SRS Book Prize 2018 Awarded to Professor Katherine Ibbett

Our congratulations to Professor Katherine Ibbett, whose book Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France has been awarded the Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize 2018. The prize is given biannually to encourage original research on any aspect in the field of Renaissance studies and to recognise significant accomplishments by members of the Society.

Compassion's Edge was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018, and is available from the Bodleian Libraries, including Taylor Institution Library. The title has been commended by SRS for its 'brilliant interdisciplinary range and relevance' and 'promises to inspire fresh scholarship in early modern French history'.

R. Gapper Book Prize: Congratulations to Prof. Roger Pearson and Dr Helen J. Swift

We are delighted to announce that the seventeenth R. Gapper Book Prize, given annually by the Society for French Studies, has been awarded to Professor Roger Pearson for his book Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France (OUP).

The prestigious R. Gapper award yearly commends books of critical and scholarly distinction which have a clear impact on the wider critical debate. Professor Pearson's exploration of the public role of the poet in the nineteenth-century France has been honoured for its engaging and in-depth research of the topic.

Our congratulations to Dr Helen Swift, too, for being commended for her book Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Boydell & Brewer). Dedicated to the literary representations of the dead, this volume analyses works in prose and verse, and casts fresh light on the ideas of selfhood in medieval culture, as well as on contemporary conceptions of literary representation itself.

Franz Kafka in Context

Cambridge University Press recently published Franz Kafka in Context, edited by Carolin Duttlinger, Associate Professor in German, Fellow of Wadham College, and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre.