CONCERT ANNOUNCEMENT

Cappella Romana Brings ‘Mt Sinai’ to Oxford

after Sell-Out Concerts in Washington, DC and Los Angeles

‘robust and intriguing music’ — The Washington Post, 2 Dec 06

‘sung with such strength and commitment’ — Los Angeles Times, 12 Dec 06

This March the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford in cooperation with the Oxford’s Greek Orthodox Community of the Holy Trinity will present 'Mt Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium' a concert featuring the internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble Cappella Romana. Led by its founding Artistic Director Alexander Lingas, a Fellow of the EHRC, the six male cantors of Cappella Romana will sing virtuosic Byzantine chant from medieval manuscripts held at St Catherine’s Monastery Mt Sinai, Egypt. Previously presented to sold-out audiences at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles—which commissioned the programme for its exhibition ‘Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai—and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., this programme features selections from the Vigil for Catherine and Byzantium’s only liturgical drama: The Service of the Three Children in the Fiery Furnace

The Oxford event will take place on Thursday, 19 March 2009 at 7.30 PM in the chapel of the Queen’s College (High Street). Admission will be by programme at £10 General, £8 Concessions and £5 Students.

The full programme and other details are available here.

Alexander Lingas

(posted 11 Feb 2009)

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT

From Stasiland to Ostalgie: Remembering the GDR - 20 Years On

Two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a wide variety of interpretations and representations of the GDR (former East Germany) have emerged. Twenty years is the halfway point of the celebrated ‘forty years’ (also the title of his autobiography) that Günter de Bruyn and others claimed would be needed to come to terms with the forty years of the socialist state. It also means that a generation has come to adulthood with the GDR only as an inherited memory. This seminar series marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the GDR and is the first to explore what has become of the state that existed there for so long as history, memory and myth.

Memories of the GDR are marked by the so-called ‘memory contests’ that are such a familiar facet of the early years of the Berlin Republic as a whole. But those contests are nowhere more acute than in remembering the second dictatorship on German soil. However, rather than reflecting on the history of the GDR up to 1989, this inter-disciplinary series will examine the changing representation and remembrance of the GDR since unification from a variety of thematic perspectives.

Nine experts from UK, Germany and USA and offer their views, examining the way it has been remembered and re-imagined during the last twenty years and the traces it has left in modern German politics, philosophy, landscape, culture, literature and film. Is it a ‘footnote in world history’ (Timothy Garton Ash) or fundamental to understanding the dynamics of contemporary Europe? It is only through understanding this uniquely divided history and the ways we choose to remember it that we can understand Germany as it exists today.

The full programme can be found in our diary as well as the seminar's webpage.

Karen Leeder

(posted 6 Jan 2009)

ACADEMIC VISITOR

We are pleased to announce that the EHRC Academic Visitor for 2008-2009 is

Dr Oleg Kozerod (Kiev) 

Administrator

(posted 3 Nov 2008)

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

Planning is well under way for the National Identity in Eurasia conference, to take place at New College, Oxford, on 22-24 March 2009. The full programme can be found here.

Catriona Kelly

(posted 15 Oct 2008)

PROJECT COMPLETION

We are pleased to announce that EHRC Fellow Dr Katharine Keats-Rohan has just brought to a successful conclusion the History Faculty's

Prosopography Project (2004-7) 

The project is aimed at making materials on advanced research methods available to graduate students. Prosopography as a modern historical method has come a long way since its pioneering inception by German scholars of Roman history in the late nineteenth century. An interdisciplinary method par excellence, its unique source-critical combination of social history, sociology, anthropology, demography and onomastics, normally exploited digitally, using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques, has been adapted to all periods of history by scholars the world over. Based at is it in the meticulous collection and ordering of biographical data relating to the members of a specific study population, confusion can arise about the exact nature of prosopography and how it relates to the very different discipline of biography. Information on all this and more is now available in the project’s recently published 634-page volume, Prosopography Approaches and Applications A Handbook, edited by Dr Keats-Rohan (commercially available at: www.coelweb.co.uk). Accompanying the book is a website, which offers a range of materials, including an online tutorial in the foundations of prosopography: http://prosopography.modhist.ox.ac.uk. Dr Keats-Rohan participated in the European Science Foundation Workshop Exploring New Methods for Prosopography in the Humanities and the Social Sciences at Uppsala University, May 10-11, 2007. Papers from the meeting are available at: www.skeptron.uu.se/monicalz/esf/.

Katharine Keats-Rohan

(posted 17 Sep 2007)

OBITUARY

Professor Malcolm Bowie 

(5 May 1943 - 28 Jan 2007)

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Professor Malcolm Bowie, formerly Marshal Foch Professor of French in the University  of Oxford, and a Founding Director of the EHRC.

Giving a talk at ‘The Future of the Humanities’ conference in 2004, Malcolm said with a mischievous smile that while some people dream of holidays on paradise islands, he spent his life fantasising about interdisciplinary centres. Malcolm’s capacity for imaginative vision, his energy and optimism, and his refusal to be deterred by academic hesitancy or ensnared by the procrastination of committees, were absolutely fundamental to getting the EHRC off the ground. He applied the same qualities when the EHRC’s publishing wing, Legenda, was set up, seeing it grow over the course of only a few years to a widely-recognised, internationally-distributed operation publishing titles from across the whole range of European literatures and cultures.

All of us feel a great sense of personal loss as well, since we benefited so hugely from Malcolm’s intellectual companionship, his interest in and kindness to other people, and his sense that the EHRC should support ambitious endeavours across the disciplinary range. Since leaving Oxford for Cambridge, he had kept in touch with both Legenda and the EHRC, and a sense of common cause had persisted. He was a unique figure, and will be sorely missed by us all.

Catriona Kelly, Martin McLaughlin & Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly

FUNDING AWARD

We are pleased to announce that the project 

Russian National Identity from 1961: Traditions and Deterritorialisation 

directed by Professor Catriona Kelly (New College, Oxford; current co-director of the EHRC), has been successful in its bid for funding and has been awarded a substantial grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom (Grant Ref: AH/E509967/1).

This collaborative project examines the development of Russian national identity in the post-Stalin and transition years. The project focuses on views of the nation and Russianness among ordinary Russians, and explores how far these may be traced back to the late Soviet era. The central themes are ‘tradition’, by which is meant cultural memory, a self-consciously recognised relationship with the past, and ‘deterritorialisation’, which refers to the stresses placed on national and personal identity by migrancy, travel, and emigration. For the project website click here.

Catriona Kelly