College Record 2014

Research Clusters
The Art in Antiquity Workshops sponsored by the Ancient World Cluster have
continued to be very popular and well attended, the practical workshop following
an academic seminars. The seminars were ‘Decorated Vase Production in Ancient
Athens’ (Thomas Mannack); ‘Early glass-making in Egypt’ ( Paul Nicholson);
‘Dyeing textiles in Antiquity: purple dye production and use in ancient Greece’
(Eleni Zimi). The workshops featured wheel- and mould-made vessels (Graham
Taylor); free-blown and mould-blown glass (Mark Taylor and David Hill, Roman
glassmakers); spinning, dyeing and weaving techniques (Sue Day).
In March, Wolfson and Corpus hosted Professor (now Sir) Richard Sorabji’s
international workshop on the re-interpretation of Aristotle and its influence.
In April, Wolfson hosted the third annual Oxford postgraduate conference on
Assyriology, which drew an international gathering from the UK, Germany, Russia,
the USA, Spain and Malta. This is becoming quite a fixture, and we hope that the
student organisers (Eva Miller, Kathryn Kelley and Laura Hawkins) will repeat all
their hard work to make it happen again.
On 21 June there will be an international symposium on Indo-Iranian and Indo-
European to honour Dr Elizabeth Tucker’s first forty years of teaching Indo-
Iranian and Indo-European philology at Oxford. The speakers will be leading
scholars from UCLA, Yale, SOAS, Oxford, the University of Georgia and Cornell.
To judge by the advance bookings, it will be very well attended.
Jacob Dahl completed his very successful tenure as Director, and officially stepped
down at the end of March, although he has continued to provide endless advice and
support. Next term he will be taking a well-earned sabbatical, and will then finally
be able to relinquish all responsibility.
Peter Barber
The South Asia Research Cluster in its occasional lecture series ‘Big Themes:
Public Intellectuals’ has heard George Kunnath on India’s Maoist movement, and
Parvathi Menon, London correspondent of The Hindu newspaper, on the decline
and changed role of the foreign correspondent. It has organized no fewer than four
workshops led by graduate students, on Christianity in South Asia; on the notion of
progress; on urban health; and on South-Asian urban development from 1850 to the
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