News

A recent edition of BBC Radio 4's Something Understood is hosted by Brasenose Classics Fellow, Dr Llewelyn Morgan. In the programme, Dr Morgan considers how the diamond, a beautiful yet tarnished jewel, is capable of provoking complex responses within us all, and examines how this precious stone can bring out the best and worst in us. The programme features reading from Christina Rosetti, Marco Polo and William Pitt Root, and music from Joan Baez, Bela Bartok and Joni Mitchell. There is also an interview with bookseller Farrukh Hussain.

Something Understood - Diamonds and Coal was broadcast on Sunday 26^th June 2011. It can be listened to on BBC iPlayer until the evening of Sunday 3^rd July:

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0122nfs/Something_Understood_Diamonds_and_Coal/

Brasenose College is pleased to announce that Professor Alan Bowman will become Principal of the College from 1st October 2011, when the current Principal Professor Roger Cashmore retires.

Professor Bowman was formerly the Camden Professor of Ancient History and has been Acting Principal of Brasenose in 2010-11, while Professor Cashmore has been on research leave.

Professor Bowman was born in Manchester in 1944, and educated at Manchester Grammar School (1955-62) and the Queen's College, Oxford where he read Greats (1962-6). He earned his Doctorate at the University of Toronto (1966-9), was Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (1970-2), Lecturer in Ancient History, University of Manchester (1972-7), Official Student of Christ Church and University Lecturer in Ancient History, University of Oxford (1977-2002) before becoming Camden Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of Brasenose College (2002-10). His research interests have included Roman Egypt and Vindolanda. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Richard Haydon
Vice Principal
Brasenose College

Ascension Day, which fell on the 2^nd June this year, is marked at Brasenose College with two long-standing traditions. Firstly, the Beating of the Bounds ceremony passed through Brasenose during the morning of Ascension Day. The boundaries of the parishes of the churches of St. Michael at the Northgate and St. Mary the Virgin (also known as the ‘University Church') pass through Brasenose College and on Ascension Day groups from both parishes visit and mark the boundary stones located on certain walls of the college by marking them with the year in chalk and beating them with willow sticks. The brief ceremony was led by our Chaplain, the Reverend Graeme Richardson, and was well-attended by students, staff and visitors.

On May 15^th a BNC Old Boys football team returned to the Brasenose sports ground to play a current students XI. Led by Gareth Cadwallader (1977, PPE), the Old Boys team certainly looked the part, sporting specially embroidered football shirts, in Brasenose colours, provided by Lawrence Lever (1977, Law) and Gary Jackson (1978, Maths).

Buoyed by the news that the current students XI were in some disarray due to the well-timed Brasenose College Ball the previous evening, the BNC Old Boys started strongly, scoring two goals through Martin Fiennes (1980, Geography) and Danny Paffett (1977, Chemistry). With some stout defending by the Old Boys and squandered goal mouth chances by the students, the first half closed with a respectable 2-2 score line.

This year's annual Brasenose Arts Festival begins on Sunday 15^th May. The festival features six days of theatre, music concerts, workshops, poetry readings and exhibitions as well as an outdoor summer bar, all organised by Brasenose students. This year's festival is kicked off with Trinity Term's Platnauer Concert. Festival  highlights include an Open Mic Night, Salsa Classes, a Comedy workshop with the Oxford Imps, a Cabaret showcasing the College's eclectic talent, the Brasenose Bake-Off followed by cake sale, communal mural painting and, last but not least, a knitting workshop.

Professor Péter Somogyi, FRS and Kurti Senior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, has been awarded The Brain Prize by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation. The Prize was awarded for the first time for outstanding contributions to neuroscience on the 2nd May 2011, and was shared between Péter Somogyi, Tamás Freund and György Buzsáki, three Hungarian educated neuroscientists, for "their wide-ranging, technically and conceptually brilliant research on the functional organization of neuronal circuits in the cerebral cortex, especially in the hippocampus, a region that is crucial for certain forms of memory."

Brasenose plumber,Andrew Wiffen, has completed the 2011 London Marathon, running to raise money for the Sobell Hospice Charity, which cares for people with life threatening illnesses.  

35 year old Andrew, who has worked for Brasenose College for the past 17 years, covered the 26 miles and 385 yards in 4 hours 44 minutes. He was inspired to run the Marathon following the death of his father from a brain tumour in 2007, when Andrew gave up smoking and took up football and running. Andrew was also running for Carmen Perez and Doreen Wright, greatly missed former colleagues at Brasenose who both spent time at Sobell House before they died.

This year's Tanner Lectures, entitled ‘An Economist Tries to Grapple with Catastrophic Climate Change', will take place on 20 and 21 May in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Said Business School. They will be given by Martin L Weitzman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Professor Weitzman is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published widely in leading economics journals, and is the author of Income, Wealth and the Maximum Principle (Harvard 2003) and The Share Economy (Harvard 1984). His current research is focused on environmental economics, including climate change, the economics of catastrophes, cost-benefit analysis, long-run discounting, green accounting, and the comparison of alternative instruments for controlling pollution.

Brasenose's second telethon, which took place during the last two weeks of March, saw an astounding £250,000 pledged to the College Annual Fund. We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who took time to speak to us, to share their experiences of BNC and life after Oxford. We are particularly grateful to everyone who agreed to make a gift to the Annual Fund.

Dr Andrew Stockley, the Senior Tutor of Brasenose College for the last five years, was farewelled in February. He has now taken up the position of Dean of Law at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where he is also a member of the University's Senior Management Team. Dr Stockley (pictured) has written about his five years as Senior Tutor in the most recent edition of the Brazen Nose.

Brasenose welcomes Acting Senior Tutor Ms Karen Brill, who joins the College on secondment from her post as Assistant Registrar (Academic Affairs) in the Humanities Division. A new permanent Senior Tutor is currently being recruited, and should be in post from September 2011.

The annual Ale Verses evening, held on Shrove Tuesday, was once again well attended and a tremendous success. Written by college members, the Ale Verses are satirical songs set to popular music and performed in Hall during a formal dinner. The evening was presided over by the Brasenose Chaplain, Rev'd Graeme Richardson, with the Organ Scholar, John Forster (Music 1st Year), providing accompaniment to the Verses. This year, 19 Verses were performed, set to music ranging from Yellow Submarine, Amazing Grace and YMCA. The winning entry, set to the music for the Jerusalem hymn, satirised the College's current building project.

 

A memorial service was held for Sir John Owen in Coventry Cathedral on Thursday March 24 at 3pm. The service was open to any Brasenose alumni that wanted to attend.

 

 ‘Restrictions May Apply' is new theatre production by Richard O'Brien, a third year Brasenose English and Modern Languages undergraduate. The play is the story of an unlikely couple who plan a weekend of romantic rediscovery on the Cornish King Arthur Trail, but IT consultant Mark hasn't reckoned for falconry, a medieval pageant and his girlfriend Izzie's complete disinterest. The play draws influence from Fawlty Towers, Peep Show and Morte d'Arthur.

Brasenose Law finalists Di Yu and Richard Hoyle have won the Shearman & Sterling competition, considered to be the most prestigious mooting contest in the University of Oxford. Following a preliminary round of written outlines of argument, twelve teams of two students were selected to present oral argument in a series of "lightning" moots conducted in a single day. Di Yu addressed the submission on breach of fiduciary duty in the context of taking up investment opportunities, while Richard Hoyle dealt with the issue as to the appropriate remedy for such breaches.

Pupils from Clifton Hampden School Primary School, St Peter's Primary School Cassington and Moulsford Preparatory School visited Brasenose College on January 25 to take part in the second Wondrous Machine - a day which introduced to them the music, mechanics and underlying science of the pipe organ.

Organised by Nicholas Prozzillo (Graduate Director of Music) and Joe Organ (Schools Officer), the event featured sessions by Simon Williams (Director of the Royal College of Organists Academy), Jeremy Sampson (demonstrating his Wooden one-octave Organ), Bob Adams (presenting the Musical Saw), Allan Chapman (Wadham College) and Jonathan Jones (Brasenose College). Pupils were also treated to trips to St John's College and Pembroke College for a hands-on session with chapel organs.

Hilary Term 2011 at Brasenose College is packed with exciting music concerts and other musical events, all held in chapel.This terms Heberden concert, in honour of a former Principal, was given on the 21 January  by the Catz Quintet, formed at St Catherine's College in 2008. The quintet is committed to raising the profile of wind quintets through the performance of non-standard repertoire and offering a new experience of such pieces. The Platnauer Concert, in memory of another Brasenose Principal, was this term held on the 30 January, and featured Phantasm, a quartet of viols founded in 1994. Phantasm reached international prominencewhen its debut CD won a Gramophone Award for the Best Baroque Instrumental Recording of 1997. Since then they have won several awards, and have become recognised as the most exciting viol consort active on the world scene today. In 2005 Phantasm were named Consort-in-Residence at Oxford University, where they regularly appear at the Holywell Music Room and other venues.

Dr Abigail Green ‘s recent biography Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero has won two literary prizes. Published last year, it was named a Times Literary Supplement book of 2010, and a New Republic best book of 2010. The work was also a finalist in the american 2010 National Jewish Book Awards.

Adam Kirsch, Senior Editor of the New Republic magazine, commented that Dr Green "shows how Montefiore's role as ambassador-at-large for Jewish causes catalyzed a new, international Jewish consciousness, and how his many trips to Palestine helped create the conditions for the birth of Zionism", and hails the book as "an important new chapter in modern Jewish history".

The third annual John Ackrill Memorial Lecture in Ancient Philosophy will take place at Brasenose College on the evening of Thursday 10^th March 2011. Professor Richard Sorabji, CBE, FBA will be speaking on 'Ideas of moral conscience in antiquity and their later effects'.

Professor Sorabji (pictured), a British historian of ancient philosophy, is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at King's College London and an Honorary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. He is founder and director of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project, devoted to the publication of translations of philosophical texts from the period 200-600 AD.

 

 

Professor Roger Cashmore is to retire from his role as Principal at the end of the academic year (30^th September 2011). After his 7 years at Brasenose, during which time there have been many substantial and successful changes, the Principal wishes to focus on his role as Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and to return to his research interests at CERN and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), at what is a particularly exciting time for particle physics.

The College wishes him success in all his new activities and would particularly like to thank the Principal and his wife for their unstinting efforts and their important and valuable contributions to day-to-day College life and the College's future prospects during their time at Brasenose.

Professor Cashmore said: "I have greatly enjoyed my time as Principal of Brasenose and I am proud of the contributions that I have made and the initiatives that I have introduced. I will miss the daily interactions with colleagues, students and alumni. However, I now want to devote my time to my role as Chairman of UKAEA and to research at CERN and the LHC."

Second Year Engineering Science undergraduate, Daniel Garrett, has won a Fozmula Bursary. The bursary is awarded for the remainder of his degree. It comes with the opportunity to visit the Fozmula factory in Leamington Spa and participate in internship programmes with the company.

Through an application process which included a short interview, Daniel was able to demonstrate proven academic ability and a commitment to the profession of engineering. On receiving the award, he commented: "I am thrilled to have been awarded a scholarship from Fozmula.  It's great to know that there are companies willing to altruistically support students and I very much look forward to getting the most out of this fantastic opportunity."