News archive - Autumn 2009

20 Years after the Fall of the Wall

On 30 November the German Department of the University of St Andrews held an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Consul General, Mr. Mössinger, opened an exhibition in the Gateway Galleries which included a wide range of memorabilia taken from daily life in the GDR. Discussions with experts and contemporary witnesses, and a reading performance from students of the universities of St Andrews, Bath and Kent, formed a varied programme, giving an insight into the reality of the divided Germany and the situation of citizens in the former GDR.

The Burn Conference: French Studies in Scotland

The School of Modern Languages hosted the French Studies in Scotland Conference, The Burn, Edzell, 20-22 November 2009. It was organised by Dr David Evans and Dr Elise Hugueny-Leger. There were 20 speakers from France, UK, Canada, USA, Croatia, on the theme of 'instruments', encompassing musical instruments, photography, etc, and featuring at its centrepiece a live performance of two rare Debussy songs by musicians plucked from St Andrews' talented student body. This successful event was enjoyed by all who attended.

Bergamo in November

Barbara Fleming was delighted to be able to visit her Erasmus Mundus administrative counterpart in the University of Bergamo during Reading Week. Plans to visit this beautiful city began during the recent AGM for the Mundus Crossways programme when Giovanna Della Cioppa generously offered to host her stay.

Barbara enjoyed sightseeing in the historic Cittá Alta with essential stops for cappuccino, as well as meeting Giovanna's colleagues in the International Office of the university. Giovanna's 5 year old daughter attends nursery school and her songs ensured Barbara learned the days of the week, months of the year and can count to twenty in Italian.

Dr Bettina Bildhauer's award

Dr Bettina Bildhauer has won a Philip Leverhulme Prize.  These prizes, with a value of £70,000 each, are awarded to outstanding young scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, are recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise.

Dr Bildhauer's first book, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006) goes beyond literature to draw on evidence from medieval medical, legal, and religious writing in order to explore the assumptions with which medieval people thought about the body in general and blood in particular. The main, but not the sole focus, is medieval Germany.  She has also co-edited a book of essays, The Monstrous Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press and Toronto University Press, 2003), on how medieval people perceived and imagined monsters, ie beings that seem too misshapen and abnormal to count as human (including Jews within medieval anti-Semitism). She also teaches film studies and is now combining this with her medievalism by inquiring into how early film theorists looked back to medieval visual culture as a model for the modern cinema. She is an outstandingly dynamic and original young academic who has challenged the conceptual divide between the medieval and the modern.

Dr Gavin Bowd round the world

In August, Iggy Pop's use on his new album of Dr Gavin Bowd's translation of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island received coverage on GMTV and in Scotland on Sunday, THES, Daily Record, Sunday Mail, The Courier, and California Chronicle (without forgetting the Border Telegraph!).

In October, Dr Bowd presented a paper co-written with his colleague in Geography, Dan Clayton, at the annual meeting of the Institute of Australian Geographers, at James Cook Univerity, Cairns, Queensland. On 21 October, Dr Bowd is invited to give an  expanded version of this paper at the University of Liverpool.

On 26 November, Dr Bowd will give a talk to the Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University, entitled 'Lettrism, Situationism and other Spectacular Deviations'. Also that month, he will be interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary on the Franco-Breton poet Guillevic, who was the subject of Dr Bowd's PhD (1991).

Crossways Meeting in Lisbon

The 2nd Crossways General Meeting, following the tradition started by Roberta Gregoli in 2008, will take place in November, in Lisbon from 3-15 November. The GM allows students from all the 7 universities of the consortium to meet and discuss the positive and the negative aspects of the program Crossways in European Humanities. In addition, it is a great opportunity to visit another university, another city, and meet other students from the same program. This year, the meeting will also count with the participation of the coordinators from the different universities of the consortium. The meeting will be presided by Ana Sofia Guerreiro (student representative) and Alessandra Gallerano (alumni representative).

Running parallel to the student's meeting will be the launch of the Alumni Association, which will focus on the development and promotion of Crossways as an excellence program. This will allow for joint activities and discussions regarding the past, present and future of Crossways, with the participation of a special guest: Chunyu Liang, president of the Erasmus Mundus Student and Alumni Organization (EMA). In this setting, students will also have the opportunity to explore Lisbon and its wonders.

Poetry Forum

The Poetry Forum hosted a reading by poets Alan Jamieson and Eddie Gibbons on the new theme of 'Poetry and Myth' on 22 October 2009. Jamieson's and Gibson's readings added respectively a Shetlandic and a Liverpool element of 'myth' based on personal and collective memory experiences to the explorations of the Poetry Forum's new theme, whose long term aim is that of mapping a European terrain on mythology in its various occurrences, forms and transformations. Robert Alan Jamieson had already published two novels and a collection of poetry in Shetlandic Scots by the time he enrolled as a mature student in Edinburgh University¿s English Literature department. His work subtly and genially engages boundaries and received wisdom. 'Shoormal' (Polygon, 1986)', his first poetry collection, pointedly includes a glossary of words and spellings `outwith the Concise Scots Dictionary¿; his third novel, 'A Day at the Office'(Polygon, 1991), incorporates a whole narrative strand voiced in poetry; his most recent collection, 'Nort Atlantik Drift' (Luath, 2007) blends Shetlandic poetry and photography with English translation and commentary. Robert Alan Jamieson is originally from Shetland and currently works at the University of Edinburgh as Senior Lecturer and Convenes the MLitt programme of Creative Writing in the same University. Eddie Gibbons was born in Liverpool. He has lived and worked in Aberdeen for the past 30 years. He has published three collections of poetry - all with Thirsty Books, Edinburgh: 'Game on', 'The Republic of Ted', Stations of the Heart'. His fourth collection, 'What They Say About You' is due to be published by Leamington Books, Edinburgh, early next year. He was a prizewinner in the Inaugural Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition in 2008. He will be appearing at StAnza 2010, giving a Poetry Cabaret.

Prest into Service

Dr Julia Prest published an etat present article on Thomas Corneille in the July 2009 edition of the leading UK journal French Studies.
She spoke on French responses to the castrato lover at the annual conference for the Society for Seventeenth-Century French Studies held at the Women's Club in Mayfair, London in September 2009.

Visiting Scholar in Berlin

Dr Bettina Bildhauer is currently a guest scholar at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a year-long stay fully funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, writing up her monograph A Medieval History of Film. Her collection Medieval Film, co-edited with Anke Bernau, came out with University of Manchester Press in July 2009.

Dr Moore in America

In January Greg Moore's translation of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation was published by Cambridge University Press. In March he was an invited speaker at the conference 'Übersetzen bei Johann Gottfried Herder: Theorie und Praxis' at the Université de Picardie, Amiens, and from August 2009 to January 2010 he will be the Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University.

He has just signed a contract with Princeton University Press for the second volume of his trilogy of Herder translations (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, to be published in 2013). A proposal for his next monograph, Herder and Philosophy, is currently under review with the same press.

Don't leave me this way

Lynne Dalrymple will begin a period of secondment with the Dept of Social Anthropology from Monday 26 October.  Stunned colleagues are relieved that she will return to the fold in July 2010. Laura Pels Ferra will be acting up in this post.  Congratulations to both.

Aimee Linekar wins Undergraduate Research Internship Programme Runner-up Prize.

Twenty undergraduates from across the university were selected to participate in The Undergraduate Research Internship Programme. Aimee Linekar, a final year student in the Russian Department, worked with Dr Claire Whitehead on her project 'More Than Meets the Ear: the Transgenerational Poetry of Contemporary Russian Rock.' Aimee was selected as one of three prize-winners among the participants for a poster presentation on her research.

Aimee describes her project:
'The project was a lateral exploration of the classic poet Alexander Pushkin through the compositions of one of Russia's most significant contemporary rock musicians, Yuri Shevchuk of the band DDT. The aim was to examine why and how references to Pushkin and his work took centre-stage in several works by the modern-day songwriter, and to consider what this case study revealed about the motivations behind intertextual practice as a whole.'

For information on how to apply to this year's programme:
Internships

A Reading by Poet Larissa Miller Organised in Collaboration with the Creative Writing Programme in the School of English

Larissa Miller, a major Russian lyrical poet, gave a reading of her poetry and answered questions from an audience which included undergraduate and post-graduate students in the Department of Russian and the Creative Writing Programme in the School of English. Larissa kindly donated three of her books to St Andrews Library, and an English translation of her memoir, Dim and Distant Days.

For more information on Larissa Miller and her poetry: http://www.arcpublications.co.uk/biography.htm?writer_id=331