newsletter SUMMER 2014
GREETINGS FROM MML IN CAMBRIDGE! This is the eighth edition of our annual Newsletter featuring information about our activities over the last year and new initiatives in MML. INSIDE: MML – Work in Progress
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80-year-old OPS officially revived
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What I Owe to MML
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The Languages of MML
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Language Teaching in MML Today
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More than books: the MML Library
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A New Schröder Professor of German
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A New Professor of Spanish
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Undiscovered Country: Editing Schnitzler
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Being With Cinema: Film and Philosophy in Contemporary France
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Brazilian Studies in MML: A New Venture
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Spotlight on the Departments
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French News
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German and Dutch News
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Italian News
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Linguistics News
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Slavonic Studies News
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Spanish and Portuguese News
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And finally
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mml.cam.ac.uk
MML – Work in Progress
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ast year’s editorial focussed on our preparation for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, the national higher education evaluation exercise on which much of the University’s funding ultimately depends. On 13 December 85 books, 90 chapters and 170 journal articles by 100 members of staff in MML and Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic were sent off to the REF authority for assessment. Now we wait for the verdict, due on 18 December 2014. Meanwhile, things continue as normal. As in previous years, the newsletter gives information on a number of current research projects. In response to several enquiries from readers we are also reporting in detail on the current situation of the ‘smaller languages’ in Cambridge and on the business of language teaching itself. Quite a few readers wrote to us to comment on our activities or to share their experiences with us. These messages were extremely helpful and we were able to feed them into our discussions with the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) and other bodies. They were also useful at the fascinating debate that unfolded at the
80th anniversary meeting of the Oliver Prior Society in March 2014, on which we are reporting in the first article. This year we are also including a longer reflection on the role that modern languages have played in his life by The Very Reverend John Arnold. We’d like to include such memoirs on a regular basis, so please do write to us. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are or what profession you ended up in. We’d like to know what studying MML led on to for you. We cannot guarantee that we’ll be able to publish everything in the newsletter but they will all appear in a special section of the MML website. One outreach initiative mentioned in the editorial last year continued to make excellent progress. The national Routes into Languages project organises university consortia in each region working with schools to motivate pupils to continue studying languages. The East Anglia region Adopt-a–class scheme recruited two Cambridge students on their Year Abroad who communicated with a modern languages school class, helping to make the language come alive.
from schools has been excellent. The students met their Year 9 classes before they went away. One wrote regular letters, another sent weekly postcards in the foreign language, a third kept in touch via a regular blog. In each case the school classes apparently had great fun responding. Two schools reported an increase in the up-take of languages at Key Stage 4 as a result of the scheme. Finally, this year we are launching an MML Annual Lecture. The inaugural lecturer will be Bernadette Holmes, Project Director of Languages First at the Cambridge University Language Centre, Director of Projects at The Language Company and former President of the Association for Language Learning. Her subject will be: ‘The Vanishing Monolingual – Why the Ability to Speak Other Languages is Defining Success for the 21st Century’. The lecture will form part of the Festival of Ideas and will take place on Saturday 25 October at 5.00 pm in Lady Mitchell Hall, followed by a reception at Selwyn College. Please join us if you wish. There is no need to book. We’d be delighted to see any MML alumnae and alumni on this special occasion.
Fifteen Year Abroad students responded to our call for participants and the feedback 1
80-year-old OPS officially revived
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n 1934, a group of Cambridge graduates turned modern languages teachers came together to constitute a subject society in memory of Professor Oliver Prior. Prior, a Fellow of St John’s College, and Drapers Professor of French from 1919, had worked from 1925 until his death in 1934 to maintain informal links with his former students through regular social gatherings. He and the students-turned-teachers who followed his example understood that there was much to be learned from bringing together teachers with a rich mix of interests and expertise to discuss matters of mutual intellectual, pedagogical and institutional interest. Through these discussions, they explored ways in which the experience of 2
modern languages students at every level might be enriched. Since 2012, Ian Roberts, Faculty chair and President of the Oliver Prior Society has been working with a team of stalwart supporters and new recruits to revive that founding spirit. And in March 2014, almost 100 secondary-level teachers and members of the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty assembled at Downing College for OPS 2014. It was delightfully clear from this two-day event that the belief in the value of mutual exchange between university instructors and school teachers which inspired the original foundation of the OPS 80 years ago still survives.
Teachers came to OPS 2014 from across all sectors of the education system and across the country. They heard from Cambridge academics about ongoing research and new departures in MML. Ian James and Maite Conde analysed the role of culture in modernisation processes in their lectures on Technology and the French Avant-garde and on Early Cinema and the Brazilian City. David Midgley introduced works by contemporary German-Turkish authors and explored the tensions between cultures and nationalities, between high and low cultures, suggesting how AS and A Level teachers might vary and expand reading lists for students preparing for university entrance. Napoleon Katsos, co-founder of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, reviewed the challenges and advantages of bilingualism in early years teaching. The secondary school teachers present found his conclusions immensely helpful as increasing numbers of bilingual or multilingual children all over the UK are
progressing from the primary level into their classrooms. The Oliver Prior Society aims to promote the University’s access and outreach initiatives and we were delighted to have an equal number of teachers attending from state and independent schools. Jon Beard, Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the Central Admissions Office, spoke at the conference dinner on Friday evening. He challenged some popular misconceptions which damage the confidence of teachers and eligible students who might otherwise apply to Cambridge. In the concluding Q&A teachers had the chance to participate in debates over the undergraduate admissions process. They welcomed the opportunity to debunk myths about Cambridge as a closed, cold and elitist institution of which they and their students should be fearful. But the reach of this session also went far beyond Oxbridge and confronted national political issues adversely affecting the teaching and uptake of languages in a constructively critical discussion. Perhaps most importantly, natural networks were formed between teachers and lecturers over the course of OPS 2014. Many teachers, especially those coming from the state sector,
remarked that they rarely have the chance to share their experiences, their successes and concerns with professional peers. And we as academics weren’t just there to talk at teachers, but to talk with them. We learnt a lot from the delegates through their engaged and enthusiastic evaluation of our practice as educators. Quite a few told us that their experience at OPS 2014 was inspiring and energising. The Faculty members who attended the meeting felt the same. Following the success of this year’s meeting, the team behind OPS 2014 are really looking forward to March 2015 when the Society meets again at Downing. There is a great deal to do before then to ensure that the OPS continues to thrive by attracting more teachers and more Faculty members.
If you would like more information or would like to become involved, please visit our website www.oliverpriorsociety.org or contact OPS Vice-President Ellie Lavan via email: oliverpriorsociety@gmail.com 3
What I Owe to MML By The Very Reverend John Arnold OBE, MA, DD, Dean Emeritus of Durham
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efore going up to Sidney Sussex College in 1954 to read Modern Languages, I was fortunate enough to serve in the Intelligence Corps during National Service and to be selected for the Joint Services Russian Course (JSRC). (Its story, so important for language studies in Cambridge, is told in Secret Classrooms, by Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman (St Ermin’s Press, 2002). It was an astonishing induction, not only into academic and linguistic rigour, but also into the breadth and depth of human nature, as exemplified both by the largely émigré staff and also by one's fellow kursanty. Mine included Michael Frayn and Alan Bennett. In the background lay a war-torn and divided Europe and the daily threat of atomic Armageddon in a Third World War. By a strange irony and through the formidable skill and determination of Professor Elizabeth Hill many of us also came to love the Russian people, their language, their culture and their church. Back in Cambridge as an undergraduate, I added Russian to German and French and had a wonderfully enjoyable all-round education, reading for the MML Tripos 1954-7 under 4
teachers of genius such as Nikolai Andreyev and Paul Roubiczek. At the same time I was trying to make sense both of my own life and of Europe. How could the best educated, most civilized and most deeply Christianised peoples in the world have done what they did between 1914 and 1945? How could they transcend the divisions and enmities of the 1950s? Two things helped me towards provisional answers. The first was the realisation that behind all European culture, and inextricably intertwined with it, lay the Christian story. Francois de Sales and Pascal played a part; so did Dostoyevsky and the twentieth century combined literature and history German paper. Secondly, I took part in 1956 in an ecumenical work camp in East Berlin, where we cleared rubble, lying where it had fallen in 1945, built a children's playground as an act of reconciliation and shared the life of Christians ‘behind the Iron Curtain’, as we used to say. As a result I stayed on in Cambridge to read theology and to be ordained. I may have thought that I was giving up the European languages and literature I loved. In fact, they were given back to me with value added. I was soon engaged by the Church as an interpreter and in its foreign relations, especially with Roman Catholicism, German
Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy; and I continued my work with Christians in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at both official and unofficial levels. Nothing I had learned in the Army and at university was wasted, only now it had a purpose. I sometimes wondered why I had spent so much of my youth on irregular verbs, vocabulary lists, conjugations and declensions, when I could have been out enjoying myself in Cambridge. Then, in 1992 I was elected President of the Conference of European Churches, of which the official languages were English, French, German and Russian; and I understood in retrospect the course of my life. I had the privilege of presiding over the European Ecumenical Assemblies of 1989 (which played its part in the momentous events of that year) and 1987 (which led to the production of the Carta Ecumenica for Europe). Now, in retirement, I am still engaged in preaching in French for the Huguenots in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and in German at Kirchentage and other occasions, and in the impossible task of translating Russian poetry. I have much to be grateful for and I want to express my heartfelt thanks for all that Cambridge and especially its MML Faculty has given me.
The Languages of MML
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ur Faculty continues to offer instruction in the Modern Languages traditionally taught to A Level in British schools: French, German, Russian and Spanish. We also offer languages somewhat less frequently taught to A Level, Italian and Portuguese. Aside from French, all of these languages can be taken up ab initio by incoming students. These are the ‘Tripos languages’, those which can be studied to degree level. We have always believed that studying a language is inseparable from studying the literature and culture expressed in that language, as well as the history of that literature and culture, and the history and structure of the language itself. But in addition to those mentioned above, the Faculty also offers instruction in a number of further languages: Catalan, Dutch, Modern Greek, Polish and Ukrainian. All of these languages can be taken as a free-standing paper featuring intensive practical language instruction along with lectures on literature, culture and linguistics. These options are becoming increasingly popular and, we believe, greatly enrich what the Faculty is able to offer its students. Catalan has been taught in the Faculty since the 1950s, a time when it was being
suppressed in its homeland by Franco’s regime. With the recent arrival of Brad Epps from Harvard (see his profile below), who includes Catalan among his interests, we now boast two Catalanistas, placing us in the forefront of Catalan studies in Britain. Some thirty to forty students study Catalan every year and the language teaching is supported by a lector post funded from Catalonia. Cultural and linguistic exchanges with several Universities and cultural institutes in Catalonia are common for both staff and students. The Department of Slavonic Studies has succeeded in securing funding to develop papers in Slavonic languages other than Russian. Over the past few years, two generous gifts from the Firtash Foundation have made it possible to create two new posts, one devoted to Ukrainian. Many students who take the Ukrainian paper develop a real fascination with this unique and, in Britain, rather little-known culture. The Department also recently received funds from the Polish government to establish a
new post in Polish, which will once again be taught in the Faculty from next year. Modern Greek has a long history in Cambridge, and in recent years has been taught in MML, while Ancient Greek is taught in the Classics Faculty. Although regrettably no longer a full Tripos language, we shall maintain our commitment to teaching this language (which, in an administrative move with illustrious historical precedents, now officially belongs to the Department of Italian). Again, the paper remains very popular with students; this year thirty-five students chose to take it. Dutch has been taught in Cambridge for sixty-five years, as we reported in the last Newsletter. With the retirement this year of Elsa Strietman (pictured), the future is uncertain. For the time being we are continuing Dutch as a ‘non-Tripos language’ with the assistance of Erna Eager, but much will depend on whether the University, or some other body, agrees to fund a new established post. There is, of course, a second ‘M’ in MML: the Faculty continues to offer teaching in a range of medieval languages: Old Church Slavonic, Old and Middle High German, 5
Language Teaching in MML Today Gothic, Old French, Medieval Occitan, NeoLatin (up to the seventeenth century) and Old Spanish. Instruction in these languages retains the traditional philological connection between the study of ancient texts and the study of the historical development of languages. In recent decades we have unfortunately had to abandon the teaching of many languages. At present, there is a lively debate in the Faculty about whether and how to try to reinstate some of these languages. Although, as ever, there is a spectrum of views on this question, we are all committed to one overriding principle: whatever this Faculty sets out to do, it will always strive for the highest levels of excellence. We would welcome your views on these questions.
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bout 20 years ago, the Faculty moved to establish language teaching on a more professional basis. Departmental lectors, normally native speakers on yearly contracts, were replaced by Language Teaching Officers, also native speakers, at least one in each Department. The latest addition to this group of professionals will be a Language Teaching Officer in Portuguese who will join the Faculty in October 2014. We review our language papers regularly so as to guarantee comparability of standards across the languages and to ensure uniform progressivity throughout the Tripos. The latest change was the replacement of the language essay for finalists by a paper called ‘Text and Culture’. This takes a CLIL (content-language integrated language learning) approach and has already generated some excellent work by undergraduates. The arrival of the Internet brought the development of CALL and the world of online language learning. The Faculty’s IT team has been instrumental in getting things set up online and these resources are now standard in MML teaching. Projects such as the e-tandem, set up by the Spanish LTOs with the University of Ecuador in 2009-11,
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paired up students of English with Cambridge first year MML students, exchanging conversation in Spanish and English, which both sides greatly enjoyed. Collaboration with the University Language Centre has also flourished, with joint online projects such as ‘Just-in-Time German Grammar’, an interactive grammar programme, developed by Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass and Silke Mentchen. One of the greatest successes of the Faculty language programmes are the ab initio courses which run in all the Tripos languages but French. At that level, Russian continues to demand the near-impossible: students cover the whole of Russian grammar in one term and end up reading Pushkin in the original by the Christmas vacation. The German, Italian and Spanish Departments are scarcely less ambitious, transforming their students from complete beginners into able readers of original texts in an intensive first year of study.
in language teaching under the Language Shadowing Scheme; they organize stays abroad for the ab initio students; they write language teaching books, serve as editors of journals of language teaching, work for outreach projects, publish translations and take part in Open Days. Some of them are Directors of Studies and Tutors in Colleges. The Language Teaching Officers also support the many cultural activities arising from modern language learning, for example productions of plays in the foreign language, such as Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve, performed by French students in October 2013 and Schnitzler’s Reigen by German students in Lent 2014.
In addition to their role in undergraduate teaching the Language Teaching Officers are engaged in many other activities. They participate in regular Graduate Training Days and Workshops; they mentor graduates who would like to gain some experience 7
More than books: the MML Library
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or over 50 years, the MML Library in the Raised Faculty Building has been a place for study, learning and exploration. The Library is the largest one in the School of Arts and Humanities at Cambridge. Its collections range from classic works of German literature to Brazilian films, Catalan theatre, French novels and linguistics texts. They include not only what is visible on the shelves, but also e-books, e-journals and an extensive choice of electronic resources for all subjects taught in the Faculty. New aspects of the collection are the growing Ukrainian section and greatly expanded DVD holdings for undergraduate papers and for graduate students undertaking the MPhil in Screen Media and Culture. The Library is much more than its collections. It is a place for students to meet and work together, to relax with their favourite foreign language newspapers and magazines, to prepare for exams and to get help with their research. With a suite of 12 computers and free wifi for those with laptops and mobile devices, the Library offers access to a full array of modern research tools. At the same time, the Library provides a very responsive personal service to its users through its highly qualified staff, 8
In November 2013, the team was proud to host a celebration of the Beit Library centenary, marking Sir Otto Beit’s 1913 benefaction in support of German collections. Visitors to the Beit will notice a newly installed portrait of Sir Otto that honours his contribution. This special event demonstrated the continuity of German collecting and scholarship since 1913 and made clear the ongoing relevance of the Beit Library to MML academic staff and students.
who bring language expertise as well as extensive professional experience to their work at MML. The Library team helps users in the Library itself, and also through online presentations, education sessions and induction events. MML students on their Year Abroad can be confident of online access to Library staff and resources no matter where they are in the world.
The Library’s goal is to be at the heart of the MML student experience, providing personalised assistance, print and electronic collections and a welcoming setting for research and study. In summer 2014 there will be a new Library website and you can also find the Library on Facebook www.facebook.com/pages/MML-LibraryUniversity-of-Cambridge and follow Library news and events on twitter @MMLLib.
The Library team changed recently with the retirement of Faculty librarian Anne Cobby after 17 years and the appointment of her successor Jane Devine Mejía in spring 2013. Deputy librarian Hélène Fernandes, librarians Charlotte Smith and Mirka Davis and library assistant Philip Keates continue in their roles.
Some Library Statistics: Registered library users: 1,700 -- Loans last year: over 54,000 -- Collection: 118,000 items, including nearly 3,000 films -- Study places: 113
A New Schröder Professor of German
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arah Colvin was elected to the Schröder Professorship of German in January 2014. She is the ninth person to hold the Chair, which was created in 1909 thanks to a benefaction from the London banking firm J. Henry Schröder & Co. The Professorship was generously re-endowed by Schroders plc in 2012. Sarah Colvin is the second woman to be Schröder Professor at Cambridge. The first was Eliza Marian Butler, who held the Chair from 1944 till 1951. ‘Elsie’ Butler was a Newnham modern linguist who had previously held the Henry Simon Chair at Manchester (1936–1944). Butler’s work, as Sheila Watts explains in her mini-biography on Newnham’s College website, was ‘individual and at times polemical: she had the distinction of having it banned by the Nazis, which enhanced her reputation at home’. Colvin studied German language and literature at Exeter College, Oxford in the 1980s, and went to Hamburg as a Hanseatic Scholar of the FVS Foundation to commence research for her DPhil on women and Turkish characters in early opera and drama. This was completed on a Senior Scholarship from Christ Church, Oxford and published as
a book entitled The Rhetorical Feminine: Gender and Orient on the German Stage (Oxford 1999). From 1995-7 Colvin was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford, developing a postdoctoral project on women and theatre (Women and German Drama: Playwrights and their Texts, Columbia, SC, 2003). In 1997 she was appointed to her first lectureship, at the University of Edinburgh, where she taught for thirteen years. She became Eudo C. Mason Chair of German there in 2004. As a Humboldt Fellow at Potsdam University in the early 2000s she read texts produced by and about the German journalist-turned-terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, Rochester, NY, 2009). She is editor of the Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture, which appears in the autumn of 2014.
groups developed her interest in writing in prisons, and her current research focus is on narratives by German prisoners. That research has taken her into the broader field of arts in prisons: she has accompanied and evaluated theatre and writing projects in prisons, including the major arts-council funded Inspiring Change project in 2010, and she is on the steering committee of the Arts Alliance, the NGO for arts in criminal justice. She has been active in campaigns to promote and support German Studies in the UK, has been Chair of Women in German Studies, and is currently President of the Association for German Studies (AGS). She is enjoying her work in the Department at Cambridge enormously, and is looking forward to seeing Cambridge German studies go from strength to strength in the coming years.
Her work on German terrorism and on incarcerated members of the terrorist 9
A New Professor of Spanish
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rad Epps joined us as the new Professor of Spanish in July 2013. Prior to accepting the position at Cambridge, he was Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. At Harvard, he served as the Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where he spearheaded a national fundraising campaign for the endowment of the University’s first visiting professorship in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies.
Last year he was elected to the Reial Acadèmia de les Bones Lletres de Barcelona and in 2011 he was named Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yunnan University in Kunming, China and the Communication University of China in Beijing. Over the past year he has given lectures in Glasgow, Durham, Liverpool, Birmingham, University College London, the University of London School of Advanced Study; he has also given keynote addresses at international symposia and conferences in San José (Costa Rica), Katowice-Ustron (Poland), and Berlin.
Brad also served for many years as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Romance Languages, where he helped create new undergraduate programs in Romance Studies and Latin American Studies. He has worked as visiting professor or visiting scholar in Spain (Barcelona, Santiago de Compostela, and Bilbao), France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Chile, Cuba, and China. Most recently, he was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, where he worked on questions of cinematic time.
A dedicated teacher, Brad is especially proud of his students, many of whom now hold tenured and tenure-track positions in the United States, Spain, Sweden, China, and Chile. He looks forward to working closely with students at Cambridge and to contributing lectures in a wide array of papers in Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Screen Media & Cultures, and European Literatures.
His research and teaching interests are varied, stretching from the literatures and cultures of Spain, Catalonia, Latin America, and France 10
to film and visual studies (especially painting and photography), critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical legal theory, immigration studies, and LGBT studies. The author of a number of books, edited volumes and journals on Juan Goytisolo, Pedro Almodóvar, Spanish literary history, immigration and sexuality, Barcelona and modernity, and the lesbian theorist Monique Wittig. He is currently working on two books: an edited collection of essays in Spanish on Ibero-American cinema (Colihue, Buenos Aires) and a monograph on cinematic history and Barcelona (University of Liverpool Press).
As Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Brad is committed to fostering collaborative ventures within the Department and beyond.
Undiscovered Country: Editing Schnitzler
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ext year he’s going to Cambridge’. When the great Austrian Modernist dramatist and narrative writer, Arthur Schnitzler, wrote this about a Viennese schoolboy in a draft for one his major plays (Das weite Land, or Undiscovered Country as it is known in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation), he could have no inkling that the papers that he so assiduously collected over his life time were themselves destined for Cambridge. When Austria came under National Socialist control with the Anschluss in 1938, Schnitzler’s widow made contact with a young researcher from Cambridge who was completing research for his PhD in Vienna, Eric Blackall. She feared that the papers of this Jewish writer, marked out for his exposure of sexual mores, anti-Semitism and the double-standards of public life, were in imminent danger of confiscation and likely destruction. Blackall acted quickly to encourage the Cambridge University Librarian to offer them safe haven, which in turn enabled the British Consul to seal the room of the Viennese villa in which they were kept. Nazi officials indeed made visits shortly afterwards, but the diplomatic seal protected the papers. They
were transported from Vienna to Cambridge in locked cases and cupboards, with the keys following on separately, for safety’s sake. The cloak and dagger operation ensured the survival of an outstanding piece of literary and cultural heritage. The Schnitzler archive contains tens of thousands of sheets of paper, many of them handwritten, others typescript, but with handwritten annotations. It includes unpublished texts, the draft versions of published ones (including some of the most famous), and correspondence. It is an archival treasure, and one that has been remarkably neglected, given the status of the author. A prime reason for the neglect lies in Schnitzler’s handwriting, which – especially in his early career – is idiosyncratic and immensely difficult, parts of it almost in a form of shorthand (it may or may not be a coincidence that he was a doctor).
Germany, Austria and the UK, to provide the critical edition of Schnitzler’s literary works that is so overdue. The UK team, with Andrew Webber (pictured) as Principal Investigator, has received a five-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to undertake a digital critical edition of texts from the middle period of Schnitzler’s career. They include the works in which he most explicitly deals with questions of Jewish identity, and the transcription and editorial processing of the drafts promises to shed fascinating new light upon this and other key concerns of Schnitzler and his time. The editions and associated resources will be presented through a digital portal, hosted by the University Library, but with open access for all users. There will also be a programme of conferences, theatre productions, and other events, aimed at broad dissemination of the findings of the project. Alumni who like a challenge may wish to become involved in the transcription of some of the cryptic manuscripts, through the ‘crowd-sourcing’ element to be introduced as the project unfolds.
It is against this background that three parallel projects are now underway, in 11
Being With Cinema: Film and Philosophy in Contemporary France
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ow does cinema respond to philosophy? And how does philosophy respond to cinema? How are these relations shaping the cultural landscape of contemporary France? These are the questions currently being explored by our colleague Laura McMahon. In 2000, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wrote L’Intrus, an account of his experience of undergoing a heart transplant. Nancy’s text frames the transplant as a metaphor for an encounter with any form of intrusion or difference, drawing on this intimate, painful, unsettling experience to reflect in philosophical and political terms on the demands of hospitality and exposure. In 2004, the film director Claire Denis made L’Intrus, a film that takes its name and inspiration from Nancy’s philosophical account. Denis grafts Nancy’s text onto the film like a transplanted heart. Yet the film distances itself from any direct biographical reference, extending imaginatively far beyond the vital organ of its textual origins. Through the elliptical narrative of a protagonist who undergoes a heart transplant and leaves France in search of a lost son, the film reflects on origins, identities and acts of intrusion, not least through the protagonist’s journey to Tahiti, a former colony of France which evokes not only his own conflicted past but a history of imperial intrusion. Switching back and forth 12
between geographical locations and moments in time, Denis’s film disrupts any straightforward linear progression. The film’s dreamlike construction creates an aesthetic of intrusion: different times and spaces are perpetually grafted onto one another. Denis’s filmic response to Nancy’s text is just one example of the rich connections between cinema and philosophy in contemporary French and Francophone contexts. Following in the footsteps of Jean-Luc Godard and his filmphilosophical experiments, filmmakers such as Denis, Arnaud des Pallières, Nicolas Klotz and the Dardenne brothers have recently drawn explicitly on works of French philosophy. At the same time, a number of French philosophers – including Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Marie-José Mondzain and Bernard Stiegler – have recently turned their attention to film. Echoing the earlier approach of Gilles Deleuze, especially his two volumes on cinema, published in the 1980s, these thinkers have significantly reshaped the terrains of film criticism and theory. Nancy has written essays on Denis’s L’Intrus and on Klotz’s La Blessure (another film inspired by the text of L’Intrus),
and Badiou and Rancière have addressed the recent films of Godard. These direct exchanges bear witness to the vibrancy of film-philosophical conversations in contemporary French culture. Yet there are other connections to be traced here too. The focus on the animal in des Pallières’s Adieu (2003) and Is Dead (Portrait incomplet de Gertrude Stein) (1999), for example, can be read in dialogue with recent reflections on the nonhuman by Jacques Derrida and JeanChristophe Bailly, Raymond Bellour’s work on the animal in film, and broader posthuman and ecological concerns of recent French philosophy. Drawing on Nancy’s idea of ‘being-with’ as a form of community without a unified identity, Laura McMahon’s research examines how contemporary French and Francophone cinema explores questions of collectivity, hospitality and difference. She also shows how contemporary French philosophers are in a process of being with cinema: they formulate their ideas alongside and in response to film. McMahon’s forthcoming book Being With Cinema will map out this network of exchanges for the first time. It will illuminate their philosophical and cinematic ramifications and consider more broadly the role that cinema plays in reflecting and shaping our cultural and political visions.
Brazilian Studies in MML: A New Venture
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aite Conde (pictured) joined the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in September 2013, as the first lecturer in Brazilian Studies. Her appointment is indicative of a growth in Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Cambridge in recent years, strengthened by the appointment of a new Portuguese Language Teaching Officer, Felipe Schuery, who will take up his position in September 2014. Maite’s work has focused primarily on Brazilian literature and film. She studied for her first degree in Hispanic Studies and Film Studies at the University of Glasgow. She then moved to the University of California, Los Angeles to complete doctoral studies on the impact of film on late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers in Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital and in the process of dramatic modernizing changes. Maite examined how Brazilian writers gradually incorporated cinematic techniques and aesthetics into their work, prefiguring the experimental work of later avant-garde authors. Maite’s first book Consuming Visions. Cinema, Writing and modernity in Rio de Janeiro (University of Virginia Press, 2011) was awarded an MLA prize in 2012. In 2006, Maite was appointed Assistant Professor in Brazilian Culture at the University of Columbia New York, where she taught
for three years. Amongst other activities, she was responsible for devising the university’s first degree program in Portuguese. Maite returned to the UK in 2009 to take up a Research Fellowship at the Brazil Institute at King’s College London, where she developed courses on Brazilian culture. Maite is currently working on Brazilian cinema, with a particular focus on the country’s early or silent cinema. Blending extensive archival work with theoretical approaches developed in the USA and Europe, Maite examines ways in which the cinema played a part in Brazil’s invention of modernity. This includes looking at films, and also fanzines, movie theatres and distribution networks and practices. For this work Maite was awarded an AHRC Fellowship to undertake research in international archives and libraries. This new work has been published in journals and book collections worldwide and will form the basis of a new monograph entitled Foundational Fictions: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil.
Brazilian scholarship to an English-speaking audience. She edited, translated and wrote the introduction to the first ever anthology of essays by the Brazilian political philosopher Marilena Chauí, Between Conformity and Resistance. Essays on Politics, Culture and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). A collection of essays by the Brazilian film critic Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, On Brazil and Global Cinema will be published by IB Tauris in 2015. Maite’s work touches on all aspects of Brazilian culture, including intellectual and political debates. She has recently written on the protests prompted by the World Cup and in September she will travel to Brazil to investigate the role of culture in these urban protests. As Brazil increasingly places itself in the global spotlight, Maite is looking forward to developing interest in Brazilian culture at Cambridge.
Maite has also been very active in bringing 13
Spotlight on the Departments French News The Department was joined this year by a new Lecturer, Timothy Chesters, formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London, a specialist in the Renaissance and in cognitive approaches to literature. We welcome him warmly and wish him many successful and happy years in the Department. This is the second year in which the new Part IB and Part II scheduled papers have been in operation. This was a major change in the curriculum of the Department, but its pedagogical benefits are already making themselves felt. The breadth of research interests in the Department is shown by the many conferences organized by members. In September 2013 a generous grant from the French Embassy enabled Ian James to invite researchers from several French and British universities to discuss ‘Science and Technology in Recent French Thought’. The annual French Graduate Research Conference, under the auspices this 14
year of Daniel Finch-Race and Jeff Barda and on the theme of ‘Textures’, was held in May 2014. The fourth annual Cambridge Conference on Endangered Languages, organized by Mari Jones, took place in July 2014. The medieval history of the French language and French culture outside France was wonderfully illustrated in an exhibition at the University Library entitled ‘The moving word: French medieval manuscripts in Cambridge’, curated by Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato (pictured, left). The material was taken from the University Library itself and from many College libraries, and it covered all kinds of medieval writing: science, philosophy, theology, epic, romance, chronicles, and devotional works (Gospels, psalters). The exhibition even includes language textbooks and phrase-books for travellers. Many of the manuscripts were remarkably beautiful, as regards both the script and the illustrations, and the exhibition offered a remarkable insight into the world of medieval Cambridge. There are many successes to report on the part of individual members of the Department. Mark Darlow’s book Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789-1794 (Oxford University Press,
2012) was shortlisted for the R. H. Gapper Book Prize of the Society for French Studies. Edmund Birch was joint runner-up for the Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize (2014), and Rebecca Sugden joint runner-up for the Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize (2013).
Emma Wilson was profiled in a book entitled The Meaning of Success: Insights from Women at Cambridge. In her interview she speaks of the difference it has made that the Department has a good gender balance and that there have been several female Professors of French before her. These are lessons not to be forgotten. Emma Gilby has been awarded a Crausaz Wordsworth Interdisciplinary Fellowship in Philosophy to pursue her research on Descartes. Last but not least, Jean Khalfa has been awarded the title Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques.
German and Dutch News 2013-14 has been a year of momentous occasions for the Department of German and Dutch, some of them commemorating past achievements and others looking to the future. In November 2013, with the generous help of the staff of the MML Faculty Library, we celebrated the centenary of the donation from Sir Otto Beit that helped to lay the foundations for German studies at Cambridge. It enabled the first Schröder Professor of German, Karl Hermann Breul, to establish the research collection of German books still known as the Beit Library. There was also double cause for festivity
in December: in the same week that the Department held a notably convivial dinner to mark the retirement of Nicholas Boyle as Schröder Professor, we were also able to celebrate the publication of four handsome volumes by Cambridge University Press under the title The Impact of Idealism. These volumes are the fruit of the collaborative research into the legacy of post-Kantian philosophy that Nick has been leading in recent years, and they provide a fitting monument to his achievements. Then in January 2014 we welcomed the new Schröder Professor, Sarah Colvin, who is profiled above. The Department continues to register major accomplishments in research and publication. Joachim Whaley’s two-volume history, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, was much acclaimed when it first appeared in 2012, this year appears in German translation with the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. We reported last year on the work of Chris Young and Mark Chinca in leading a five-year project to produce a digital critical edition of the important early German chronicle, the Kaiserchronik. Andrew Webber’s work as part of an international consortium that will produce a digital critical edition of writings by the Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler is profiled above. In addition our historian of the
German language, Sheila Watts, together with a team of colleagues at Ghent and Manchester, has received a grant from the Flemish government to work on the medieval dialects of Low German. Some of our graduate students have also achieved remarkable successes. Katie Stone has joined the illustrious list of Cambridge graduate students who have been invited to give the annual Sylvia Naish Lecture in the Senate House of London University. The subject of Katie’s lecture in March 2014 was ‘A Hidden Idiom of Cultural Memory? Gender and Attempts to Manage the Memory of National Socialism’. Polly Dickson, who is in the first year of her PhD, working on Balzac and E.T.A. Hoffmann, won the prize for the best postgraduate paper presented at the annual conference of the Société des Dix-Neuvièmistes. And two of our current graduates won Hanseatic Scholarships that will enable them to pursue their research in Germany for up to two years: Kaleen Gallagher is working on the theme of female suicide in German literature and culture since 1945, and Allison Jones, who has recently joined us from the University of Alberta, is working on the political philosophy of modern social movements.
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The Department continues to host a regular programme of special events. In October, Sarah Colvin gave the annual Schröder lecture under a title that combined a wellknown motif from Rilke and contemporary philosophical perspectives with Sarah’s current special interest in the writings of prisoners: “You have to change your life”? The Ethics of Reading and German Studies.’ Visiting speakers included the poets Ursula Krechel and Jan Wagner, the film actor Gerhard Polt, and the New York correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Patrick Bahners, who spoke on Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s prize-winning novel Blumenberg, an anticampus novel that engages wittily with the work of the philosopher and cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg. And, marking the centenary of the First World War, Deborah Holmes of the University of Kent gave the second annual Ludwig Boltzmann lecture entitled ‘War and Words’, on the subject of Karl Kraus’s monumental satire, The Last Days of Mankind. Finally, Sharon Nevill retired in October 2013. Sharon’s wonderful efficiency and good humour will be fondly remembered by many former students and by the academic staff. We have been fortunate to find a similarly dedicated successor in Ulrike Balser. 16
We would very much like to hear from any alumni, particularly those who would like to contribute to the Department’s on-going undergraduate recruitment campaign. Just email us at german@mml.cam.ac.uk.
Italian News 2013-14 saw the Italian Department engaged in important innovations in both teaching and research. Despite the continuing national struggle to encourage the study of languages in UK schools, our first-year undergraduate cohort grew this year. All the students, whether starting Italian from scratch or carrying on from A Level under the guidance of Claudia Domenici, took our very popular first-year ‘Texts and Contexts’ course, with its mix of literature, art, film and linguistics. A new Part II course on ‘Text and Image’ ran for the first time, offering the chance to study Leonardo da Vinci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and modern design, alongside a rich body of literary works. A similar variety continued to characterize the research activity of the Department. We are particularly proud of the international networks that are central to our work, led by our many links with Italy, of course, but also with other countries in Europe and beyond. Robert Gordon gave invited lectures at the
Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig as well as in Genoa and Edinburgh. Adam Ledgeway (pictured) was Visiting Professor of Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice for Michelmas Term 2013 and was elected ‘conseiller délegué’ of the Société de linguistique romane. Pierpaolo Antonello’s book on ideas of science in modern Italy, Contro il materialism. Le «due culture» in Italia: bilancio di un secolo (Aragno, 2012), was shortlisted for Italy’s major non-fiction literary prize, the Viareggio Prize. He is currently planning a new exhibition on Italian designer Bruno Munari to take place in Lisbon in 2015. Heather Webb and George Corbett have continued to organise their hugely successful cycle of ‘Vertical Readings’ in Dante, with speakers from North America as well as the UK all now viewable online at: http:// sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1366579. Helena Sanson concluded her project on ‘Conduct Literature in Italy for and about Women, 14701900’ with a major international conference in Cambridge in March 2014, which brought together leading authorities in the field from Italy and the UK to present the results of the
research and make future plans. The Department continues to build productive links across academic disciplines. The Cambridge Italian Research Network (CIRN) hosted an international symposium on ‘Global Italy’ in May 2014 with speakers from Music, History, Art History, Film Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, as well as Italian. Heather Webb and Robin Kirkpatrick continued to collaborate with artists and practitioners at Central St Martins in London and in Cambridge on issues of performance and posture. We are very keen to take our research to our alumni and a wider public: Abi Brundin’s lecture at the Hay on Wye festival on ‘Voices from Italian Convents’ was sold out and had to be moved to a bigger venue. And over 100,000 visitors saw her exhibition ‘The Brownlows in Italy: Books and Continental Travel’ at Belton House, Lincolnshire during 2013. Finally, we are delighted to have a flourishing group of young doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, who are a key part of a modern humanities Department, alongside our undergraduates and lecturers. In 2014, we will have postdocs across all our core areas of teaching and research - in medieval and Dante studies, in Renaissance studies and in modern
literary and cultural studies - an exciting first for the Department and a positive sign for the future. The Italian Department is keen to catch up with former students. Let us know your memories of Italian at Cambridge and what you’re doing now. We are hoping to run an Italian alumni event next year. Email us at: italian@mml.cam.ac.uk.
Linguistics News Since the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics is so large, we decided to run a series of articles introducing its various subdisciplines rather than the usual survey of the work of the whole Department. This year the editor asked Senior Lecturer Paula Buttery (pictured) what she did and this is what he learned from her. It really doesn’t matter where you are: sitting down at a College dinner, politely conversing with the stranger next to you on a plane,
meeting friends of friends in the pub: every computational linguist will have the same story to tell. When asked what it is you do, next-tonobody will have heard of a computational linguist. ‘Is that a thing?’, ‘a computer what?’ are common replies. Well, it really is a thing. Computational linguists are a growing breed and they’ve touched all of your lives. Anybody who has used a grammar checker, predictive text, speech recognition, an automatic language translator, or who has simply ‘googled’ something, has had a run in with a computational linguist. Computational linguistics covers all areas of traditional linguistic study (from sounds to meanings) but from a computational perspective. The common thread is building language models: that is, identifying patterns in (usually large amounts of) language data and subsequently organising those patterns into a predictive model of language. Broadly speaking, computational linguists come in two varieties. The first design and construct computational models of language for use in computer applications. These computational linguists are the creators of the electronic language tools we use every day and are generally considered to be computer 17
scientists. They work in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP): the word ‘natural’ in Natural Language Processing specifies human languages, as opposed to formal languages such as computer programming languages (which are the most salient forms of language to a computer scientist). The second variety of computational linguist uses computational language models to research the cognition of language: i.e. they are trying to answer the question ‘how does language work in the human brain’. This aspect of the subject is still emerging as a field in its own right and the researchers in this area have not yet even decided on a name for themselves: they may be referred to as computational neuro-linguists, computational cognitive linguists or computational psycholinguists depending on the experimental methods they adopt. The goal of their research is essentially the same as that of a traditional linguist. Yet the models they produce tend to be formally (mathematically) specified and/ or involve statistics. An example of such work might be to create a statistical language model that can predict the reaction times to a reading experiment, or even to predict brain function from linguistic stimulus. The Computational Linguistics Cluster in 18
the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics led by Paula Buttery is, for the most part, populated with the cognitive variety of computational linguist (unlike the Computer Laboratory or the Engineering Department, where the NLP variety are located). [Photo of Paula Buttery plus groups photo to be supplied by her] Staff and students are working on a variety of topics in the areas of language acquisition, language evolution and language processing. Recent work from the group contributes to understanding of how word meanings are stored in the brain’ how population movement influences language change, and how to model language at an individualised level (rather than as a population standard). Computational Linguistics is taught in MML at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Several undergraduates have gone on to higher study within the field and our postgraduates have taken up Natural Language Processing positions in both large research and commercial companies.
to Jana Howlett (pictured), the longest-serving member of our Department. Jana was appointed in October 1980. Over the previous 34 years Jana has made a major contribution to the Department’s work, in particular through her stewardship of the study of medieval Russian history and culture. She has taught and influenced generations of students, many of whom attended her retirement party and were just as sad to lose her as we were. However, all is not lost! Jana remains a Fellow of Jesus College and will, we hope, continue to be an active participant in our departmental seminars and research forums.
Slavonic Studies News
Another colleague who left us was Alexander Etkind who, after six years at Cambridge, was appointed to a Chair at Florence’s European University Institute. As you will recall from last year’s newsletter, Alexander helped to lead the Department’s ‘Memory at War’ project.
This has been a year of arrivals, departures, changing roles and new developments. With many fond memories we said goodbye
New arrivals and existing colleagues with new roles include Katia Bowers, Elena Filimonova, Alyson Tapp (pictured), Anna Toropova and
Alexandra Vukovic. Last summer Katia Bowers received a grant to develop stronger ties between researchers working on nineteenth-century Russian literature in the UK. After hosting a series of academic symposia in Cambridge, a roundtable, jointly organized by Katia and involving scholars from across the country, discussed various strategies for promoting nineteenth-century Russian literary studies in the UK. We were delighted when Elena was appointed Language Teaching Advisor. Elena studied Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in Moscow State University (MA and PhD) and worked as a research associate in the University of Konstanz before coming to teach Russian in Cambridge in 2005. Alyson Tapp, recently appointed to a University Lectureship in Russian Literature, joins us from Reed College in Oregon USA. Alyson started out as an ab initio student of Russian at Pembroke College who then studied at Sheffield and Berkeley California and she specialises in the history and theory of the novel.
Anna Toporova joined us as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow researching the interplay between mass media and structures of feeling under Soviet socialism. Alexandra Vukovic studied at Paris’s EHESSENS where she became interested relations between the Byzantine Empire and emerging Slavonic elites in the Balkans and early Rus. She completed her MPhil in our Department in 2010 and her PhD at Northwestern University (Illinois) before returning to Cambridge to work with Simon Franklin on Russian information technologies 1450 to 1850. This spring she was appointed to a Junior Research Fellowship at Newnham College. There were two notable innovations in the Department this year: the creation of the Cambridge Slavonic Studies Graduate Research Forum (GRF) and the introduction of a new paper on Russian and Soviet cinema, our first paper devoted to Russian film. The GRF aims to promote contact between graduate students and academics from Cambridge and elsewhere. Our postgraduates can now extend invitations to scholars who have influenced their work, and this year we have had visits from academics based in the Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA. As for cinema studies, support from the Russkii Mir
Foundation and Trinity College enabled us to invite the internationally renowned filmmaker Marina Razbezhkina to spend two weeks at Cambridge in March, while Anna Toporova contributed to a three-day event, hosted by Trinity College, which brought together specialists on Russian and Soviet cinema from the UK, the USA, mainland Europe and Russia.
Spanish and Portuguese News 2013 saw the expansion of the department as Bradley Epps assumed the position of Chair in Spanish in July and Maite Conde joined as lecturer in Brazilian Studies in September. Their presence has led to exciting innovations in the Department’s teaching, including a new undergraduate paper on Ibero-American Cinema, to start in October 2014. Taught by a majority of the Department’s staff, the paper reflects our increasing interests in visual as well as written culture. As well as developments in teaching, our research projects are moving ahead in interesting and varied directions. Dominic Keown organized a conference on Catalan poet Salvador Espriu that brought together international experts to celebrate his centenary. In June, Ioanna Sitaridou organized a workshop titled “Interaction of negation 19
and modality in the history of Greek and beyond,” which is part of her broader work on Romeyka. As part of an AHRC-funded project, Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936, Alison Sinclair curated an exhibition at the University Library, which had over 10,000 visits. She also organized a conference on Wrongdoing at the British Library in July as well as four well-attended workshops. Alison retires this year; she has been central to the department for many years and has inspired generations of students. We will miss her enormously. Much of our research has been internationally recognized. Manucha Lisboa was awarded Brazil’s prestigious Itamaraty Prize for her work on Lygia Fagundes Telles. Her research on Lusophone women writers continues, with two publications appearing this year. In November, Samuel Llano received the American Musicological Society award for his monograph Whose Spain?: Negotiating ‘Spanish Music’ in Paris, 1908-1929. Rodrigo Cacho (pictured, above) was awarded a British Academy mid-career 20
fellowship, which will begin in January and which will allow him to conduct research for a monograph on colonial poetry. Joanna Page received AHRC funding for an international research network titled ‘Science in Text and Culture in Latin America.’ Several colleagues have gained wide recognition in Spanish and Latin American studies for their innovative work on literature and visual culture. 2013 saw the publication of Elizabeth Drayson’s The Lead Books of Granada (Palgrave) Erica Segre’s Ghosts of the Revolution in Mexican Literature (Peter Lang), Edward King’s Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture (Palgrave) and Joanna Page’s Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature (University of Calgary Press). Andreea WeislShaw published work on the thirteenthcentury Castilian Sendebar in the Modern Language Review. Geoffrey Kantaris and Rory O’Bryen co-edited Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect (Tamesis Books)which includes essays from a number of members of the Department. Our Language Teaching Officers Ángeles Carreres and María Noriega-Sánchez are also collaborating on a handbook on language acquisition through translation.
Our PhD students have also been active. Imogen Sutton, Dunja Fehimovic, Franco Pesce and Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga presented papers at the Association of Hispanists Conference held in Ireland. Dunja and Imogen organized this year’s seminar series, which hosted speakers from Spain and the UK who presented on a variety of topics from Basque cinema to Claude Lévi-Strauss. The series ended with a fascinating lecture on the Mexican-US Border by internationally renowned Latin Americanist Jean Franco, Professor Emerita of Columbia University, which attracted a large audience. The Department is especially pleased to announce the appointment of its first Language Teaching Officer in Portuguese, Felipe Schuery (picture, above), who will be joining us full time in Michaelmas as well as a new Lecturer in Modern Spanish, Bryan Cameron. We look forward to welcoming them to our community.
And finally… We hope that you have enjoyed reading this Newsletter. You will find further information on most topics on our website (www. mml.cam.ac.uk). For information on the MML student multilingual magazine Polyglossia, see the Polyglossia website at www.srcf.ucam.org/ polyglossia. If you want to know more about anything, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll do our best to provide more information. Equally, if you are ever passing by, please don’t hesitate to call in and visit us. We’d be more than happy to see you.. If you want to contact us, here’s how: Contact point: MML Faculty Office Telephone: +44 (0)1223 335000 +44 (0)1223 335062 Fax: Email: alumni@mml.cam.ac.uk Post: Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA
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