Alumni Weekend

ALUMNI REUNION WEEKEND

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ANNUAL REVIEW 60 One of the joys of Alumni Reunion Weekend, Homerton-style, is its scale. Rather than hosting year group reunions spread throughout the year, our tradition has always been more of a free-for-all. While year groups are encouraged to return en masse to mark significant anniversaries, the weekend is open to everyone, resulting in a ALUMNI cheerful inter-generational mingling of precisely the kind that COVID has put a stop to. As a result, and because it runs over an entire weekend, it is not an easy event to pull together at short notice, and we sadly had to take the decision early in 2021 that the situation was too unpredictable for an in-person event to be viable. However, the scale of the weekend was undiminished. What we lost in food, wine, familiar faces and nostalgic rediscoveries, we made up for in a celebration of the astonishing diversity of Homerton life and pursuits. • Participants heard from virologists Professor Ravi Gupta and Dr Julia Kenyon how their expertise in HIV had equipped them to respond to the challenges of understanding the emergent COVID-19 virus. • They joined a discussion on the pros and cons of online teaching and learning, led by alumnus and Head of the University of Cambridge Primary School Dr James Biddulph, Director of Studies in Geography Dr Francesca Moore, and MA student Elle Rose Hoskins, who is combining her own studies with a teaching career. • The inspiration behind Homerton’s newest and possibly most dramatic building, the emerging dining hall, was revealed in conversation with its architects, Edmund

Fowles and Eleanor Hedley of Feilden

Fowles.

• Alumnae Louise Chater and Lise-Marie

Biez unpicked how the teaching skills they had gained at Homerton had been put to use through the twists and turns of careers in the film industry and HR.

• English graduates enjoyed their inaugural book club, discussing Maggie O’Farrell’s

Hamnet.

• Dr Will Fawcett and Dr Amelia Drew stretched the limits of human understanding with their talk on ‘A revolution in Physics’, while Poet-in-Residence Dr Mariah Whelan fostered our creative instincts by hosting a poetry workshop.

• Alumni also had the opportunity to bid farewell to Professor Geoff Ward, and welcome Lord Woolley.

Thank you to Alumni Relations Manager Sally Nott for overseeing a wonderfully varied programme, and to everyone who joined us and all who contributed n