Dr Claire Nichols: Ancient magnetic fields and life on Earth

The letters of Catherine the Great and the CatCor Pilot

Professor Andrew Kahn FBA is Professor and Tutorial Fellow of Russian Literature and Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall, and Professor of Russian Literature in the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Andrew’s research falls into three areas; the Russian Enlightenment in its comparative European context, the work of Alexander Pushkin and Russian poetry: the traditions.

This year saw the launch of the completed (or nearly there!) pilot of the Digital Databases of the Correspondence of Catherine the Great: https://catcor.seh.ox.ac.uk. These letters have never appeared in a single edition (and for that reason are relatively underused in scholarship); the new possibilities of the digital world promise users not only a means of bringing together texts often difficult to access, but also a whole array of means of searching and manipulating a corpus of thousands of letters.

The idea for this digital humanities resource came to me about seven years ago when I started supervising the doctoral dissertation of Kelsey Ruben-Detlev, a gifted young scholar who has now done distinguished work in eighteenth-century studies and is associate professor at the University of Southern California. ‘CatCor’ as a moniker came to me when I was wracking my brain—well not too hard!—for a catchy nickname to put in a funding application. I happened to be sitting in a café in Paris and had ordered a slice of French pound cake or Quatre Quarts and that’s all it took. Most good things begin with cake. There was then the question of dough. Funding in several phases was provided from a range of sources, all listed on CatCor, with Oxford’s John Fell Fund the largest source. The initial proof of concept was limited to 100 letters. In the last phase of the pilot, Kelsey and I managed a team of five research assistants, all of whom knew either French, Russian, or German, Catherine’s languages. Digital projects are speedy tools. The work itself is labour intensive and takes a lot of meticulous tagging and

‘Catherine the Great Selected Letters: A new translation by Andrew Kahn and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev’. A letter with signature and corrections in the hand of the Empress about a diplomatic kerfuffle concerning a Swedish defector and spy. Bodleian MS. Montagu d. 20, fol. 3. research. Facets of a letter we take for granted—salutation, closer, date and place—provide the metadata that are the basic categories for description. No inventory of Catherine’s letters—perhaps as many as 10,000—exists. Basic information of this kind needed to be checked carefully—no easy task given the state of the nineteenthcentury editions of her letters.

The eighteenth century was an age of global commercial expansion. Letter writing or epistolarity was the state of the art means of communication and became a literary art of its own as well as practical medium. To historians the ‘Republic of Letters’ is the term used to characterise the way knowledge circulated among scholars and scientists in the Enlightenment. Catherine II was one of the great letter writers of the age, notable among eighteenthcentury monarchs for her consuming interest in literature, ideas, and culture. Intellectual authority, in her view, was essential to marking the difference between the ruler as despot and ruler as enlightened monarch charged with enlightening her nation (or at least its bureaucratic and landowning classes). Her correspondence network extended from Madrid to Kazan and beyond: the visualisation tool in CatCor (or map) shows the range.

If you want to know what this amazing woman was like I’d advise reading her letters rather than going to HBO. Kelsey and I produced a sort of life and letters that was published as an Oxford Worlds Classic. Catherine was the original micromanager and had her finger in every pie. She used her extensive (and still understudied) correspondence for pragmatic policy-making purposes and in order to try out ideas. She could turn on the charm, had a sly wit, and was a shrewd survivor on the throne. Her letters to the greatest minds, including Voltaire, Diderot, the Eulers, established her own and her nation’s formidable presence in the political life of Europe and in the intellectual life of the European Enlightenment. Her use of her epistolary network is now being seen as a means for projecting and controlling her own image and celebrity. Russia’s national identity also comes to the fore in the letters, where references to the question of what Russia is as a nation accumulate. As she wrote to Voltaire on 31 March 1770, ‘In general, our nation has the most fortunate proclivities in the world: there is nothing easier than giving them a taste for what is good and reasonable. […] When this nation becomes better known in Europe, people will recover from the many errors and prejudices that they have about Russia.’ Rather bittersweet words at the moment.

A letter with signature and corrections in the hand of the Empress about a diplomatic kerfuffle concerning a Swedish defector and spy. Bodleian MS. Montagu d. 20, fol. 3.

Aularians in journalism

Two of the College’s most prominent journalists discuss how their time at Teddy Hall set them up for a career in journalism.

Samira Ahmed (1986, English) is a journalist, writer and broadcaster at the BBC.

Anna Botting (1986, Geography) is a news presenter with Sky News.

A big part of my time at Oxford was spent reporting, writing and editing magazines – my first feature for Isis was on government immigration policy and many of the NGO workers and activists I met then went on to be significant figures in the New Labour Government and running public services. I saw the long-term impact of the hard work they’d put in for so many years.

I realised that the critical thinking skills that were nurtured by my English literature tutors were a key part of my development as a journalist. Parsing Anglo Saxon with Bruce Mitchell and de-coding poetry with Lucy Newlyn taught me to learn to trust my instincts in assessing evidence. And I received brilliant encouragement from Reggie Alton—who taught me Shakespeare with such freshness and combined his academic career with authenticating news making documents, such as Kurt Cobain’s suicide note.

My advice to students is, don’t ever assume you’ll be treated fairly. At Teddy Hall I felt I was given every opportunity and encouraged and expected to do my best. I naively assumed that news organisations by the 1990s would do the same. Having now successfully sued the BBC with the backing of the NUJ for sex discrimination overpay in 2019 I would tell my younger self and students today to join their union, always ask for equal pay from the start, and to share their pay information with friends and colleagues. When we are allies, regardless of sex or gender or race, we make the world fairer for us all.

In a world where 30 seconds seems a long time and every deadline is ‘yesterday’, the art of the essay crises (definitely plural in my case) is a skill set to be dreaded at the time, but much drawn upon in the future - work fast, write fluently, think clearly - with your arguments to be presented and challenged, in person, via the tutorial system.

A short-term concentrated workload, much suited to journalism.

Two other factors from SEH helped my career choice too. Firstly, the subject matter. I chose Geography. Never has it been more relevant with the climate issues the world faces (I was recently in Glasgow covering COP26), but also my finals papers—on ‘Racial Geography’ and the history of Russia to the present day, (which back then was Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, now all undone by Putin)—gave indications to my future interests and current real-world events.

Secondly, TV journalism is an outgoing, sociable business. I constantly have to chat to put guests at ease. The hours spent in the buttery, or playing a multitude of team sports at Oxford’s friendliest college can’t have hurt.

I had no idea I wanted to be a journalist until after I’d left College, who knew that struggling to write essays on time, drinking beer, while studying social unrest would take me there…

Working towards a sustainable Hall

St Edmund Hall wants to be recognised as one of the greenest and most environmentally sustainable colleges in Oxford.

Our Sustainability Sub-Committee has been working with our 900 students and staff over the past two years to greatly reduce our impact on the natural environment, manage resources that we impact in a sustainable way, and conserve and enhance biodiversity across all our sites. We outline some of the work we have undertaken to create a baseline of data against which we can now track our progress, set meaningful sustainability targets and record activities and successes that we have achieved to date.

Highlights: Current Initiatives

Low Carbon Monday From February 2022, the Hall started a ‘Low Carbon Monday’ as a new initiative to reduce our food carbon footprint. We now offer two vegetarian meals, which tend to have a lower carbon footprint, and one meat option every Monday for lunch and dinner. We are using the Our World Data website to guide which ingredients we use to ensure that we are offering low carbon meals.

EcoSync The Besse building has a new interactive heating control system in every room called EcoSync. Students and guests can scan a QR code to alter the temperature on their smart radiator valve which feeds back to the EcoSync’s cloud-based management platform.

The system is also being linked to the Hall’s accommodation booking systems which will enable the proactive ‘switching-off’ of heating to empty rooms, greatly improving the Hall’s energy efficiency.

Biodiversity Audit The Hall’s Biodiversity audit last year revealed: i) vegetation in the College grounds currently stores ~25 tonnes of carbon (which equates to around 92.4 tonnes CO2e); ii) the Queen’s Lane and Norham St Edmund sites support 58 trees (30 different species); iii) the College grounds provide habitat for 18 different species of bird, of which 15 are classified as of conservation concern; iv) over 500 insects were captured during a 3-day interval including 126 bees and insects known to be important for pollination and pest control; v) Sadly we appear to

Two St Edmund Hall Graduates taking part in the Biodiversity Audit in Trinity term 2021.

have only one earthworm in the College grounds!

In total 18 colleges took part in this biodiversity audit exercise and there are plans to repeat this on an annual basis to enable us to record trends in biodiversity, and the success of any actions that we implement to increase overall biodiversity on college sites.

Decarbonisation Plan Produced by Max Fordham and funded by the UK Government’s Salix Grant, the Hall now has a decarbonisation plan which sets out a road map for our historic estate to become as close as possible to zero net energy by 2030. A detailed study of the Hall’s buildings was carried out and a project to improve the energy effiency of the medieval buildings in the Front Quad was proposed. The plan will be used to inform future estate projects.