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Download PDF - St. Catherine's College

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CATZ FELLOWSWhat have been the highlights of your careerso far?In 2004, I was the leader of a group that analysed themost sensitive image of the universe to date. Using theHubble Ultra Deep Field (a small patch of sky imagedrepeatedly by the Hubble Space Telescope for 400orbits) we discovered fifty galaxies within a billion yearsof the Big Bang – the faintest and among the mostdistant discovered so far. These discoveries, which werethe culmination of many years of work, receivedinternational recognition and generated a significantamount of academic discussion.What next?Working with NASA, I am involved in the building ofHubble’s successor – the James Webb Space Telescope –which will push our knowledge of galaxies even furtherback in time, potentially seeing the first generations ofstars form in the universe. It is an incredibly excitingtime, and I consider myself to be extraordinarily lucky to bedoing what I have always wanted to do. The telescope isdue to be ready in 2014 and I hope to be one of the firstto use it to discover new things about our universe.Hazy sunset at the summit of MaunaKea, Hawaii... there wasplenty of livelyinterchangebetweenEngland andSpain, throughdiplomats,spies,merchants andtravellers ...Photograph © WM Keck ObservatoryColin ThompsonTutor in Spanish, on theSpanish Golden AgeFor most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries –known popularly as the Golden Age – Spain was thedominant European power and, with its Americanpossessions, ruled the largest empire the world had everknown. Despite frequent wars, economic crises and theheavy hand of the Inquisition, its culture was vibrant and itproduced writers, artists and musicians of great originalityand distinction. Yet with one or two exceptions (notablyCervantes and Velázquez) their works are little known in theEnglish-speaking world and scarcely figure in modernhistories of European Renaissance and Baroque culture,which tend to focus on Italy, France and England. That wasnot so at the time: there was plenty of lively interchangebetween England and Spain, through diplomats, spies,merchants and travellers, which partly explains theextraordinary wealth of original editions of Golden-Ageworks in the Bodleian Library, a magnificent scholarlyresource for those who work in this area. The change isprobably due to the political and economic decline of Spainfrom the middle of the seventeenth century and, in morerecent times, to the long shadow cast by the SpanishCivil War.As I look back over my research and plan its future,I can see how it has been influenced by my wish tobring the Spanish Golden Age back into the Europeanmainstream of the time. My last book, on the sixteenthcenturySpanish poet and mystic <strong>St</strong> John of the Cross, was48/COLIN THOMPSON

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