Welcome to the Spotlight Newsletter.
We have just completed our final ever term in the St Cross Building! From Michaelmas Term we will be moving to the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, which has just been built at the heart of the University's Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, between Woodstock Road and Walton Street. For the first time in the University's history, seven humanities faculties will be housed together with a new humanities library and state-of-the-art academic, exhibition and performance spaces, including a 500-seat concert hall.
Alongside preparing for the move, Trinity Term was busy with public lectures. Professor Ronald Hutton offered an intriguing overview of the figure of the Morrigan in Celtic mythology and our Professor of Poetry, A.E. Stallings, continued her termly lectures, this time exploring 'Repetition as a Form of Change'. Following on from his sold-out lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre in January, our News UK Visiting Professor of Creative Media, Sir Stephen Fry, returned to Oxford to lead workshops with the Poetry Society and the Oxford Writers’ House.
We were also delighted to announce the winner of the Oxford/42 New Writing Prize, a new multi-disciplinary storytelling competition organised in conjunction with the management and production company, 42. The competition proved extremely popular, attracting more than 3,500 entries. Many congratulations to all six of the shortlisted authors. Steve Mellen won the prize for his novel Ask the Ghosts and Keelan Gallagher’s film script Billy Balaclava was runner-up.
Researchers in English have recently been in the news for discovering a rare manuscript of a Shakespeare sonnet and revealing never before seen Tennyson text using multispectral imaging to remove crossings out, marks and ink blots from manuscripts.
Our Shakespeare webinar series with Professor Emma Smith continues on the first Monday of each month (with a break over the summer). Our next webinar will explore The Comedy of Errors with Dr Ian Burrows (University of Cambridge). You can sign up for upcoming webinars and see recordings of previous events on the English Faculty website.
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