newsletter

SUMMER 2013

MML, Education and Evaluation 1

A New Serena Professor of Italian 3

The First German National Chronicle 4

Sixty-five Years of Dutch at Cambridge 5

Domestic Devotions in Renaissance Households 6

Searching for the Holy Grail of Modern Linguistics 7

Polish Studies at Cambridge 8

Russian Information Technologies 10

Spotlight on the Departments 11

French News 11

German and Dutch News 12

Modern Greek News 13

Italian News 14

Linguistics News 15

Slavonic Studies News 17

Spanish and Portuguese News 18

And Finally 19

INSIDE:

This is the seventh edition of our annual Newsletter featuring information about our activities over the last year and new initiatives in MML.

GREETINGS FROM MML IN CAMBRIDGE!

mml.cam.ac.uk

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MML, Education and Evaluation

I n June 2013 the popular Guardian University Guide 2014 placed Cambridge top for modern languages and linguistics for the third year

running. The quality of education in MML should come as no surprise to you, our former students and peers! We hope that the articles about our teaching and research in this Newsletter will bear that out. Yet for those of us at the academic chalk-face, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was a year of Evaluation, Evaluation, Evaluation, and of working to resist the effects of the national decline in taking up languages at schools that is a source of deep concern to all of us who care passionately about language-learning.

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Once every five years, the Government requires UK universities to undertake a massive research assessment exercise. This has a major bearing on our funding. Now known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the assessment requires each member of the Faculty to submit four publications. This time, we also have to submit voluminous evidence of the ‘impact’ of our research on the economy, society, public policy, culture and the quality of life, and to document the quality of our research environment in supporting a flow of excellent research and its effective dissemination and application. The corridors of the Faculty are even quieter than usual this summer as colleagues work hard to meet the 31 December census deadline for their publications.

Meanwhile, teaching and research continue to flourish, despite the pressures on universities in general, and on languages in particular. We are delighted to be introducing Brazilian Studies within the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and are planning to expand provision in Polish and Ukrainian studies.

One of the most positive of our growing number of initiatives to tackle the

serious decline in language-learning in schools was one carried out by a group of Faculty students who, each year, go out into regional schools via a ‘Routes into Languages’ initiative. The idea is to motivate pupils to continue studying languages. A new project this year took this further: ‘Adopt-a-class’, piloted in East Anglia, enabled language students on their Year Abroad to communicate with modern language classes in schools, helping to make the language come alive. Fifteen of our current Year Abroad students responded to our call for participants and have made a real impression, passing on their passion for languages to local Year 9 students.

In addition, our schools liaison team organises a series of events for school students and teachers in Cambridge, while travelling to such events, both regional and national, held elsewhere. Members of the Faculty are actively involved in the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) and other bodies.

These are modest beginnings, perhaps, but Cambridge MML is striving to address the decline in take-up of languages in UK schools. We are, moreover, hoping to set

up new, concerted activities to raise public awareness of the importance of learning languages, not only in terms of outreach to schools but in terms of stimulating public debate.

Your thoughts on how we might influence policy-makers and opinion-formers on the need to teach languages in schools as a core aspect of the curriculum, with commitment, imagination and engagement with the world around us, would be genuinely welcomed. You are, after all, our most important ambassadors, advocates and friends.

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A New Serena Professor of Italian

Robert S.C. Gordon was

elected to the Serena Chair of Italian in October 2012. He is the eighth person to hold the Chair, which was established

in 1919 thanks to an endowment by the British-Italian shipbroker Arthur Serena. Serena was the son of the Venetian patriot and exile, Leone Serena, who had served alongside Daniele Manin in defence of the Venetian Republic of 1848-49. Arthur Serena endowed Chairs of Italian at Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and Birmingham.

Robert Gordon is the first holder of the Chair whose research and writing has focussed primarily on the modern period, itself indicative of the marked growth in this area over the last fifty years. He studied for his first degree in Modern Languages at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the 1980s. He moved to St John’s College, Cambridge, as a Benefactors’ Student for his PhD, working with Anne Caesar. His topic was the highly

controversial poet, intellectual and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Researching in Cambridge and at the Collegio Ghislieri at Pavia University, he concentrated especially on the striking ways in which Pasolini worked to shape his public image, and the complex sense of selfhood and subjectivity that dominated his work. The PhD was completed in 1993, winning the international Pasolini Prize of that year, and became Gordon’s first book in 1996, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (OUP).

In 1990, Gordon was appointed to his first lectureship, at Oxford, where he taught for seven years. Among other activities, he was part of a group responsible for introducing the first film course to be officially recognised as part of an Oxford degree. In 1998, he returned to Cambridge to become Lecturer in Italian and a Fellow of Caius. For a number of years, his main area of research was the work of the remarkable Holocaust survivor and writer, Primo Levi. In 2001, he published Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues (OUP), a study of Levi’s acute enquiry into the problems of ethics seen in the light of the horrors of the Nazi genocide.

Building on a decade of work on Levi,

Gordon spent a year at the National Humanities Center in America developing a major new study of Italy’s complex and contradictory responses to the Holocaust, published in 2012 as The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944-2010 (Stanford University Press) and as Scolpitelo nei cuori:L’olocausto nella cultura italiana (Bollati Boringhieri) in Italy, where the work generated lively public debate in spring 2013. In this and other work, Gordon touches on literature and cinema as well as on cultural history, and he has continued to teach and research in all these areas, writing an Introduction to 20th-Century Italian Literature (Duckworth) and a BFI Film Classics volume on Bicycle Thieves. He is very much looking forward to helping maintain and develop the vibrancy of Italian at Cambridge as it nears its centenary year.

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Mark Chinca and Christopher Young have been awarded funding of circa

£950,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to produce, with Jürgen Wolf (Marburg), the first ever full edition of the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik over the next five years.

The Kaiserchronik (Chronicle of Emperors) is one of the great monuments of medieval literature. Chronicling the reigns of Roman and German kings and emperors, from the earliest times to the twelfth century, it projects a magnificent historical sweep in which the German-speaking peoples and their rulers feature as actors on the stage of ancient history and heirs to the legacy of

Rome as capital of the Christian West.

Although much of this history consists of myths and legends, for researchers it offers an insight into how the German-speaking peoples of the twelfth century saw themselves, their ideas about ethnicity and religion, their cultural identity, their notions of the past, the relationship between Church and Empire, and more.

Completed around 1150 in Germany, the Kaiserchronik was written at the same time as two works of dynastically inspired history from Britain and the Anglo-Norman world: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which inspired the medieval fascination with the figure of King Arthur, and the Roman de Brut, an adaptation of Geoffrey’s history by the Jersey-born poet Wace.

Like the Kaiserchronik, these histories recount the exploits of kings and rulers in chronological order, and use the past to justify contemporary political arrangements and foster a sense of cultural identity. Previous scholars have seen the Kaiserchronik only as a feature of German history and literary tradition. For the first time, Chinca and Young aim to show

that it is a fundamental part of European cultural history as a whole.

In addition to the editorial work, the project team will research the literary and historical background to the chronicle: its twelfth-century context, and the reasons for its enduring appeal over the following four and a half centuries (the last known manuscript dates from 1594). The results will flow into the introduction and commentary of the edition, and will also be presented at international conferences and in special issues of academic journals. The project aims to provide a complete understanding of the extraordinary cultural resonance of the Kaiserchronik over such a long period of time, and to offer a transformative reassessment of the place of history-writing in the development of German literature in the Middle Ages.

German medievalists have greeted the project as ‘sensational news for the subject area in general’, while historians working on the project’s advisory board have described the initiative as a ‘godsend’ that promises to ‘transform the teaching of medieval Germany’.

The First German National Chronicle

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Sixty-five Years of Dutch at Cambridge

It is pleasing to be able to report that, despite the withdrawal of Dutch as a

full Tripos language in the Faculty from October 2014, the subject is still going strong. The paper, ‘Introduction to the Language and Literature of the Low Countries’, offers the opportunity to MML students to add Dutch as another language and literature area to their portfolio, and it continues to attract excellent students. In the last few years this has meant that we have not only had students studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also attracted students interested in the Medieval and Golden Age papers. We are delighted that Erna Eager will continue to teach this paper beyond October 2014.

In September 2012 there was a most successful reunion of students of Dutch. A group of alumni of very varying ages came together in Murray Edwards College for a celebratory gathering. Professor Emeritus Peter King, who was the Lecturer in Dutch at Cambridge from 1947 until 1977, was the focus of affectionate and hilarious speeches which emphasised the intellectual and personal impact he had on the lives and careers of many of his students.

Held as part of the Alumni Festival, the

reunion included events such as a visit to the Map Room in the University Library, where staff welcomed the visitors with their customary enthusiasm and with a stunning display of their cartographical treasures: maps of the Low Countries, ancient and modern, including many showing former colonial areas, particularly the Indonesian archipelago.

A translation workshop led by Tony Parr (Christ’s 1974), aimed in part at aspiring translators, was a great success, particularly as we had in our midst some professional translators. The event showed that for many alumni, whether they had continued to use their Dutch expertise professionally or not, their contact with the language, literature and the culture of the Low Countries has had a lasting and pleasing impact.

Research in Dutch also continues to flourish. Elsa Strietman (pictured) currently participates in an international AHRC project, Transcultural Critical Editing: Valois/Habsburg Burgundy, 1460-1530, which focuses on poetry and verse drama that engages with current affairs in the period. It builds on recent research which has signalled the importance of the

interplay between Dutch- and French-language authors and milieux, and which addresses the linguistic, literary and cultural impact of each community

on the other. Editors of Burgundian literature are thus able to take account of this interplay, addressing its linguistic, literary and cultural impact on the texts that they edit. A colloquium presenting the initial findings of the researchers will be held in September 2013 in Murray Edwards College, and a number of editions, articles and exhibitions are planned as well.

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Domestic Devotions in Renaissance households

A trio of Renaissance

scholars from Cambridge, including Abigail Brundin (pictured) of the Department of Italian, has been awarded a European

Research Council Synergy (ERC) grant of over €2.3 million to launch a ground-breaking interdisciplinary project on ‘Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home’.

‘Domestic Devotions’ brings together the study of books, buildings, objects, spaces, images and archives in order to understand how religion functioned in the Renaissance household. In opposition to the enduring stereotype of the Renaissance as a ‘secular age’, the project starts from the insight that religion played a key role in attending to the needs of the laity, and it presents the period 1400-1600 as a period of spiritual revitalization.

Devotions, from routine prayers to extraordinary religious experiences such as miracles or exorcisms, frequently took place within the home; they were also

specifically shaped to meet the demands of domestic life – childbirth, marriage, infertility, sickness, accidents, famine and death. This tight nexus between the domestic and the devotional was neither institutionally nor legally defined. It cannot be adequately traced in any one type of source nor by means of a single approach. For this reason, a rare combination of expertise and experience across several disciplines is required in order to illuminate the pivotal place of piety in the Renaissance home.

The project moves beyond traditional research on the Renaissance in two further ways. Firstly, it breaks free from the golden triangle of Venice, Florence and Rome in order to investigate practices of piety elsewhere: in Naples (then the largest city in the whole of western Europe); the Marche (a central region dense with smaller urban settlements and with vibrant traditions of local devotion); and the Venetian republic (that stretched across northern Italy).

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Anyone who has studied another language knows that grammars can

vary: learning where to put the verb in German, how to master the unstressed pronouns in French, the tenses and aspects of Russian, and how to parse Latin or Greek can be among the bigger challenges facing the aspiring linguist. Studying the histories and the varieties of languages reveals more intriguing puzzles and clues: it isn’t difficult to see a ‘family resemblance’ among the Romance languages, but French seems rather different to its closest relatives, and of course English is very much the black sheep of the Germanic family.

The systematic study of the grammatical similarities and differences among

languages, known as language typology, began in the 1960s and is now a central part of Linguistics. Within MML, Ian Roberts is currently leading a research group which is investigating the ways in which the syntax of the world’s languages can vary. The project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, consists of a team of three post-doctoral fellows and five PhD Students, as well as a consulting Visiting Professor from Newcastle University.

Over five years the project group (see mml.cam.ac.uk/dtal/research/recos) will attempt to find systematic patterns of grammatical variation among the world’s languages. The group’s collective language expertise is impressive: in addition to the ‘usual’ Germanic and Romance languages it features Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian, Basque, Afrikaans, Mandarin, Welsh, Swahili, Japanese, Modern Greek, Russian, and British Sign Language. Moreover, the expertise extends to lesser-known languages such as Makhuwa (a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique), Khanty and Mansi (Ugric languages related to Hungarian, spoken on the lower Volga) and Xhosa (perhaps best known for being Nelson Mandela’s native language). Members of the group are also working

Searching for the Holy Grail of Modern Linguistics

Secondly, the project also rejects the standard focus on Renaissance elites in order to develop our understanding of the artisan household. Inspired in part by the rich historiography on the role of the family in Protestant society, Domestic Devotions will shed new light on the roles of women and children in the Italian Renaissance home, and will be attentive to gender and age as factors that conditioned religious experience. The multidisciplinary approach of the researchers involved with the project will enable unprecedented glimpses into the private lives of Renaissance Italians.

The ERC Synergy competition attracted over 700 applications. Only 1.5% of them were successful. Domestic Devotions is one of only two projects from the Humanities and Social Sciences to be funded, and the only one to be led by an exclusively female team.

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Over the last twenty five years, Poland, once at the heart of the Eastern Bloc,

has become one of the most dynamic and influential states in the European Union. This fascinating and strategically important part of Europe demands to be studied in greater depth than is currently the case in the UK.

To address this need, the Department of Slavonic Studies has set itself the goal of restoring Polish Studies in Cambridge. We have initiated a series of high-profile events, signalling our commitment to Polish studies.

We have had public lectures by renowned figures including Polish dissident and journalist Adam Michnik (pictured overleaf), and historians Norman Davies and Anne Applebaum, and have hosted Polish film-makers and writers.

Polish Studies at Cambridge

with native-speaker consultants of Kurmanji (a Kurdish dialect of South-Eastern Turkey), Vlah (a Romance language spoken in Greece) and Matengo (a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania).

The group’s starting hypothesis is that there may be just five basic ‘building blocks’ of grammar: the order of the words in a sentence, the ability to ‘omit’ certain key words (especially pronouns), the complexity of words themselves, the flexibility of sentences in expressing questions, emphasising and de-emphasising content, etc., and (lots of Linguistics Tripos students don’t know what these are!!) the nature of case and concord relations. It is well known that these grammatical features vary quite significantly across languages, although it seems that in each case the variation is not completely arbitrary, but rather structured to a fairly limited repertoire. Combining and recombining a somewhat limited set of options across each of these five domains seems to give a picture of each language’s ‘fingerprint’. Once that is established, we can compare languages systematically and try to give a clearer, possibly even quantifiable, picture of the nature of the family resemblances we observe so

readily. This in turn may shed light on how grammars change over time.

The really key question, the Holy Grail of modern linguistics, is to understand how small children can learn such complexity. Children seem to be quite indifferent to the intricacies of Mandarin, Xhosa, Khanty or Welsh; they simply absorb these massively complex systems quite literally at their mothers’ knees. It may be that breaking grammars down into their basic building blocks will give us the answer to the age-old question of the how much of grammar is due to nature and how much to nurture.

Rethinking Comparative Syntax (ReCoS) Project team

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Indeed, although Polish is not currently part of our Tripos provision, the study of Polish and Poland is already being energetically pursued at Cambridge. We offer popular weekly language classes in Polish at all levels, which are open to all members of the University.

In 2010, the Department received a major grant from Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) for the ‘Memory at War’ project, which focuses on cultural memory in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. This project, led by Professor Alexander Etkind, seeks to understand how the memory of the traumatic events of the twentieth century is played out across these three countries today in culture, society and politics.

One of the project’s major publications was Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012), collectively authored by the Cambridge team of Rory Finnin, Alexander Etkind, Julie Fedor and Uilleam Blacker. This landmark book examines how the massacre of almost 22,000 Polish service personnel by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 is remembered across Eastern Europe today, highlighting how this event has come to be seen as one of the most horrific and significant of the history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.

In 2010, the tragic death of the Polish president in a plane crash as he travelled to Katyn to commemorate the massacres sparked an outpouring of emotion in Russia and Poland. Remembering Katyn reveals the complex memories and narratives of Katyn that underlay that outpouring. The book traces the memory of Katyn in cultural texts, media and political discourse, with a particular focus on political relations between Poland and Russia. Jay Winter of Yale described the book as ‘more than path-breaking’, and ‘essential reading for all students in the social sciences and humanities’. It has been warmly received in Poland, and it was recently the subject of an edition of the hugely popular ‘Klub Trójki’ programme on Polish Radio 3.

Poland, and Polish, are already at the heart of our activities. We hope, over the next few years, to give them a permanent place there. For further information about our Polish projects, see: mml.cam.ac.uk/slavonic/Polish.html

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Russian Information Technologies

A research project on

‘Information Technologies in Russia, 1450-1850’ sounds anomalous. If one wanted to study how culture responds

to changes in information technologies, would one really start in 1450 and look at Russia? But this is precisely the task set by a team of researchers led by Simon Franklin (pictured), and including Katherine Bowers in Cambridge, and scholars at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ St Petersburg Institute of History, and the Russian State University of the Humanities (Moscow).

Information technology did not begin with computers, or even with telegraph and telephone. Writing, too, is an information technology. Through making words visible, through turning them into portable objects, through separating the message from the messenger, the thought from the thinker, writing has been linked with similarly fundamental transformations. And then there was printing, the technology of mass replication. The phrase ‘the print revolution’

has become a historiographical cliché, and the technological sequence from the written through the printed to the digital is familiar enough: an inevitable progression, generally equated with progress.

Truisms are as red rags to academic bulls. Look more closely at the cliché, and the truism is not as straightforwardly true as it appears. ‘Progress’ turns out to be nuanced, contradictory, and far from inevitable. The new does not simply replace the old, but both adapt to each other in a shifting ecology of technologies.

Nor do all places fit a single, general pattern. There are anomalies, places where the ‘technology-driven’ paradigm seems not to operate; places which possessed, or had access to, the technologies yet did not follow the implied ‘logic’; places such as Russia.

Studying the history of such processes in Russia challenges the stereotype. Before one even begins to analyse and interpret, much remains to be discovered and charted. The first task has been to map what the team call the ‘graphosphere’: the totality of visible products of the various information technologies, at whatever level, and in whatever spaces.

This has required original investigation in Russian archives. No such comprehensive survey has been attempted. Russian scholarship has tended to focus on ‘high-status’ products, such as books and engravings, while ignoring the ‘low-status’ ephemera which are equally significant in a holistic study of the technologies. Thus the spin-offs from the project range, for example, from the first chronology and taxonomy of early printed blank forms in the eighteenth century, to a survey of the significance of handwritten copies of poems in the early nineteenth century.

Taking a fresh look at the past will shed light on our own situation. Defining, testing and predicting the social, economic, cultural and political dynamics of unprecedentedly rapid changes in information technologies is an experiment played out all around us, an experiment in which we are not only observers but participants.

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Spotlight on the DepartmentsFrench News

This year Michael Moriarty succeeded Bill Burgwinkle (promoted to a well-deserved Professorship of Medieval French and Occitan Literature, and

pictured here) as Head of Department. Peter Bayley, Drapers Professor of French from 1985 to 2010, and Head of Department from 1983 to 1996, retired at the end of September 2011. His retirement was marked by the presentation of a Festschrift edited by Nicholas Hammond and Michael Moriarty, Evocations of Eloquence: Rhetoric, Literature and Religion in Early Modern France: Essays in Honour of Peter Bayley (Peter Lang, 2012). Many Cambridge colleagues contributed chapters to this volume, as did a number of distinguished international scholars, and it is a powerful sign of the esteem and affection in which Peter is held.

We also said goodbye also to Neil Kenny, who became a Senior Research Fellow

at All Souls College, Oxford. Dr Tim Chesters, of Royal Holloway, University of London, was appointed to a Lectureship in sixteenth-century French to succeed him. We wish Neil well, and warmly welcome Tim.

In October 2012, the French Ambassador, H. E. Bernard Émié, paid an official visit to Cambridge. He made a point of visiting the Department, and met a number of colleagues for an illuminating discussion of the state of French studies in Britain. We continue to work together with the Embassy, which has been a generous source of support.

During his Headship, Bill Burgwinkle was very active in developing excellent links with Transitions (mouvement-transitions.fr), a group of academics and doctoral researchers headed by Professor Hélène Merlin-Kajman of the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), and devoted to rethinking the place of literature in education and culture. Several members of the Department took part in the Transitions conference (‘“Littérature”: où allons-nous?’) in Paris in early October 2012, and Professor Merlin-Kajman and a group of her collaborators returned the

compliment by visiting us and presenting two seminars on 19 and 20 November.

A final-year undergraduate, Matthew Phillips (Peterhouse), was joint runner-up in the competition for the R. H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize organized by the Society for French Studies. Michael Moriarty was awarded the R. H. Gapper Book Prize for Disguised Vices (OUP, 2011).

Amid all these encouraging developments, we also suffered one great misfortune: the death, at the age of 64, of Professor Philip Ford (pictured). He was one of the pillars of our

Department: an outstanding researcher on sixteenth-century literature in both French and Neo-Latin; an inspiring teacher and postgraduate supervisor; a selfless and effective contributor to the activities of the Department, the Faculty, and the University; the lead organizer of the important conference series, Cambridge

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French Colloquia. Unfailingly kind, generous and energetic, he will be very much missed, both on a professional and personal level.

German and Dutch News

The Department of German and Dutch has continued to flourish over the last year. The major projects featured in recent newsletters have been continuing

with great success. The Impact of Idealism project, led by Schröder Professor, Nicholas Boyle (pictured), culminated in a major international conference in September 2012, with speakers including the former Archbishop of Canterbury and new Master of Magdalene, Dr Rowan Williams.

The two volumes of Joachim Whaley’s history of the Holy Roman Empire have met with a welter of enthusiastic reviews in journals and newspapers, not least in Germany. And the Kaiserchronik project, led by Chris Young and Mark Chinca, is

now in full swing (see the feature on Page 4).

The last year has also seen a number of special events. Sixty-five years of the teaching of Dutch at Cambridge was celebrated in fine style (described on Page 5). Speakers who visited the Department included the Austrian Ambassador, Dr Emil Brix, who inaugurated a new series of lectures on Austrian culture. And October saw the inaugural Schröder Lecture, with Nicholas Boyle delivering a fascinating talk on ‘Goethe’s Marriages’. This annual Lecture marks the generous re-endowment of the Schröder Professorship of German by The Schroder Foundation, and – as part of the University’s Festival of Ideas – aims to encourage public interest in matters German. We were delighted that some alumni were able to attend, and hope that this will serve as a regular opportunity for us to welcome you back to Cambridge.

In light of the national decline in the study of modern languages, we are actively seeking to bolster efforts to encourage the learning of German at school level and to inspire able candidates to see the benefits of a degree in modern languages in general, and German in particular.

Examples of the kind of outreach work that we have been undertaking include our spearheading of a new initiative for online learning, HE+. This new collaborative project being piloted by Cambridge with groups of schools and colleges in several regions of the UK, will provide learning resources for school students who wish to extend their skills in preparation for degree-level study. The pilot module focuses on fairy-tales, marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of the classic collection by the Brothers Grimm. Our two Senior Language Teaching Officers, Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass (pictured) and Silke Mentchen (pictured), have also been working on the second phase of their Just-in-Time online grammar resource. Anybody who would like to put themselves through some grammatical hoops can

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do so at langcen. langcen.cam.ac.uk/jtg/jtg_ge.html. The second phase promises to be even better.

In June 2013, we hosted our second biennial Teachers’ Information Day. Like the first of these, held in June 2011, it was a great success. Around a hundred teachers from both state and independent sectors attended, offering their views on how to enhance the national picture for learning German, and responding with enthusiasm to presentations by members of the Department. Any alumni who are now teaching would be very welcome to join our e-mail list, which will act as a channel for the exchange of ideas and for publicising future events (just mail Sharon Nevill at mml-german@lists.cam.ac.uk). We will always be very pleased to hear from you.

Modern Greek News

The main feature of the Modern Greek Section’s activities this year was a series of lectures devoted to the Cretan Renaissance masterpiece Erotokritos (the nearest thing we have to an Orlando Furioso or a Don Quixote). Its author, the Veneto-Cretan Vitsentzos Kornaros, is thought to have died in 1613/14, although the first edition of his lengthy romance did not appear until

1713. At all events, an anniversary offered itself for celebration. During the Lent and Easter terms six scholars, all Cambridge PhDs, returned to their alma mater to give talks on various aspects of Erotokritos: Marina Rodosthenous (University of Nicosia), Tina Lendari (University of Athens), Tasoula Markomihelaki-Mintzas (University of Thessaloniki), Tassos Kaplanis (University of Cyprus), Natalia Deliyannaki, and Alfred Vincent (University of Sydney).

During the Easter vacation the Modern Greek Section held a one-day conference, in collaboration with the Society for Modern Greek Studies, on the subject of ‘Greece and Britain in women’s literary imagination, 1913-2013’. The keynote speaker was Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni (University of Glasgow), and other speakers included Professor Deirdre David (Temple University, Philadelphia), Thodoris Chiotis, Kelli Daskala, Rowena Fowler, Laura Vivanco, and Sofka Zinovieff. The concluding Round Table was chaired by Professor Roddy Beaton (King’s College London). The conference was master-minded by Eleni Papargyriou and our recent PhD graduate Semele Assinder.

The last intake of students for the Tripos took Part II in the Easter Term. The four candidates, plus one for the Linguistics Tripos, between them offered all four available scheduled papers in Modern Greek.

David Holton (pictured) retires at the end of the academic year after thirty-two years as Lecturer, Reader and, latterly, Professor of Modern Greek. Although there

will – at least for the time being – be no students taking the full Tripos in Modern Greek, the very successful optional paper, ‘Introduction to Modern Greek language and culture’, will continue. In 2013-14 it will be taught by Regina Karousou-Fokas and Liana Giannakopoulou.

An alumni dinner was held at Selwyn College in May 2013, with the current British Ambassador in Athens, Cambridge graduate John Kittmer, as guest of honour. If you are not on our mailing list of former students of Modern Greek, please send

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your details to us at moderngreek@mml.cam.ac.uk. Future plans include an evening of poetry and music to celebrate the great Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), to take place in November 2013.

Italian News

Following the departures of Robin Kirkpatrick and Zyg Baranski in September 2011, Gabriele Natali retired in September 2012. Gabriele has been the heart and soul

of our language teaching since the 1980s and has inspired generations of students with his flair as a teacher and remarkable linguistic acumen in both Italian and English. We will miss Gabriele enormously but will be staying in touch, working with him on our year abroad from his base in Italy. We are lucky to have an excellent successor to Gabriele in Claudia Domenici (pictured), who comes from Lucca originally, but who taught Italian for many years at the Universities of Bristol and then Bath, before joining us in Cambridge.

We continue to be very active in teaching and research, pushing ahead with both individual and collective projects in the most interesting and varied directions. The Department helped to launch a new network called CIRN, the Cambridge Italian Research Network, drawing together and sponsoring events for over 120 lecturers and researchers throughout Cambridge who have written on Italy and Italian culture.

An exhibition on the designer Bruno Munari, co-curated by Pierpaolo Antonello at the Estorick Gallery in London, ran from September to December 2012 and was widely reviewed, from The Guardian to The New York Times. This was the first

exhibition of Munari’s work in the UK and the very first exhibition outside Italy since his death in 1998.

Helena Sanson’s major project on conduct literature by and for women in Italy from 1500 to 1900 successfully attracted funding from the Newton Trust to employ a postdoctoral researcher, Francesco Lucioli, who has also been teaching for us while Helena is on leave.

Abigail Brundin’s project on Italian books in the libraries of National Trust houses led to an exhibition at Belton House, Lincolnshire, in 2013. Abi is also part of a team awarded a major ERC grant to study domestic religion in art, history and literature during the Italian Renaissance, which was featured above.

Heather Webb, jointly with our former student and new Junior Research Fellow at Trinity, George Corbett, launched a four-year programme of ‘Vertical Readings in Dante’: 36 public lectures to be given over four years by leading scholars, each one tackling three of the same numbered ‘canti’ of Dante's Commedia at once (so, Inferno 1, Purgatorio 1 and Paradiso 1 together for the first lecture, and so on). Heather has also been collaborating with

Bruno Munari Exhibition

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a project on performance and posture in medieval culture, linking up with networks set up by Robin Kirkpatrick and working with Central St Martin’s College of Art in London.

Adam Ledgeway has been spending his ongoing research leave travelling widely in Europe to give lectures and seminars, following the publication of his latest major book, From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and Change (OUP). He is also developing an exciting new research project on the Greek dialects still in use in parts of southern Italy.

All of this research work has been feeding into our teaching, keeping things interesting for both undergraduates and postgraduates: for example, October 2013 should see the launch of a new paper called ‘Text and Image’, reflecting our increasing interests in visual as well as written culture. The paper will range from medieval illuminations to Leonardo’s notebooks to films and graphic novels.

Finally, as you’ll have read on Page 13, Robert Gordon was elected to the Serena Chair of Italian in 2012 in succession to Zyg Baranski. Robert’s previous Lectureship will be filled next year,

demonstrating the University’s on-going commitment to Italian and to the study of languages in general, at a time when this cannot by any means be taken for granted.

The Italian Department is keen to catch up with former students. Let us have your memories of Italian at Cambridge and tell us what you're doing now. You can email us on italian@mml.cam.ac.uk.

Linguistics News

This was the second year of our existence as the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (DTAL), and we were delighted that Cambridge was recently rated the best place in the world to study Linguistics, coming top of the QS World University Rankings. This attests not only to the excellence of the Department, but also to the galvanising effect of a widely inter-disciplinary Strategic Research Initiative in Language Sciences.

The first group of students of the new Linguistics Tripos (introduced in 2010) graduated this year, many of them having profited from an increased choice of papers and practical classes that reflect the breadth of the new Department.

We also saw a first cohort of students go through the new research MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. A large number of our PhD students successfully finished their PhDs and found jobs as lecturers or holders of fellowships and other awards.

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Looking ahead, we managed to secure a healthy number of studentships for MPhil and PhD students for 2013-14, and also increased the potential for studentships overall by being recognised as part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Centre. Moreover, we were given two additional four-year ESRC-funded studentships for multi-disciplinary work to be co-supervised by John Williams and Matt Davis.

This year we said farewell to John Hawkins, the Director of the former Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics from 2004 until it merged into DTAL. We are looking forward to the arrival of the new Professor of English and Applied Linguistics soon.

Individual staff members attracted substantial interest from the media this year. Francis Nolan published an article in The Independent and both he and Kirsty McDougall discussed their work on forensic phonetics in Radio 4’s Frontiers series. David Willis has also been on radio and television to speak about his database of Welsh tweets which is designed to assist his research into changes in the language as it is spoken today.

Some large research projects such as Sound2Sense have finished, some are at the height of their production (for example, the Rethinking Comparative Syntax project and the Education First Research Unit studying second language learning of English and innovation in language teaching) and some new projects are in various stages of preparation or funding application.

Beginning October 2013, for example, Cambridge English Language Assessment will fund a five-year interdisciplinary project to conduct research in Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA). This project (which is currently recruiting four three-year doctoral students and two three-year postdoctoral research associates) will draw on expertise in the fields of corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, speech processing and machine learning. ALTA will be administered by the Computer Laboratory but includes principal investigators from the Department of Engineering and also Paula Buttery from DTAL (pictured top left).

The Cambridge Linguistics Forum (our weekly seminar series) saw some really interesting and eminent speakers this

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year, and some members of staff got some very prestigious awards. Kasia Jaszczolt, (pictured top right) was elected to the Academia Europaea; Wendy Bennett (pictured, bottom left) won the Prix Georges Dumézil of the Académie Française; and Ian Roberts (pictured bottom right) received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bucharest.

Finally, a team of students from the Department, led by current PhD student Jessica Brown, held a ‘markathon’ to mark entries in the 2013 UK Linguistics Olympiad. Over 6,000 secondary school students from around the UK participated in the annual competition which involves solving linguistic data problems ranging from traditional code-breaking to devising a computational system for spotting errors in translation, and our students marked their answers. Our students are thereby helping us with our outreach targets.

Slavonic Studies News

This academic year began with an outdoor film screening, on the steps of the University Library, of a Soviet silent film, with live piano accompaniment. It is testament to the sheer dedication of our

community – and to the interest of our subject matter – that when the sell-out event was rained off as it began, throngs of keen spectators made their way through Cambridge, in the downpour, to an indoor venue, where they overflowed into the aisles! This kind of energy and commitment is characteristic. In the face of a challenging situation for modern language teaching and study across the UK, we are delighted that applications for Russian remain buoyant, and that our students continue to relish its thrills and spills. The contemporary and historical contexts of Russia and Eastern Europe continue to offer compelling reasons to take up a study of Russian and/or Ukrainian here in Cambridge.

This year has seen a number of major publications by members of the Department. Chris Ward’s (pictured) Living on the Western Front: Annals and Stories, 1914-19 (Bloomsbury, 2013)

is the result of meticulous work with the archives in the Imperial War Museum.

Stitching together over a hundred extracts from primary sources, which can then in turn be read either chronologically or thematically, Chris gives a vivid sense of life on the front during the Great War – as experienced by the soldier ‘settlers’ who spent years in Belgium, Northern France and Germany. Simultaneously a history and an anthology of stories, this book tells us about landscapes, sounds, smells, food, journeys, memory and morale – and challenges popular conceptions of what history writing can or should be.

Alexander Etkind’s ‘Memory at War’ project, which we wrote about here about last year, produced two notable publications. Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012) is highlighted in the feature on Polish on Page 9. Alexander’s own book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, 2013) is another major outcome of that project which surveys the role of traumatic memory in late-Soviet and post-Soviet society.

Ambitious plans for the future include two notable new research projects. Rory Finnin has been awarded a grant for his new research into the relationship between

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nationalism and lyric poetry in Eastern Europe. Emma Widdis (pictured) is establishing an international network to explore the ‘Sensory History’ of totalitarian regimes, exploring

how political and social ‘revolutions’ were often accompanied by far-reaching ambitions which sought nothing less than to transform sensory experience itself.

We are committed to ensuring that our research is linked to, and informs, our teaching – and vice versa. Our students’ active participation in all our events, and their many and varied futures, bring considerable energy to all our work.

Finally, we were deeply saddened by the death of Diane Thompson in March 2013. Diane’s unwavering and passionate commitment to the moral purpose of great literature, and her genuine love of Russian poetry and prose, inspired several generations of students. She was a warm and committed teacher and colleague. Her loss is greatly felt in our community – and

in the wider national and international community of scholars of Russian literature.

Spanish and Portuguese News

This year saw the election of Bradley Epps to the 1933 Chair in Spanish. Brad, who took up his position in July 2013, came to Cambridge after many years spent at Harvard. His research interests extend across the Atlantic from things Latin American to Spanish Culture and Catalan Studies.

The appointment is particularly opportune as the MacColl Symposium for the academic year 2012-13, which was organised in Clare College by Alison Sinclair, was devoted to remembering the first holder of this chair, Professor J B Trend.

It is Lusophone Studies, however, that takes centre stage this year as Portuguese continues to go from strength to strength. Ana Margarida Martins, recently awarded a prestigious scholarship at the Centre Camões of King’s College, London, published her Magic Stones and Flying Snakes: Gender and the Postcolonial Exotic in the work of Paulina Chiziane and

Lídia Jorge (Peter Lang, 2012). Her co-edited volume, The Lusotropical Tempest: Postcolonial Debates in Portuguese, was published by Bristol University Press. Meanwhile, Manucha Lisboa remained prolific while Lucia Villares was actively involved in outreach initiatives in London and Cambridge.

One such event was the visit of two Brazilian authors, Tatiana Salem Levy (b. 1979) and Michel Laub (b. 1973), to celebrate the launch of Granta’s special issue dedicated to ‘The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists’. A round-table discussion, led by two fourth-year students, touched on topics such as the role of the writer in contemporary Brazil, the lack of a Brazilian readership for modern fiction, and the constant struggle against clichéd views of what it means to be Brazilian. The seminar was followed by a public reading at Waterstones, where the writers discussed the stories that they had published in Granta.

There are now over thirty students taking the Portuguese Tripos and a further forty doing at least one paper in Portuguese, Brazilian and African literature, art and culture. The University’s Language

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traditional literary criticism.’

Sadly, we lost the two lectorships in Catalan which had been funded for the last fifteen years by the Universities

of Alacant and Castelló, to whom we are immensely grateful. Happily a new lectorship in Catalan, covering all our teaching needs, is now provided by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, the Institut Ramon Llull and the Universitat Jaume I, Castelló.

Centre has also recently launched beginners’ and intermediate courses in Brazilian Portuguese. The corollary of such dynamism and demand has

been the appointment of Maite Conde (pictured) to a newly established University Lectureship in Brazilian Studies from 1 October 2013. Lusophone Studies now boasts one full-time Lecturer, one Lecturer shared with Spanish (Linguistics), one half-time post, one Santander Research Fellow and one Instituto Camoes Leitora, and one Associate Lecturer.

The Spanish section of the Department has been no less dynamic. Joanna Page returned from a period of study leave in Argentina spent researching into science fiction, and Steven Boldy gave invited lectures at the Sorbonne, UCLA and the University of Buenos Aires. Stuart Davis (pictured) published his Writing and Heritage in Contemporary Spain, which has been described as ‘a coalescence of museum studies, metacriticism and

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And Finally…We hope that you have enjoyed reading this Newsletter. You will find further information on most topics on our website (mml.cam.ac.uk).

For information on the MML student multilingual magazine Polyglossia, see srcf.ucam.org/polyglossia.

If you would like to know more about any aspect of work and life at MML, and if you would like to tell us something of what you have been doing reently, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Equally, if you are ever passing by, do call in and visit us. We’d be happy to see you.

If you want to contact us, here’s how:

Contact point: MML Faculty OfficeTelephone: 01223 335000Fax: 01223 335062Email: alumni@mml.cam.ac.ukPost: Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA

Image on back cover: Independence Day in Oaxaca, by Antonia Eklund. From the MML Photography Competition, © University of Cambridge