The Queen's College Record 2020

them if they are admitted to hospital – and even in normal times this can be very busy
with unwell people, but the pandemic was unlike anything I have ever experienced.
COVID-19 is a fearsome pathogen and day after day I saw young and old people
brought to the hospital gasping for breath and terrified that they were infected. While
some improved and recovered, sadly others did not. Soon members of staff were falling
ill too and some did not survive. The sad consequences of the pandemic on patients
and their loved ones are well known and seeing this at first hand and at scale was
painful.
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In this context, I was hugely impressed with my medical, nursing and other colleagues,
who continued to come to work and care for patients despite significant personal risk.
People really did go out of their way to help each other and this and the positive morale
was inspiring. To their great credit, some of our clinical students volunteered to help in
the hospital and the sixth year students graduated early to take on a professional role.
Let us hope that we never see anything like this again, but it has been, for me, a very
real reminder of the great power of people to be kind and help other, even when the
going gets tough.
Richard Bruce Parkinson (Egyptology)
A sabbatical year allowed me to revive a long-standing
project to write a commentary on The Tale of Sinuhe.
The sabbatical began in October with a trip to Cairo to
teach at the annual Académie hiératique at the Institut
français d’archéologie orientale (podcast: bit.ly/RBPoct19).
I was able to examine the copies of the poem in
the Institut’s collection and to visit locations that feature
in the poem; some lectures for the Excellency cluster
‘Temporal Communities’ in Berlin gave me a chance to re-visit the papyrus of the
poem there. Progress was assisted by a three month stay in Denmark as a visiting
researcher in the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies at the University
of Copenhagen, generously enabled by the Nordea Foundation, and a first draft of the
commentary has been completed. A planned recording of a companion poem with
actress Barbara Ewing was postponed while she was locked-down in New Zealand,
but our earlier work on Sinuhe was featured in the TORCH Light Night in November
2019: bit.ly/source-code2019.
I’ve learnt a lot from working with Christopher Hollings on the reception of Ancient
Egyptian mathematics, and in the next years we will develop this historiographical project
(which has strong links to Queen’s). Research on LGBT+ history continued with two
articles on the reception of Ancient Egypt in twentieth century queer writers, Marguerite
Yourcenar and E.M. Forster, and the British Museum’s touring exhibition ‘Desire, Love,
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 23