The College Record 2022

Reports and College Activities
Credit: John Cairns
students who for a wide variety of reasons are having difficulties with their studies.
It has to be said that there have been quite a few more of those this year than
last, showing perhaps that the effects of COVID-19 are delayed and unpredictable.
This job, which has taught me a lot about how the College and the University work,
would not be possible without the Academic Administrator, Sarah McHugh, who
fortunately for me and many students is punctilious, full of knowledge, and witty.
We’re lucky to have her.
Christopher Metcalf (Literae Humaniores)
A ‘sabbatical year’, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, is in its original sense ‘the seventh year,
prescribed by the Mosaic law to be observed as a
“Sabbath” in which the land was to remain untilled’. I am
now fortunate to look forward to an intermission of this
kind, and to reflect on the past six years of service at the
College. The main surprise for me is to realise that my
research has been helped, rather than hindered, by the broad range of teaching that
my post requires me to offer. In the past year, a course of tutorials on Sappho led
me to find an unnoticed translation of a Sapphic verse in Vergil’s Aeneid. This shows
conclusively that Vergil knew Sappho’s poetry, which is a fact that scholars have
only recently begun to understand. One reason why the correspondence remained
unnoticed for so long is that it is very unusual for a single person to teach both of
these authors—except in the tutorial system that the College continues to uphold.
I feel honoured that the resulting publication, which is available online and will
appear in print next year, will make a small contribution to the study of Sappho,
which is so closely associated with the College, throughout the 20th century,
thanks to Fellows and Old Members such as Bernard Grenfell, Arthur Hunt, Edgar
Lobel, and Angus Bowie. In the coming year I plan to begin some fresh projects
(rather than to leave the land wholly untilled), which are again partly inspired by my
undergraduate teaching: I look forward to reporting on these next year.
Dirk Meyer (Chinese)
In Autumn 2021, my book Documentation and
Argument in Early China: The Shangshu 尚 書
(Venerated Documents) and the Shu Traditions, was
published. Berlin: De Gruyter (x, 281 pp.) (ISBN hard
copy: 9783110708417; ISBN e-book: 9783110708530). For
the first time this book reveals Shu (Documents) as a genre
of textual practice that was used creatively by contrasting
conceptual communities for socio-philosophical ends. It breaks new ground by
18 The Queen’s College | College Record 2022