newsletter AUTUMN 2015
GREETINGS FROM MML IN CAMBRIDGE! This is the ninth edition of our Newsletter with information about our activities over the last year and on new initiatives in MML. INSIDE: MML – Work in Progress
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What about that REF?
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A Privilege and a Pleasure
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A New Professor of English and Applied Linguistics
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German agency announces €1 million funding for Research Hub in Cambridge
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Centre for Film and Screen: an exciting development
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MML, Life and Football (in that order!)
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Update on Portuguese
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Dialect Variation in Welsh
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Polish Studies: Towards New Horizons
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News from the MML Library – A Year of Change
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The Global History of Sport in the Cold War
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A New Colleague in Spanish and Portuguese
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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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DTAL 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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rom any perspective one of the high points of last session was the inaugural Annual Faculty Lecture which took place in October 2014. Bernardette Holmes MBE gave a provocative and stimulating talk entitled ‘The Vanishing Monolingual - why the ability to speak other languages is defining success for the 21st Century.’ The lecture addressed the paradox of contemporary England’s lack of multilingual skills and the fact that the English language owes its origins to rich borrowings from other languages, arguing that monolingualism is a distinct disadvantage for life in the 21st century. It is a pity that no one from the Ministry of Education was present! We look forward to the 2015 lecture which will be on Saturday 17th October 2015 at 5.00 pm in the Lady Mitchell Hall. We are delighted to be welcoming back Bernardette Holmes MBE, along with Mr Steve Eadon of the Arsenal FC Double Club. Football is a world that crosses borders and unites others in a way that no other phenomenon can do. The Arsenal Double Club is working with schools in North London and across the country to bring together two powerful forces for change, football and languages. The lecture will illustrate how learning languages through football can teach you more than how to pass the ball and how to argue against an unfair offside decision in French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. All are welcome to attend both the lecture and a drinks reception to be held at Newnham College (from 6.15 pm).
As this publication approaches a decade of existence it is only fitting to thank readers for their contributions and comments about previous editions. Last year we received a number of fascinating accounts about the Cambridge experience and its consequences, particularly from undergraduates in the 1950s, of which we have chosen George Scanlon’s experience as representative. Curiously, all the contributors were male and we would love to hear accounts of MML - way back when or in the more recent past - from their female counterparts. As we prepare to go to press we are coming to the end of Ian Roberts’ stint as Chair of Faculty. It is a thankless task to broker peace, harmony and equanimity over such a polyglottal configuration, especially during periods of financial uncertainty, and all concerned would like to thank Ian for his placid, good humour throughout the ups and downs of the period. Also on the move are David Midgley and Chris Ward, who retire from the Departments of German and Dutch and of Slavonic Studies respectively, and Rachel Deadman, Faculty Assistant Administrator. Rachel has been with MML since 2009 and in her present role since August 2012. She now leaves for the Department of Sociology. All three colleagues have contributed enormously to MML in their time with us and our very best wishes go with them for the future.
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What about that REF?
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ad you been anywhere near the Raised Faculty Building recently you could not have failed but be aware of an alarmingly ubiquitous acronym: REF. Previous newsletters have indicated the intensity of the preparation for the national Research Excellence Framework exercise, involving both academic and administrative staff, and its deadline of December 2013. The results were published at the end of 2014 and Nick Hammond, architect extraordinaire of the MML submission, communicated the extremely positive outcome to the whole affair by reporting that the Cambridge Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages had performed exceptionally well, reconfirming its status as world-leading and internationally excellent. Unlike previous Research Assessment Exercises, where individual departments were given separate scores, academic staff from the entire Faculty - and some members of the Departments of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and of History of Art - were examined as a single unit, which involved years of planning and cooperation between the different departments. The research publications by members of staff, comprising monographs, editions, 2
articles and web-related projects, formed the nucleus of the assessment process; but also the wider categories of Research Environment and Impact were scrutinized by the national panel. A number of individual members of staff submitted case studies of the impact made by their research, with subjects including Phonetics applied to forensic speech services, Norman French dialects in the Channel Islands, the public awareness and understanding of Ukraine, the endangered Greek variety Romeyka still spoken in mountainous Turkey, the History of the Olympics in modern Germany, and the curation of the major Late Raphael exhibition at the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris. The Cambridge submission came first in the country for the crucial categories of outputs, impact and environment for weighted 4* (defined as ‘world-leading’), as well as for weighted impact on combined 4* and 3* (defined respectively as ‘world-leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’), and 2nd in the UK for weighted outputs and environment for combined 4* and 3*. These high rankings were reflected in the Times Higher Education Supplement’s placement (1st January 2015) of Cambridge MML in top spot for Modern Languages and Linguistics (rather than single linguistics) intensity-weighted submissions.
Although the REF exercise was immensely time-consuming, it has enabled the Faculty to continue placing top-quality research at the forefront of the work that it does. Nick deserves both great credit and huge thanks for masterminding the submission. Unfortunately, there was no time for celebration as he finished his report by remarking that there would be no resting upon laurels: preparation was already underway for the next Research Excellence Exercise, which is due to take place in 2020. Sadly for that event we will be without Louise Balshaw, our Research Grants Administrator, who is leaving the Faculty after eight years with us. We wish her all the best for the future.
A privilege and a pleasure:
Oliver Prior Society 2015. Professor Ian Roberts reports on proceedings
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t has been wonderful to receive such inspired and inspiring feedback from the teachers who attended OPS 2015. I was particularly heartened by this response from the MFL subject leader of a sixth-form college in the West Midlands:
University of Exeter, Routes Into Languages East, and several other national organisations supporting language teachers. We knew that with such a diverse mix of delegates we were set for a lively and stimulating annual meeting.
“It is such a privilege to be able to learn new concepts, and to widen and enrich existing knowledge. It has been a great pleasure to talk with colleagues from other institutions and sectors.” These are the two central aims of the Oliver Prior Society, which is now enjoying its second year of revival. In all, 104 delegates travelled to my college, Downing, for the two-day meeting on the 29th and 30th of March 2015. Members of the MML Faculty at Cambridge mixed with secondary-level teachers from all sectors and from across the country representing 65 different schools. Several longstanding members of the Society were present, including one delegate who has been coming to OPS annual meetings for the past 50 years. We were joined by friends and colleagues from Alliance Française de Cambridge, the
Elspeth Wilson and Sarah Schechter hear from the Cambridge Bilingualism Network
Once again, I was very grateful for the willingness of colleagues in the Faculty to share their current research, giving our teachers real insight into what the learning experience is like for MML undergraduates at Cambridge. Rory O’Bryen opened OPS 2015 with a fascinating presentation about the works of nineteenth-century Colombian
poet Candelario Obeso. The lively round of questions from the audience that followed Dr O’Bryen’s talk really set the tone for the rest of the meeting: throughout, there was a delightful exchange of knowledge and expertise. We remained in the nineteenth century with Nick White, who introduced us to his research on the cultural legacy of the Franco-Prussian War. Dr White explained how this project exploring “the war before the First World War” gets to grips with the use of the language of war in unexpected contexts – in commentary of the 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and Germany, for instance – in order to understand how history speaks to the present moment, especially as Europe reconstructs its identity. Identity politics were also central to Abigail Brundin’s lecture on the seventeenth-century proto-feminist nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who developed a powerful political voice that was heard far beyond the convent walls. Remarkably, Dr Brundin showed how Tarabotti’s writing retains its empowering potential today. In her talk, Henriëtte Hendriks questioned whether language shapes the way we think, and encouraged audience participation 3
Dr Abigail Brundin speaking in the Howard Theatre, Downing College
through on-the-spot- translation exercises. Teachers commented afterwards on the value of this research, as they find themselves so often working with students whose first language is not English. Bilingualism was something of a theme for OPS 2015, providing us with opportunities to talk freely
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about pressing political and social issues. We were fortunate enough to hear from Sarah Schechter, Project Manager of Routes Into Languages East, about the many and various initiatives rolled out locally and nationally to encourage language learning at secondary level. Clips from entries to the Routes
Spelling Bee, Language on Film, and Sing to the Future: Language Beatz competitions were not only impressive, but thoroughly entertaining. The Vice Chancellor made an appearance (albeit virtual!) at lunchtime, as doctoral candidate Elspeth Wilson and Dr Theodora Alexopoulou screened a short film produced by the Cambridge Bilingualism Network. Your Languages, Your Future emphasises both the importance of proficiency in a second language for any number of careers and the need to recognise and validate all the languages children might be using at home. The film was a perfect complement to the persuasive after dinner speech given by Cambridge Language Centre Director, Jocelyn Wyburd. We didn’t mind at all that Jocelyn threw cautionary etiquette to the wind in talking politics, as she grappled with the possible outcomes of the forthcoming General Election and the potential impact of new departures in education policy on teachers nationwide.
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.
A new Professor of English and Applied Linguistics
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anthi Maria Tsimpli is the newly appointed Chair in English and Applied Linguistics. She recently held the positions of Professor of Multilingualism and Cognition at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading and Professor of Psycholinguistics and Director of the Language Development Lab at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Ianthi holds a BA in Modern Greek Literature and Byzantine Studies from the University of Athens and a PhD in Linguistics from University College London (1992). Her doctoral thesis was published in 1996 in the Garland series of Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics with the title Functional Categories and Maturation: The Prefunctional Stage of Language Acquisition. Ianthi has worked extensively on the case of Christopher, a polyglot-savant, with Neil Smith (UCL) with whom she co-authored the book The Mind of a Savant: Language
Learning and Modularity (1995, Blackwell) as well as a number of journal articles. This collaboration continued, with a team including Bencie Woll and Gary Morgan, leading to the recent book Signs of a Savant (2010, CUP) detailing a subsequent research project investigating Christopher’s ability to learn British Sign Language. Before moving to Thessaloniki, Ianthi taught Linguistics at University College London, the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She teaches and researches into Bilingualism/ Multilingualism, First and Second Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Language Impairment and Theoretical Syntax. The Language Development Lab she founded and directs in Thessaloniki conducts research on first and second language development, bilingualism, SLI, Broca’s aphasia, native adult, child and L2 sentence processing and eye-movements. A large part of this research is externally funded by national and international research bodies. Ianthi’s most recent projects are cofinanced by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national funds through the Operational Program “Education
and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), THALES and Excellence I. The THALES project (“Bilingual Acquisition & Bilingual Education: The Development of Linguistic & Cognitive Abilities in Different Types of Bilingualism”) investigates the interactions between bilingualism, literacy and nonverbal cognition. More than 700 children, 8-12 years old, monolingual and bilingual from Greece, Albania, Germany, the UK and the US participated in this project. The aims were to examine the effects of bilingual education and biliteracy on non-verbal cognition as well as on language abilities. The Excellence I Research Programme entitled “Individual Differences in Anaphora Resolution: Linguistic and Cognitive Effects” aims to shed light on the issue of individual differences observed in anaphora resolution among healthy adults, young and elderly. The factors examined include domain-specific, linguistic factors such as lexical, syntactic and pragmatic complexity, domain-general abilities such as executive control and fluid intelligence, aging and language experience measured through print exposure and education levels.
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German agency announces €1 million funding for Research Hub in Cambridge
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he German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) announced in March that it will be providing €1 million over five years to create a research hub for German studies at the University of Cambridge. The Hub will not only build on research into German issues already underway at Cambridge, it is designed to create a public platform for the UK where German themes can be explored.
the DAAD and the University of Cambridge are going to strengthen their auspicious partnership. Building on the University’s already remarkable position in this respective area, the Hub promises an outcome at an even higher academic level with international acclaim. Thus DAAD not only enhances the outreach of German studies, but also its visibility as a world leading academic funding institution within the UK and beyond.”
Speaking at the signing in Berlin, the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, said: “The University has a critical mass of scholars working on German themes unrivalled in the United Kingdom and probably anywhere in the world outside German-speaking Europe. Few nations can boast such a powerful tradition of scholarship and learning as Germany, which plays a critical economic and political role at the heart of Europe. We therefore welcome this golden opportunity to foster even greater partnership between Cambridge and Germany.”
The Hub will start operations in January 2016 and be co-directed by Professor Sir Chris Clark (History) and Professor Chris Young (German, and Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Humanities). Open to established scholars, postdocs, and graduate students, it aims to draw on and support the activities of all Cambridge scholars working on German-related and comparative themes from any period and from across all subjects in the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences. The internal launch in June was attended by over eighty colleagues from across this full range - an event that was almost certainly unique in terms of breadth and scope in the history of German studies at the University.
DAAD President Professor Margret Wintermantel replied: “By founding this Hub, 6
Georg Krawietz of DAAD at the launch of the German Hub
Centre for Film and Screen Studies: an exciting development
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ilm and Screen Studies are taking on an increasingly central role in the Modern Languages curriculum at Cambridge. Not only is their presence felt at undergraduate level in specialist papers like the final-year options on European or Ibero-American Cinema but film has also taken its place in courses dealing with the culture of all periods, from the medieval to the contemporary. Such innovation has also been experienced in the graduate sphere where the successful MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures has been re-designed for the coming session and will re-launch in 2016 as the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies. This development has been coordinated with the launch of a PhD in Film and Screen Studies, which will welcome its first students in 2016. Perhaps the most exciting element of this expansion, however, will be the appearance of the Centre for Film and Screen, which will act as the home for the discipline. Plans for the Centre include the appointment of visiting artists, curators and scholars as well as research and study of this most modern of media. The inspiration behind the project is Dr JD Rhodes who created and will direct the Centre. Since arriving at Cambridge, he has worked closely with colleagues in MML,
English, and other departments and faculties to promote the growth and visibility of film and screen studies at the University.
short monograph (2011) on Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s watershed experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon.
John David joined MML in September 2014 as the University’s first Lecturer in Film. Previously, he was Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. He also held a permanent post at the University of York and a visiting appointment at University College Cork. In 2012 he was the Tomás Harris Visiting Professor of Art History at University College London.
In 2008 John David co-founded the online journal World Picture. The journal is dedicated to film and visual theory, literary theory, and philosophical approaches to media, but also regularly features original works of art, film, as well as interviews with artists and philosophers. World Picture holds an annual conference every autumn; and the 2016 conference is scheduled to take place at Cambridge.
A specialist in Italian cinema, European cinema, the Avant Garde and experimental film and media, John David has published widely on Pier Paolo Pasolini, in particular. His first book, Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007) locates Pasolini’s emergence as a filmmaker inside the material and political history of twentiethcentury Roman urban and architectural development. John David has also edited three books—one on Michael Haneke (2010), another on Michelangelo Antonioni (2011) and a third, Taking Place (2011) that directly grew out of his abiding interest in the intersection of cinema, architecture and geography. He is also the author of a
The ambition animating all of these developments is that Cambridge will emerge as the leader in the training of graduate researchers in the UK and will distinguish itself as a key player in this field internationally. Cambridge has been home to serious teaching and research in the discipline before Film Studies existed as such, though much of this happened in the absence of a central and coherent base at the University. Now that the newly established Centre, the PhD and the remodelled MPhil are all in place, John David hopes that Cambridge will be able to move swiftly in establishing itself as the most exciting place in the country to study film. 7
MML, Life and Football (in that order!)
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ormer student George Scanlon reflects on the undergraduate experience in the Faculty shortly after the Second World War and the type of future it promised. “In 1952 I obtained a place at Christ’s College. I belonged to one of the first groups of primary school leavers to benefit from the Butler Education Bill which allowed entry into Grammar Schools on success in the Scholarship Examination. I took French, Latin and History at ‘A’ level and decided to do my National Service in the R.A.F. before going to University. The Cold War had started, the Iron Curtain erected and I was sent to take a course in Russian on completion of which I was given a place on an Interpreters Course at the London School of Slavonic Languages. This was the key moment which would open the doors to a life-long interest in languages, especially Russian. On arriving at Christ’s in 1954 I started the Languages Tripos and studied French, Russian, Arabic and Persian. On graduation I passed a Foreign Office examination in Arabic and was promptly assigned to the Russian Desk before being posted to Hong Kong as Deputy Director of the Far Eastern Information Department at a most interesting 8
period of Chinese history covering Chairman Mao’s “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”: a devious plan to unearth his opponents, followed by “The Great Leap Forward” an ill-considered and reckless policy of collectivization and industrialization, causing havoc and starvation with forced labour gulags. After a short spell in Vietnam I joined the teaching profession and introduced Chinese and Arabic to the sixth formers at Hele’s School, Exeter. In 1966 I was appointed Director of the One Year Intensive-Russian Course at Liverpool Polytechnic where I became Head of Languages and Dean of Humanities. At the same time, I was elected British Universities representative at the Moscow based International Association of Teachers of Russian with the mission of propagating Russian language and culture, with our meetings held in the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries. In 1966 the World Cup took place in England and I was asked by the F.A. to act as attaché to the Soviet team based in Durham. They reached the semi-final and my involvement with the side brought me to the notice of the many famous managers who requested my
help when taking their teams to the USSR; and their Soviet opponents also relied on my services in return games. My football background helped me to form easy relationships with managers and players. As a schoolboy I had played for the North of England alongside some of the Busby Babes. I captained Cambridge against Oxford in 1957 and played four times at Wembley. I was signed by Everton when I was 14 but turned down a professional offer in order to go to Cambridge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 encouraged me to take early retirement and accept a consultancy with Umbro, using my football contacts to sign kit agreements with the top Russian teams. Perestroika allowed Russian stars to be transferred and I was kept busy looking after them. I also acted for Eric Cantona at Manchester United, at a time when Beckham, Neville, and Scholes were learning the trade in the Youth Team. Russian has enriched my life, created friendships, extended my football career, provided career opportunities and, above all, helped me to appreciate the history, literature and culture of a richly endowed nation.”
Update on Portuguese
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e are delighted to report that Portuguese is now as robust as ever in the Faculty with four established members of teaching staff. In last year’s newsletter we announced the arrival of Felipe Schuery as the first Faculty Language Teaching Officer appointed in that language. Felipe graduated in Publishing from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and worked as an editor in the Brazilian Publishing market. He has a Master’s degree in Literature and Discourse Analysis from Université Blaise-Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, where he was the Portuguese Leitor from the Instituto Camões during 2011/12. He is interested in Children’s Literature and had his first book published in October 2013: Ralf & Demi – Uma história de duas metades (Quatro Cantos) Felipe – along with Manucha Lisboa and Maite Conde, our other experts in Lusophone culture - was joined in September 2014 by Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá as Teaching Associate in Portuguese Studies. Vivien’s first degree was in Portuguese and English Studies
at the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she later did an MA in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation was a comparison between Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the novel Grande Sertão: veredas, by Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa, analysing the symbolic relevance of objects in storytelling and narrative. She taught for many years at the Literature Department at PUC-Rio and at the State University of Rio de Janeiro before coming to the UK in 2007 to do her PhD. Between 2010 and 2014 she lectured at the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex . Vivien’s doctoral research was on the travel journal of Anthony Knivet, an Englishman who spent nine years in Brazil in the late sixteenth century and left what is the earliest detailed description of Brazil written by an Englishman. Her research was a cross-disciplinary work involving History, Portuguese and Latin American Studies and Ethnography, focusing on the encounters between Portuguese settlers, Brazilian Indians and English privateers in the sixteenth century. Vivien’s critical edition of Knivet’s account, The Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes of Master Anthony Knivet, is being published by Cambridge
University Press. Her current research is on early exchanges between England, Portugal and Brazil, focusing most specifically on travel accounts, Jesuit texts and letters. She has finished preparing the book Ingleses no Brasil: relatos de viagem 1526-1608, which involved co-translating and editing for the first time 12 accounts of English travellers to that country. More recently Vivien has been examining a rare Brazilian manuscript written by Portuguese Jesuits and stolen by English pirates. Vivien is also a published poet in Brazil and Argentina, with the books Água Rara, Durante a Noite and Durante la Noche + poemas inéditos, and was one of 22 Brazilian poets to be included in the prestigious collection Esses Poetas: uma antologia dos anos 90. She is currently participating in the exhibition of Brazilian contemporary poetry “Poesia Agora” at the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo.
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Dialect Variation in Welsh: David Willis from DTAL addresses the question.
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ny living language is constantly changing. We are often aware that older or younger people speak slightly differently or that people who grew up in a different area or social context say things that we would not say ourselves. This often leads to change: if one variant is used by younger people, it may eventually become the one used by everyone; or if two variants are used in different areas or by different groups, one may spread at the expense of the other. Variation and change lead to fundamental questions of historical linguistics: first, why does a new variant appear in the first place, if no one has ever said it before? Sometimes new options seem to arise when children learn language, creating different rules from those of earlier generations: communication remains successful and the ‘mistake’, barely noticed by anyone, spreads to other children. Contact between languages and dialects may accelerate this. A second question is how and why, once it has arisen, does a new option spread? Many linguists believe that words and patterns 10
spread when they are prestigious, but there are other possibilities: perhaps the new option is easier to learn, or is somehow more useful, expressing a new meaning for instance, or it may simply be that innovations spread as people move about and communicate with others. These are questions being investigated by Dr David Willis and colleagues at Newcastle and Essex in their project on the geospatial and social determinants of syntactic variation in Welsh, part of a network of similar projects working on dialect variation in Dutch, German, Italian, Basque, Scots and Scandinavian syntax. Welsh is spoken by some 562,000 people; 8% of children in Wales speak it at home and 22% are educated in Welsh. It makes an excellent testbed because the spoken language varies greatly in terms of sentence structure from region to region and there is little pressure to conform to a spoken standard. Welsh is also interesting because it can be used to work out how language contact leads to change: it is in close contact with English, and there are many ‘new’ speakers, people who acquired the language as children through schools
established by the revitalization movement since the 1960s. To create the best possible picture of syntactic change in Welsh as spoken today, project members are gathering spoken material from people of all ages from across Wales to make comparisons across time and space. Twitter is useful to get a rough idea of the current extent of variation and what new structures are entering the language, and then recordings of oral questionnaires establish a more detailed picture. In tracking shifts in the language, GIS mapping is used to plot where interviewees were brought up and enables researchers to look at geographical spread of particular aspects of syntax, making comparisons by age group, gender and social and language background. While a full-scale atlas mapping this variation is a long-term undertaking, a pilot in north Wales has already revealed a lot of internally motivated change, with the spread of new pronouns and patterns of negation. The next stage is to work out why these emerged in the first place and how they are spreading, for instance, whether from a single location or from across a wider area.
Polish Studies: Toward New Horizons Pub quiz: what is the second most-widely spoken language in Great Britain?
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f you answered ‘Polish’, then bardzo dobrze. In an exciting new development in the MML Faculty, Cambridge students can now study the language as well as the literature and culture of Poland, from the Romantic poetry of Adam Mickiewicz to the postmodern prose of Olga Tokarczuk. The Department of Slavonic Studies is advancing an ambitious four-year pilot project in Polish Studies, which seeks nothing less than to make the University of Cambridge a permanent home for the study of Poland and a global forum for new ways of thinking about Polish and Central and Eastern European culture and society. The programme officially commenced in October 2014 with the appearance of Paper SL 13, ‘Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture of Poland’, which was designed by the Faculty’s new Lecturer in Polish Studies, Dr Stanley Bill. A native of Australia with a PhD from Northwestern University, Dr Bill specialises in twentieth-century Polish literature and culture with a particular focus on religion, secularization theory and postcolonial interpretations of cultural history. To invigorate the field of Polish Studies and
radiate Cambridge teaching and research beyond the academy, Dr Bill supplements our curricular offerings with film screenings, debates, and academic conferences. In January 2015, for instance, Cambridge Polish Studies treated audiences to a stunning virtual tour of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which preceded a candid discussion of the many ways in which contemporary Poland is rediscovering the Jewish dimension of its history. In April, the programme hosted Adam Zagajewski, Poland’s greatest living poet, who read a selection of poems and discussed his craft before a large crowd in Trinity’s Winstanley Theatre. The event also featured readings in Polish and English by students of Paper SL13 as well as an award for the best translation of a Polish poem into English by a student in the programme. At a time of unprecedented interest in Poland as a rising economic power and a highly strategic
EU and NATO member state, the programme is also cultivating a more nuanced understanding of that country as a geopolitical lynchpin of the continent. In March 2015, Dr Bill moderated a spirited debate between Peter Hitchens (The Mail on Sunday) and Edward Lucas (The Economist) on the topic of ‘Poland between Russia and Germany’. And on 30 June and 1 July, he co-organised a major international conference on the Polish-Ukrainian encounter with Dr Rory Finnin, Director of the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme. Entitled ‘Past as Prelude: Polish-Ukrainian Relations for the Twenty-First Century’, the conference brought together scholars, politicians and public intellectuals from Poland and Ukraine in order to discuss and develop new directions for PolishUkrainian relations in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. The event was made available to the public beyond Cambridge via roundtable panels broadcast live around the globe. In just one year, the Cambridge Polish Studies programme has quickly become the most dynamic initiative of its kind in Europe. It is not only cultivating new ground in the study of Poland but also engendering fresh comparative research into the cultures and societies of Central and Eastern Europe, which is a critical objective for the University of Cambridge. 11
News from the MML Library – A Year of Change
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his has been a busy and demanding year for the Library. On 1st August 2015, we became affiliated with the University Library (UL) and changed our relationship with the Faculty. MML Library staff and budgets came under the management of the UL, along with those of the seven other School of Arts & Humanities Faculty libraries. It is too soon to say what effect this change will have on library services and collections but we hope that the MML Library will continue to be what one teaching staff member recently termed “the jewel in our Faculty.” To make library information even more accessible to users, we launched our new website in Michaelmas 2014. The response has been very favourable and we are happy that students, staff and visitors can easily find us, learn more about our collections and services, as well as library events and activities. The new website replaces the previous printed guide to the Library with an extensive FAQ section, which is both a greener means of communication and a more effective way of keeping our information very current. You can find it at: www.mml.cam. ac.uk/library
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of Slavonic Studies and Dr Stanley Bill to develop the collection of Polish books and films and to support teaching and learning.
User friendly: both the system and staff in the MML Library
We have been happy to welcome many visitors to the Library in addition to our current students and staff, including the Sutton Trust Summer School, which aims to improve social mobility through access to education. Many other prospective students visited the Library during the MML Open Day in March and the Cambridge Open Days in July 2015. Visitors were delighted to discover that our library is open for consultation to anyone with an interest in linguistics and European languages. This year has also seen the re-launch of Polish as an MML taught language. The Library has worked closely with the Department
The growth of film and screen studies across the MML departments is having an exciting impact on the Library, in new areas of collecting like Ibero-American cinema and avant-garde film. Then, of course, there is also the planned Centre for Film and Screen which will come online in the very near future. To accommodate the expansion of these collections, the second floor of the Library will soon have a ‘visual culture’ area encompassing DVDs, cinema books and art books, thus offering the full array of material in one convenient space. As we step into our new role as a ULaffiliated library, we will continue to keep in close touch with MML linguists past and present, visitors and with all our current library users. Please visit our website and follow us on twitter @MMLLib and Facebook www.facebook.com/pages/MMLLibrary-University-of-Cambridge.
The Global History of Sport in the Cold War
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rofessor Chris Young has secured a prestigious grant from the U.S. National Endowment of the Humanities to work on a collaborative project on sport in the Cold War. Together with his co-recipient, Bob Edelman, a Professor of Russian History at the University of California San Diego and author of a recently acclaimed history of Spartak Moscow, Chris will be working under the umbrella of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre’s multi-award-winning Cold War Project. “Sport has long been linked with politics, never more so than during the Cold War,” Chris observes. “In this highly precarious time, nations and peoples around the world used sport to promote their political, social, and economic development. The media promoted mega-events between capitalist and Communist athletes as surrogates for diplomatic and military tension. Yet, for all its obvious ideological freighting, sport in this period reflected a complex integration of commerce, celebrity, trans-regional and transnational fan loyalties. It revealed different and shifting notions of race, class and gender (often within a single nation.) Furthermore, the uneasy mapping of sports and geopolitical allegiances could even make bitter rivals of strategic partners.”
“Despite its unrivalled visibility,” Professor Edelman adds, “sport has been only minimally examined by scholars of the Cold War, whether in international political systems or in elite and popular culture. As the hardest form of soft power and the softest form of hard power, sport crosses the divide between these two main objects of study. Meriting the same rigorous examination already given to subjects from diplomatic relations and military engagement on the one hand to ballet, theatre, art and design on the other, sport has the potential to bring both strands together in mutually enriching ways.” Their collaborative and comparative project seeks for the first time to understand Cold War sport in its fullest social, political, cultural and global dimensions. To this end, they have assembled a group of seventy-seven presenters and discussants from many nations and humanistic disciplines to break down and scrutinize the common master narrative of East-West sporting tensions. In contrast to the small body of previous scholarship on the topic, presentations will cover all five continents and a plenitude of sports.
University, the German Historical Institute and Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and Pembroke College, Cambridge. These have a number of key goals: to provide the first, comparative and archive-based examination of the much cited but little understood Boycott Olympics of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984; transcend the hitherto dominant focus on the USA and USSR by examining other key nations as well as sports outside the Olympic arena that opened up different nodes of confrontation and rivalry; and, finally, move beyond the role of the state to interrogate the differences and commonalities between the systems brought about by gender, the body, commerce and celebrity. As well as engaging in various media initiatives, the project will produce two volumes, to be published by the University of California Press and Stanford University Press. In addition, an open access internet portal on the hugely popular website of the Cold War International History Project will include detailed paper summaries, interviews with presenters, translated documents, and a timeline of Cold War sports events.
Over a three-year period, the project will be hosting three workshops - at the Jordan Center for Advanced Russian Studies at New York 13
A New Colleague in Spanish and Portuguese Learning (2009-2010) and won a prize for excellence in teaching in 2011.
B
ryan Cameron joined the Department in September of 2014 on the retirement of Alison Sinclair. His research centres on modern Spanish culture with a focus on literary, filmic and ideological production from the eighteenth century to the present. Bryan took his first degrees in Spanish and English at Indiana University in Bloomington before moving to Philadelphia to pursue a Master’s degree in Education. Subsequently, he began a doctoral programme at the University of Pennsylvania where he completed a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Spanish novel and graduated summa cum laude in May of 2012. As a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania, Bryan worked as Book Review Editor of the Hispanic Review (2007-2008), held a fellowship from the Centre for Teaching in 14
After submitting his dissertation, Bryan was named Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish at Bryn Mawr College where he taught courses on language, literature, film and Hispanic cultures from 2011-2012. Amongst other activities, Bryan organized a symposium on (il)legal immigration in the United States, which featured a panel of undocumented students living in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In 2012, Bryan was appointed Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University where he worked for two years in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In addition to teaching seminars on Spanish literature, film and culture at NYU, Bryan served as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies from 2012-2014. Bryan’s current book-length project, ‘Paternity Tests: Destabilized Authority and Patriarchal Anxiety in the Late-NineteenthCentury Spanish Novel,’ examines the representation of genealogy, impotence, marriage and reproduction in novels following the decay of the liberal programme launched by the Revolution of 1868. Works
which feature in his study are Manuel Cubas Thaïs, El marido impotente (1886); Alejandro Sawa, Crimen legal (1886); Benito Pérez Galdós Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) and Las novelas de Torquemada (1889-1895); Leopoldo Alas, Su único hijo (1891); and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Flor de mayo (1895) and La barraca (1898). In these an allegory of fractured paternity and a refusal to espouse narratives of progress, (re)production and political unity, is seen as a challenge to the ideological confines of Restoration Spain (1874-1931), the Bourbon monarchy and the Catholic Church. Bryan’s work on the fin-desiècle novel has been published in journals and book collections worldwide and he plans to explore related themes such as inheritance and laws of succession in future research. In addition to his work on the nineteenthcentury novel, Bryan is currently developing projects on the Spanish Enlightenment, Romantic theatre, fin-de-siècle journalism, early Spanish cinema, anti-Francoist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s and protest movements in Spain from 2011 to the present. As Lecturer of Spanish Peninsular Studies, Bryan is committed to expanding the presence of the target language in scheduled papers at Cambridge and looks forward to collaborative ventures within the Faculty.
Spotlight on the Departments
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French News In October, the Department welcomed its newest member, Dr Hannah Scott, College Lecturer at Girton College, a specialist of nineteenth-century literature. As always, we have been promoting French studies in Cambridge and elsewhere through publications and conference contributions. The fifth annual Cambridge Conference on Endangered Languages, organized as usual by Dr Mari Jones, took place in July 2015; a successor is planned for July 2016. Dr Emma Gilby co-organized an interdisciplinary conference on ‘The Places of Early Modern Criticism’ (CRASSH, March 2015), and Dr Jessica Goodman a conference on ‘Posterity in France, 1650-1800’ in the same month. Prof Bill Burgwinkle and Dr Miranda Griffin ran a symposium on ‘The Interdisciplinary Middle Ages’ at the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France in June, 2015. The annual French Graduate Research Conference, organized as always by the postgraduates themselves, and on the theme of ‘Textures’, was held in May 2014; and this year’s conference, on ‘Parasites’ was held around the same time. It is impossible to list all the conference papers and visiting lectures given by colleagues, but 16
Cambridge contributors were very prominent at the annual meeting of the Société des DixNeuviémistes in Glasgow in April 2015: Dr Nick White gave a plenary lecture on his research on the representation of the FrancoPrussian war. Dr Martin Crowley and Dr Ian James were both invited to speak at the firstever conference devoted to the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, held at the University of Kent in November 2014. They will be participating in an international research consortium based in the Netherlands on the topic of ‘Social Imaginaries between Secularity and Religion in a Globalizing World’. Prof Emma Wilson is a Network Partner in an international research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust entitled ‘Child and Nation in World Cinema: Borders and Encounters since 1980’. Dr Jones has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bamberg (Germany) and Canterbury (New Zealand) and Prof Burgwinkle at Stanford University and UCLA in California. Prof Nicholas Hammond has just launched the website http://www.parisiansoundscapes.org/, which deals with an extraordinary collection of 17th- and 18th-century songs and poems, known as the Chansonnier Maurepas. Most of the pieces are street songs, often topical, sometimes scandalous. He has been working
on the collection with performers of early music. The site contains the texts of the songs, arrangements, audio and video recordings, and much else. Prof Christopher Prendergast’s Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic has been awarded the 2014 R. H. Gapper Book Prize of the Society for French Studies; this is the second time in three years the prize has been won by a member of the Department. He is the first person ever to win it twice: he previously won it in 2008. Dr Goodman was a joint winner of the inaugural Romance Studies Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers. Alex Tranca was joint runner-up for the Society for French Studies R. H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize. All in all, another active and successful year for the Department.
German and Dutch News The Department started the year with the launch of the website, Cambridge Online German for Schools (www.cogs.mml.cam. ac.uk) This project, to support German language at various levels, is spearheaded by Silke Mentchen; and was developed as part of the “Think German” initiative financed by Berlin and promoted by the German Embassy
in London. A large number of school teachers attended the launch, which included contributions from the German Embassy, Goethe Institute, DAAD, UK German Connection, Institute for Modern Languages Research (London), British Museum and Routes into Languages (East). A particular boost was provided by the British Museum's exhibition Germany: Memories of a Nation. A 600-Year History in Objects. The blog on ‘The Holy Roman Empire: from Charlemagne to Napoleon’ that Professor Jo Whaley wrote for the opening is available online at blog.britishmuseum. org/2014/10/13/the-holy-roman-empire-fromcharlemagne-to-napoleon/. Jo’s two-volume history, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire 1493-1806 (OUP, 2011) has now also appeared to great acclaim in German translation. Special mention in connection with the British Museum exhibition goes to first-year, Sam Groom, who won a prize for the poem he submitted in the Dinggedicht competition. In October, Sarah Colvin gave her inaugural lecture as Schröder Professor, entitled ‘Inaudible Stories: German Prisoner Narratives after 1945.’ The lecture drew on the extensive research that Sarah has done
on the writings of people serving terms of imprisonment; and it gave a poignant sense of how their stories tend to be occluded from public awareness. Sarah is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture (2015), which also contains a contribution by Andrew Webber. Another success for Sarah and her Schröder Research Associate, Dr Katharina Karcher, is the award of a major grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for an international research project on extremism in Germany since 1968, entitled ‘Reading Violent Politics.’ We were particularly delighted that members of the Schröder family could attend Sarah’s inaugural lecture. It was the donation of the banker J. Henry Schröder that enabled the initial establishment of a Chair of German. And a further generous benefaction from the family in 2011 allowed the Department to sustain a diverse programme of activities promoting German Studies within Cambridge and throughout the UK. A notable event in that programme, devised by Sarah Colvin, was the first Undergraduate Conference in German Studies in the UK, held in February. The subject was ‘Germany in 2015,’ and the event was organised entirely
by students. Undergraduates from a variety of universities gave papers; and their Cambridge counterparts acted as convenors, chaired the panels and took on the role of respondents. We heard contributions on anglicisms and historical change in German; the translation of German poetry into English; sexual politics since reunification and gender issues in the German media; asylum-seekers in Germany and press coverage relating to Jihadist insurgency; and the re-shaping of the German workforce in a global economy. The standard of the presentations was uniformly high. In June, the Department also hosted a one-day event dedicated to the teaching and learning of translation. There were workshops for students and teachers of German, including Duncan Large, Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at the UEA; two prominent British translators of German literature, Mike Mitchell and Fiona Rintoul; and Klaus Fritz, who translated the Harry Potter books into German. This event was linked to a launch and reception for the Migration Museum’s exhibition ‘Germans in Britain,’ which is touring the UK (http:// migrationmuseum.org/output/exhibition/ germans-in-britain/). The exhibition was on display at Murray Edwards College in June.
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Student successes this year include Marie Kolkenbrock and Erica Wickerson who were awarded Sylvia Naish Fellowships for postdoctoral study by the Institute of Modern Languages Research. Erica was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College; and Marie was appointed Research Associate linked to the Arthur Schnitzler project led by Andrew Webber. Ina Linge, won the 2014 Women in German Studies Prize for the best postgraduate essay. And Ellie Collins, a current final year, won the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for her translation of a story by Julia Franck. Visitors to the Department this year included Thomas Meinecke, Illja Trojanow and David Wagner. Academic speakers have included Prof Elizabeth Boa (Nottingham), Prof Horst Bredekamp (Berlin), Prof Christopher Clark (Cambridge), Prof Jaimey Fisher (University of California, Davis), Dr Markwart Herzog (Schwabenakademie Irsee), Dr Nick Hopwood (Cambridge), Dr Manfred Mittermayer (Salzburg), Prof Damaris Nübling (Mainz), Prof Helen WatanabeO’Kelly (Oxford), and Prof Stefan Willer (Berlin).
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We would very much like to hear from any linguists, 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 Despite the continuing 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 mixture of literature, art, film and linguistics. An exciting development for our Department was the addition of a new colleague. John David Rhodes joined MML in September 2014 as the first lecturer in film to be appointed by the University. He came to Cambridge from Sussex where he held the post of Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. His publications on Italian cinema include Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007); and an edited collection on Antonioni, Antonioni: Centenary
Essays (2011). He is currently writing two books: one on queer theory and Pasolini, the second on the house in cinema. This was also Pierpaolo Antonello’s first year as Head of Department. Pierpaolo replaces Robert Gordon who began a period of research leave as visiting scholar in Wellington, New Zealand, where he gave public lectures at the University and also at the National Library on the Holocaust and on the work of Primo Levi. He is now developing a book project on modern ideas of luck. Adam Ledgeway won a 2-year Marie Curie research project to study the Romanian linguistic varieties (namely, the Aromanian dialects) spoken in northwestern Greece. He was invited to give keynote talks in Siena, Potenza, Bucharest, Trento, Leiden, Naples and Lisbon. He also published two edited volumes, with Paola Benincà and Nigel Vincent, namely: Diachrony and Dialects. Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy (OUP, 2014); and Approcci diversi alla dialettologia italiana contemporanea; a special issue of L’Italia dialettale 75 (with Roberta D’Alessandro, Claudio Di Felice, and Irene Franco). Adam’s industry is certainly impressive as he has just won Leverhulme funding for the project ‘Fading voices in Southern Italy: investigating language
contact in Magna Graecia’ which will bring two research associates to Cambridge for three years: Giuseppina Silvestri and Norma Schifano.
Council project on Renaissance ‘Domestic Devotions’ continues its work with a group of 9 researchers between Italian, History and Art History.
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. It may be accessed at http://sms. cam.ac.uk/collection/1366579 though will soon be available in book format. Helena Sanson continues her successful research on conduit literature across the early modern and modern periods with a series of research events and with the organization of a symposium to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of Giovanni Francesco Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua, the first ever Italian grammar book.
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. This includes Dr Paul Howard, who started his three year post-doc at Trinity College in October, and Dr Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, the Keith Sykes Fellow at Pembroke College, who organized a series of events for the celebration of the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth.
As well as international exchanges, the Department continues to build links across academic disciplines. The Cambridge Italian Research Network (CIRN) hosted an international symposium on ‘The Italian Home’ in May 2015 with speakers from History, Art History, Film Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, as well as Italian. Abi Brundin's European Research
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 event for Italianists past and present next year. Email us at: italian@mml.cam.ac.uk.
DTAL News This year was the fourth year of the new Department, and it is starting to feel like
we have all settled into the new teaching arrangements (with undergraduate papers in both theoretical and applied areas, an integrated MPhil programme, and lots of research-specific and transferable training for our PhD students). In the last few years we have welcomed around 25 undergraduate students per year, who are taken care of by Dr Paula Buttery, our undergraduate Tripos coordinator. Paula won the Pilkington Teaching Prize this year, so the students are in very good hands with her. The second cohort coming through the full Tripos successfully finished their BAs and spread their wings outside Cambridge or stayed with us for further studies in the MPhil. Our MPhil cohort this year was slightly bigger than in previous years with around 30 students under the experienced directorship of Professor Francis Nolan. Last but not least, research in the Department is very much alive and supported by our numerous PhD students (approximately 45 in all), some of whom left this year for research and teaching careers all over the world including the United States, Russia and China, as well as in our very own Department. In August 2014 we welcomed a new, but already very well-known colleague, Dr. Anna Korhonen. Anna has been in the Department 19
as a Royal Society Research Fellow, but is now officially a member of DTAL, and has made her presence felt right away by getting in some large grants from the ERC and EPSRC. Other members of staff have also put in a maximum of effort to get grants. Two of our colleagues were successful in getting Cambridge Humanities Research Grants this year, three of them received Cambridge-Africa research funding, and further applications are in the pipeline. Furthermore, together with the PhD students we have celebrated the breadth of the Department’s research by organising a large number of Research Cluster events, reading groups and workshops. In the scope of the Language Sciences Research Initiative, Wendy Bennett, Napoleon Katsos and Dora Alexopoulou have also started a series of lunch-time talks on Multilingualism, an interest shared by many colleagues in the Department aswell as teachers and parents in Cambridge, as is also evident from the popularity of the Cambridge Bilingualism network events at the Festival of Ideas.
to work as a Senior Research Associate in the former Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. She is a much awaited addition to the staff, and will no doubt make a big difference in the research life of the Department.
Exciting news came to us towards the end of April, when Professor Ianthi Tsimpli accepted her election to the Professorship in English and Applied Linguistics. Ianthi is no stranger to our Department either, as she used
Finally, from the 1st of October 2015 Henriette Hendriks will hand over to a new Head of Department, Dr Brechtje Post, who will undoubtedly make the Department grow and flourish even further.
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Slavonic Studies News With Eastern Europe in crisis, the Department has striven to offer a deeper understanding of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish histories and cultures. We have mobilised unique initiatives – our leading Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme, in particular – as well as cross-Faculty networks like the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES)
to engage the academic community, the international media and the broader public in constructive discussions about Europe’s greatest crisis since the end of the Cold War. Rory Finnin made repeated appearances on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and Sky News to discuss the Maidan Revolution, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. He also welcomed to Cambridge a number of high-profile scholars, civic activists and journalists – from historian Timothy Snyder to rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk – who sought to place the crisis in a deeper and more comparative
cultural and historical context. A particular highlight of the academic year was the international conference ‘Ukraine and the Global Information War,’ which examined the intersection between the politics of representation and international security through the lens of the geopolitical tumult in Ukraine. In keeping with our conviction that the study of language forms the foundation for crosscultural understanding, open course offerings were continued in Polish and Ukrainian, and provision of oral practice in Russian was increased by fortnightly ‘Coffee Breaks.’ Led by Dr Galina Nikiporets-Takigawa, these informal sessions offer regular opportunities to speak Russian with colleagues and native speakers. The Department also offered an exciting new paper in Polish Studies. It is led by new arrival, Dr Stanley Bill, who worked at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before coming to Cambridge. Stanley is only one of a number of new members of staff who bring diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives. Edyta Nowosielska is our new and highly experienced instructor of the open language courses in Polish. Dr Claire Knight is our Lecturer in Russian History and Culture
through 2016. She has been part of the Cambridge family for years, having recently completed her PhD on post-war Soviet cinema. Dr Olenka Pevny (below) is the new Lecturer in Pre-Modern East Slavic Culture. Olenka previously held the position of Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art at the University of Richmond. Trained as an Art Historian, she has studied visual culture as a locus of expression in narratives of communal, regional, national, religious, class and gender identity.
Olga Plocienniczak, our new Departmental Secretary, comes to us from elsewhere in the University. With a passionate interest in the Arts, Olga has a Masters in Russian Studies from the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań, where she specialised in Russian literature. 21
Dr Josephine von Zitzewitz joins us as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. A former MML undergraduate, she holds a DPhil from Oxford where she worked as a Lecturer and Junior Research Fellow. Alongside her Leverhulme project – which focuses on Leningrad Samizdat – Josie is working on a monograph on Viktor Krivulin, one of the most important underground poets of the late Soviet era. Sadly, we also said goodbye to colleagues who have contributed richly to the intellectual life of the Department. Dr Chris Ward made the study of Russian and Soviet history a distinctive mainstay of our identity. He retired in Easter Term. Galya Scott moved to Edinburgh after teaching Russian language with an awesome knowledge of grammar. Mirjam Zumstein returned to Switzerland after a stint as Teaching Associate from 2012-15. Dr Olesya Khromeychuk, Lector in Ukrainian, won a Leverhulme Fellowship to conduct research at UEA on the topic of female fighters during the Second World War. Despite their departure from Cambridge, all of these colleagues will remain a part of our Slavonic Studies community in a variety of ways in the future. Students and staff also won a number of 22
Mexico Noir: conference poster
awards. Jessica Fitch-Bunce took firstplace prize for her Russian-language essay ‘Studying in Russia and What It Means for My Career’. The distinction secured her a place at Novosibirsk University during her Year Abroad. PhD candidate Daria Mattingly gave the ‘Best Doctoral Paper on Ukraine’ at the 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities Convention in New York City. Katie Sykes, a first-year PhD student, won the 2015 Wood-Whistler Medal and
Scholarship. Head of Department Dr Rory Finnin was also awarded a 2015 Teaching Award for Outstanding Lecturer from the Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), the representative body for all students at the University.
Spanish and Portuguese News This session saw the arrival of new blood into the Department. Along with Dr Bryan Cameron, a specialist in modern Spanish studies, we welcomed Felipe Schuery, Dr Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Dr Víctor Acedo Matellán, a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens College. Imogen Choi also stepped up from her role as a doctoral student to stand in for Rodrigo Cacho during his British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Conference activity was, as ever, dynamic. Brad Epps orchestrated the Norman MacColl symposium which was devoted to Roman Gubern, one of the most distinguished scholars of Film Studies in Spain, counting on the participation of numerous critics of international repute. Ioanna Sitaridou organised the Ibero-Romance Linguistics Fest, dedicated in part to her predecessor Professor Chris Pountain. Graduate students refused to be left out as Dunja Fehimovic and Rebecca Ogden pitched in with their successful conference ‘Branding Latin America.’ And the American theme was further emphasised by Erica Segre’s interdisciplinary forum, ‘Mexico Noir: Rethinking the Dark in Contemporary Narrative and Photography.’
The Centre for Latin American Studies and the Department once again joined forces with the international symposium, ‘Adaptaciones del cuerpo’, with inaugural and closing lectures by Diamela Eltit Simón Bolívar Visiting Professor - and Brad Epps respectively. In the Easter term the Department welcomed the XVI Congreso Internacional CILEC: la diversidad en la literatura, el periodismo y el cine held at Emmanuel College and rounded off the session with the Norman MacColl lecture delivered by Professor Eukene Lacarra Lanz of the Universidad del País Vasco. Last but by no means least was the contribution of colleagues on the language side. In conjunction with the MML Graduate Office Àngeles Carreres and María Noriega were responsible for the I Cambridge Translation Day for Graduates. Our Language Teaching Officers also became review editors of the Journal of Spanish Language Learning, a new journal that provides an international forum on the teaching and learning of Spanish. In addition, next session they will organise a series of panel discussions and workshops on translation across disciplines under the auspices of CRASSH.
The Department celebrated twenty years of exemplary service given by Senior Secretary Coral Neale whose warm and friendly efficiency has endeared her to generations of Cambridge Hispanists. Retiring but in no Rosemary Clark way shy: Rosemary also announced Clark her well-earned retirement. Students of contemporary Spain will have appreciated Rosemary’s energy, intelligence and dedication over the last two decades in all forms of teaching. She will be sorely missed. The same can be said about the departure of another stalwart, Andreea Weisl-Shaw. We wish both former colleagues well for the future. On a brighter note, a College Associate Lectureship in Spanish has been recently created at St John’s (and our thanks go to Johnian fellow and Professor of Portuguese, Manucha Lisboa.) We hope to report in more detail on that appointment in due course.
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The Department was represented at a number of academic events worldwide. Graduates performed at conferences from Ireland to Bolivia and from Cambridge to Valladolid. And the staff were no less extravagant in their travels. Joanna Page’s research network held symposia in Oxford, Puerto Rico and Buenos Aires; and Elizabeth Drayson presented papers in Exeter, Berlin and Michigan. Maite Conde and Bryan Cameron also performed at conferences both at home and in the Americas. And in similar globetrotting vein Brad Epps, having already lectured at three universities in the UK, also accepted invitations from Poland, Czech Republic, Valencia, Santiago de Compostela, Rome and Harvard. Outreach also figured prominently on the Departmental list of priorities. Our Language Teaching Officers featured in a series of initiatives: WhyNotLang@Cam, the Hereford Languages Day for Year 12 students and an MML residential school at Sidney Sussex. In addition, Bryan Cameron gave a Masterclass as part of the University's HE+ scheme at Greenhead Sixth Form College, Huddersfield. Rory O’Bryen entertained the Oliver Prior Society with a talk on Columbian poet Candelario Obeso. And Dominic Keown
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lectured on Catalan culture to sixth formers at the Institut Lluis Vives in Valencia. In terms of awards and distinctions Brad Epps, appointed to the Jury of the Premio José Donoso in Chile, was also named associate editor of Quaderni Ibero Americani, introducing Bernardo Atxaga at the annual literary prize of the publication. Congratulations also to Gillian Harris (Murray Edwards, 2010) who had her English version of a poem by Argentinian Susana Thénon commended by judges at the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is keen to catch up with former students. Let us know your memories of Hispanic Studies at Cambridge and what you’re doing now. Email us at: spanport@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
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:
01223 335000
Fax: 01223 335062 Email: alumni@mml.cam.ac.uk Post: Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA
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