BALLIOL COLLEGE NEWS

   
   

May 2016
 

Student's painting hung in Hall

 
 

Emily Carrington Freeman
(2016), Magdalen [oil on linen]
Balliol College, Oxford 

A painting by Fine Art undergraduate Emily Carrington Freeman (2013), entitled Magdalen, has become the first by a current student, and probably the first by a female artist, to be in hung in Hall.

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Tilden Prize for Professor Dermot O'Hare

 
 

Professor Dermot O'Hare.
Photograph courtesy of
Department of Chemistry 

Congratulations to Professor Dermot O’Hare (SCG Fellow, Professor of Chemistry and Tutor in Inorganic Chemistry) on being awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Tilden Prize 2016.

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LISTEN: British Academy lecture by Kylie Murray

 
 

Kylie Murray. Photograph 
courtesy of Faculty of English 

Kylie Murray (Junior Research Fellow in the Humanities) gave a lecture at the British Academy on 5 May 2016, entitled ‘Elizabeth Melville and the Poetrics of Desire in Early Modern Britain’.

LISTEN HERE

READ: Floreat Domus 2016

 
 

 

The 2016 edition of Floreat Domus, Balliol’s magazine, has now been sent to Old Members - READ IT ONLINE

Included with it were invitations for all Old Members to attend the Balliol Society Weekend on 1-2 October.  Those matriculating in 2008 have been sent an individual invitation - email us if you did not receive yours.

Balliol people win OUSU Teaching Awards

 
 

The Rev'd Bruce Kinsey

Many congratulations to the following Balliol Fellows who have won 2016 Oxford University Student Union Teaching Awards:

    • Outstanding Pastoral Care: Adrian Kelly (Clarendon University Lecturer and Tutor in Ancient Greek Language and Literature)
    • Most Acclaimed Lecturer: Professor André Lukas (Professor of Physics and Tutor in Theoretical Physics)
    • Best Support Staff: Rev'd Bruce Kinsey (Chaplain/Wellbeing and Welfare Officer

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Old Member wins West End Theatre Award and Olivier Prize

 
 

Ramin Sabi with his
Olivier Award 

Congratulations to Ramin Sabi (2010) who, through his company DEM Productions, won the 2016 West End Theatre Award for Best Producer.

Ramin was also a co-producer for Gypsy, the first London revival of the classic Broadway musical, which ran at the Savoy Theatre from March-November 2015 starring Imelda Staunton, to sold out houses and 5-star reviews.  Gypsy won Best Musical Revival at the prestigous Olivier Awards 2016.

Ramin is the youngest person to win both of these awards.

Students' success in sport

 

Oxford University Company of
Archers' Varsity Team

Balliol RFC

Balliol's canoe polo team
 

 

We congratulate the following students and teams on their recent sporting successes:

Graduate student Zoubeir Emambokus (2012) earned a half-blue in archery, as part of the Oxford Experienced team at the archery varsity match against Cambridge, on 7 May.
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Balliol's rugby team won the Cuppers Plate final, on 7 May.
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Balliol's canoe polo team won the Cuppers competition, on 15 May.
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Balliol College Boat Club M3 and M4 crews both won blades at Summer Eights, on 28 May.
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Graduate students Matthew Kennedy (2010) and Ben Green (2012) played for Oxford in the recent snooker and pool varsity matches, in which Oxford triumphed against Cambridge.
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Prince William opens new University Buildings

 
 

Professor Woods and
Prince William.  Image
credit: John Cairns

On 11 May HRH The Duke of Cambridge visited the University of Oxford to formally open the home of the Blavatnik School of Government, and also to unveil a plaque marking the major redevelopment of the Bodleian's Weston Library.  Professor Ngaire Woods (Balliol 1987 and Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government), and Richard Ovenden (Professorial Fellow and Bodley's Librarian) both comment on the Duke of Cambridge's visit in an article on the University website. 

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Philip Howard to be Professor of Internet Studies at OII
 
 

Professor Philip Howard.
Photograph courtesy of
philhoward.org

Professor Philip Howard has been appointed Professor of Internet Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute, and he will become a Fellow of Balliol when he takes up his appointment in July 2016.

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Balliol Academic Society 40th Anniversary Dinner
 
 

 

Ray Bremner (1975), the Founder of the Balliol Academic Society, and past Presidents of the Society, would like to invite Old Members to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Society.  Dinner is being held in the Balliol SCR on Saturday 24 September for Old Members who attended the Society's functions in the 1970s and 1980s, in any of its incarnations.  

If you remember going to one or more of those events, and would like to attend the Anniversary Dinner, please email Aria Johnston.
SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS BY OLD MEMBERS
If you would like us to mention in this section any significant work published this year or last, please contact Ginny Matthews.
Valentina Gosetti (2007) has published 'Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit: Beyond the Prose Poem' (Routledge, 2016) which proposes a substantial reassessment of Gaspard de la Nuit (1842) and promotes a new understanding of Bertrand in his own terms, rather than those of his successors, like Baudelaire and Ravel. Through his playful and ironic reinterpretation of Romantic clichés, and his overt defiance of the boundaries of poetry and beauty, Bertrand emerges as a fascinating figure in his own right. This book is one of the first full-length studies of Bertrand’s work, and it will be of particular interest to specialists of the nineteenth century and of provincial literature, and to students of nineteenth-century poetry or the fantastic. Valentina Gosetti now holds the Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
Ben Fine (1966) has published 'Macroeconomics. A Critical Companion' (Pluto Press, 2016) with Ourania Dimakou. This distinctive book draws upon years of critical questioning and teaching and exposes how macroeconomic theory has evolved from its origins to its current impoverished and extreme state.  Professor Fine has also published 'Microeconomics. A Critical Companion' (Pluto Press, 2016) which offers students a clear and concise exposition of mainstream microeconomics from a heterodox perspective.
Christopher Beeley (1997) has published 'Web Application Development with R Using Shiny - Second Edition' (Packt Publishing, 2016). Dr Beeley's book is a guide to Shiny, a contributed package to the R language.  R is free, open source, and rapidly growing and allows scientists and statisticians to easily produce robust and cutting edge analyses.  These include inferential techniques, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, genomic studies, and many others, all powered by a powerful programming language for data and thousands of contributed packages from across the open source community.  Shiny is a package which enables analysts to use any modern browser to rapidly produce interactive graphical interfaces allowing users to easily explore datasets and analyses. Shiny assumes no knowledge of JavaScript or HTML and uses a reactive programming framework to enable small amounts of pure R code to produce powerful and attractive interfaces.
Professor Alan Knight (1965) has published 'The Mexican Revolution: A Very Short Introduction' (Oxford University Press, 2016). This, as required by the rigid format of Very Short Introductions, is a succinct overview of the Mexican Revolution, covering some thirty years (1910-40) in 125pp (and no footnotes). Since previously describing the decade of armed Revolution (1910-20) in 1300pp (and 5,556 footnotes), Professor Knight is breaking the prolix habits encouraged by the likes of R. Cobb, and cultivating a new gnomic brevity, his ultimate goal being a half-millennium of of Latin American history on the back of an envelope.
Michael Taylor (1952) has written 'L'Invasion et l'Occupation de Belle-Isle par les Anglais 1761-1763' (Société Historique de Belle-Ile-en-Mer, 2016). This is the first-ever modern book on the subject.  Pitt told George III that the objective was to secure all Canada (it was not traded for Minorca, as is generally said).  An English-language publisher is being sought.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

SAVE THE DATE

    • The Usborne Dinner - Thursday 17 November, Reform Club London - By invitation

GOT NEWS? We want to hear from you!

Send an email to Ginny Matthews if you have something you would like to share in a future newsletter - You can also tweet us your stories @ballioloxford.  Don't forget to submit your News and Notes for the Annual Record 2016 before 15 July.
Editor's note: The photograph of Maurice Keen which appeared in the April newsletter is by Katie Jamieson (1989).  We apologise for not crediting her.

 

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