New Fellow of the British Acacdemy

Congratulations to Professor Stephen Halliwell FRSE, Professor of Greek, in the School of Classics, who has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. At its Annual General Meeting on July 17, the British Academy elected 42 highly distinguished UK academics from 19 universities as Fellows, in recognition of their outstanding research. Prof. Halliwell's research interests range widely across the interpretation of ancient Greek literature (especially drama) and philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle), as well as the influence of Greek ideas on later periods of Western culture. He has given invited research papers in 17 countries and four languages. Two of his books have won major international prizes.

BA Fellowship awarded to Dr Bridget Heal

Dresden’s Frauenkirche

Dr Bridget Heal, Director of the Reformation Studies Institute, has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project on “Lutheran Visual Culture during the Age of the Renaissance and Baroque”. Protestantism was all about the pure preaching of God’s Word. In order to focus parishioners’ attention on the Word, and in order to eliminate idolatry, reformers often destroyed religious images, as the University’s own St Salvator’s chapel shows. Yet unlike Scottish Calvinists, Germany’s Lutherans developed an astonishingly rich visual culture, which reached its highpoint during the early eighteenth century with the construction of monuments such as Dresden’s Frauenkirche. Dr Heal’s project asks why this word-based confession came to value images so highly. Through the example of Lutheran Germany, it will illuminate the ways in which religious identity was constituted and expressed during the early modern period.

Professor Elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy

Congratulations to Professor Robert Crawford of the School of English on his election to the Fellowship of the British Academy. Each year, the British Academy elects to its Fellowship up to 38 outstanding UK-based scholars who have achieved distinction in any branch of the humanities and social sciences. Professor Crawford’s current interests include modern Scottish literature, T.S. Eliot, creative writing and contemporary poetry. His biography of Robert Burns, 'The Bard' (2009) won the overall Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award, and his recent book, 'The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography', was published in June 2011.

Cape Colony historical find

Dr David Culpin, of the School of Modern Languages, in the Special Collections of the National Library of South Africa, in Cape Town where he found a very important book describing the shipwreck of a French vessel on the coast of southern Africa in 1829, and the survivors' 200 mile walk to safety. The book gives a rare account of encounters between Europeans and the indigenous Xhosa population as well as offering an eye-witness description of several towns in South Africa just a few years after their establishment. In addition, this account is the first book in French and the first travel narrative ever to have been published in Cape Colony. Following this discovery, Dr Culpin is working to produce modern critical editions of this text, in English and in French. The project is funded by the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust.