You will all recognise the place where the picture at the top of the issue was taken c. 1968-70: the steps up to the Taylor Institution, still home to our beautiful library and where much of our lecturing is carried out—though the entrance is now from St Giles. Generations of modern linguists have all passed through the Taylor Institution. The only woman undergraduate on the photograph, Jacqueline Mitchell had a prestigious career thanks to her languages: as you will learn in this issue, she became an interpreter in Russian and French at the United Nations in New York. On the right of the picture stands another distinguished linguist, Dr John Dunn. He became a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he taught Russian and Polish. Please let us know if you recognise the other two students.
Our current undergraduates have been busy at home and abroad. Henry Worsley has been enjoying La dolce vita—both the Roman way of life and Rome’s cinematic tradition and writes beautifully about both in a short piece for us. Already very much at home in Oxford, fresher Victoria McKinley-Smith got involved in reading contemporary French novels and judging them as part of the annual Choix Goncourt UK.
Our graduate students write about events they have organised: Sarah Fengler was instrumental in bringing about an exciting new development which broadens our linguistic reach with the establishment of a Scandinavian studies network. Billie Mitsikakos celebrates Greek visual and performance artist Dimitris Papaioannou’s visit to Oxford: his acts and words resonate for a current student. Maria Pereira Branco’s account of a conference marking the ‘unfinished revolutions’ fifty years on from Portugal’s 25 April 1974 change of regime reminds us of the importance of taking the long view of history. Rebecca Boyd evokes author Renée Vivien whose poetry and persona lead to fascinating reflections about questions of identity and their literary ramifications. We end with a project born in Oxford and which has led to a British Academy sponsored conference, to radio programmes and to performances, most recently in the Sheldonian theatre: as a first-year student, Jennifer Rushworth got interested in music in Proust’s writings. The French author was one of the subjects of her doctorate. Now a lecturer in London, she shows how, around Proust, Hahn and others, her research led to a wonderful series of public-facing concerts and talks.
Many students and staff have been rewarded recently for their work. To name a few of them, Hannah Scheithauer, who wrote about Berlin in the last issue, won the Gapper Postgraduate essay prize for ‘Cycles of Violence and Fictions of theGrey Zone in Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laisse mon âme’; Bekah Goodchild was runner-up. Oscar Jelley, a graduate in German and Philosophy, was awarded the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. Doctoral student Ola Sidorkiewicz has received a prize at the 2024 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies for a paper on Polish playwright Witkiewicz. She has also been awarded a Leverhulme Studentship and will spend the next academic year in Wrocław. Georgina Fooks will also travel far from Oxford for her research: she will be looking into the archives of Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik thanks to her Friends of the Princeton University Library grant. There has been success too for Dr Nora Baker who will be a Fondation Wiener Anspach postdoctoral fellow at the ULB in Brussels for two years. Congratulations to them as well as to Professor Nikolaj Lübecker who has won the Gapper Prize for the best book published last year by a colleague in French Studies in the UK.
Oxford is always teeming with events. If you make it here, as we hope you will in the coming months, remember to visit Kafka: Making of an Icon. An exhibition at the Weston Library curated by Oxford Germanists Professor Carolin Duttlinger, Professor Katrin Kohl, Professor Barry Murnane, Dr Meindert Peters and Dr Karolina Watroba, supported by Bodleian curator Malgorzata Czepiel.
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With warm wishes to you all for the summer.
Professor Jonathan Thacker
Chair of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages