News archive - Winter 2010

France Honours a Verray Parfit Gentil Knyght

Members of the French Department represented the University at a glittering reception in the Residence of the French Ambassador in London on 18 January, when Dr David Gascoigne became a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight of the Order of Academic Excellence). The award was conferred in recognition of Dr Gascoigne's outstanding contribution to French Studies and to the dissemination and understanding of French culture. Created by Napoléon to reward excellence in services to education, it is most often awarded to a select elite of French nationals: Dr Gascoigne is the only recipient in recent years from a Scottish university.

The impressive medal and purple ribbon of the Palmes Académiques were conferred by the French Ambassador, Son Excellence M. Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, on behalf of the French Minister of Education. The Ambassador praised Dr Gascoigne's brilliant teaching, innovative courses and excellent scholarship, mentioning in particular his two most important books, Michel Tournier (Berg) and The Games of Fiction (Peter Lang). In a brief and characteristically eloquent reply, Dr Gascoigne referred to his commitment to French Studies and graciously paid tribute to his family, friends and colleagues.

David Gascoigne, now an Honorary Senior Lecturer in French, came to St Andrews in 1975 and retired as Senior Lecturer in 2007. Throughout his career, he was enthusiastically appreciated by students and colleagues alike, not only for his intellectual brilliance but also for his personal warmth, wit and collegiality. On top of his teaching and research, he was Head of French; chaired or participated in a range of School and University committees; undertook stints as acting Head of School and Director of Teaching; did much to ensure the solidity of French holdings in the Library; and acted as mentor to countless new colleagues and research students. Beyond the University, Dr Gascoigne was heavily involved in the establishment of the St Andrews - Loches alliance. Never lost for a bon mot or a bad pun, always conciliatory and constructive, a fountain of knowledge and a pillar of wisdom, David Gascoigne is surely one of the most deserving recipients of the Palmes Académiques.

Later this year, Dr Gascoigne's outstanding work and far-reaching impact in French Studies will be celebrated again, with the publication of a Festschrift, or collection of essays in his honour. The book, edited by two former students of Dr Gascoigne's, will appear with Peter Lang under the title Narratives of French Modernity: Themes, Forms and Metamorphoses. It will contain no fewer than 16 chapters contributed by colleagues from the UK and France, all of whom have benefited from Dr Gascoigne's influence.

One of the volume's co-editors, Professor Milne, said: `David Gascoigne is a man of the highest standards in all things, and is an inspiration in French Studies and beyond. He has the warmest congratulations of all his colleagues on receiving this rare award from the French Government.'

Please also see the BBC's News pages at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8518296.stm

Julia Prest's mini tour of the US

Dr Prest is going on a ten-day academic mini-tour of the US in January 2010. She will be based first in New York and then in Provo, Utah.

She has been invited to speak first at the Department of French at Columbia University in uptown Manhattan, where she will give a talk entitled 'Ballet and Bloodletting: Religious Reconciliation the Medici Way'. The next day she will make her way to downtown Manhattan where she will speak at the Maison Française under the auspices of the French Department Research Seminar of New York University. Her topic for NYU is 'Responses to the Italian Castrato in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century France'. After a day of vigorous shopping, Dr Prest will fly to Salt Lake City and then make her way to Provo, home to Brigham Young University where she will spend three days as a Visiting Professor.

Her visit has been timed to coincide with a local production of Tartuffe and her first engagement will be an evening talk on the Tartuffe controversy, open to the university as a whole. She will also participate with, among others, the director in a talk-back discussion after a performance of the play, and will feature as a guest on a radio show about the production that will be broadcast live to the whole state of Utah! Finally, Dr Prest will guest lecture for a seminar on Gender and Performance in the Comparative Literature department at BYU, before flying back to Edinburgh via New York.

Research Trip to South Africa

In January 2010 David Culpin will visit South Africa, where he will spend two weeks carrying out research at the National Library into 'French Books in the Private Libraries of Nineteenth-Century Cape Town'. This project follows on from his previous research into 'French Books in the Early Libraries of South Australia, 1848-1894', which set out to shed light on the knowledge of French literary culture and the French language in anglophone colonial community.

The first phase of the research to be carried out in South Africa will focus on private rather than public libraries, specifically the Fairbridge collection (approximately 7,000 volumes) and the Grey collection (approximately 5,000 volumes), which are now held by the National Library in Cape Town. Very little work has been done in this field in South Africa, and it is hoped that this project may open the way for further research into book history in South Africa. It will also begin to make possible a comparison between the reading habits and knowledge of French culture in two anglophone colonial contexts at a similar historical period.

A particular point of interest in this research programme derives from the fact that Sir George Grey, who collection is to be examined, was Governor of South Australia betweeen 1841 and 1845, before becoming Governor of Cape Colony from 1854 until 1861. It will therefore be interesting to examine the books themselves and attempt to establish whether any of them were collected during his time in South Australia.