The College Record 2022

Reports and College Activities
My big project this year was teaching-related. Andréa Rosinhas and I created a
French theatre workshop for our second-year students. They spent the year studying,
translating, and performing excerpts from Wajdi Mouawad’s Victoires. The workshop
involved a Zoom masterclass with the Canadian translator, Linda Gaboriau, and
three days of intensive acting classes with the French director, Emmanuel Besnault.
It culminated in a short performance in Trinity Term. The beauty of our students’
work will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Robert Taylor (Physics)
The past year was a strange one given the lockdowns
and COVID-19. However, I was lucky enough to be able to
continue my research at a reduced level. I was fortunate
to be named as a co-investigator on a large grant looking
at the quantum nature of life from the Moore Foundation in
the USA with Prof Vlatko Vedral and Dr Tristan Farrow. It is
also my final year as Head of Condensed Matter Physics
in Oxford as my five-year term has now come to an end. I am looking forward to
sabbatical leave next year. I was able to publish nine papers this year in various
international journals.
Credit: John Cairns
Seth Whidden (French)
The year began with the publication of my translation
of Dominique Noguez’s book Les Trois Rimbaud, which
imagines if, instead of being the year of his death, 1891
had marked Rimbaud’s resurgence into the world of
French literature. Fashioning Rimbaud as an elder poet
worthy of being elected to the Académie française is folly,
but (as my notes explain) it’s so clever that a reader can’t
help but smile and revel in the playfulness. My monograph Reading Baudelaire’s
Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem (OUP) was published
in June. In it, I ask, simply: in what way are prose poems poetic? In searching for
an answer, I was struck by how texts’ poetic nature reveals itself visually, on the
page; in the interaction between paragraphs, not unlike verse stanzas; in poetic
rhythm discernible in Baudelaire’s poetic prose; in different registers of language,
including slang. Finally, the end of the year saw the appearance of the first two
volumes of the six-volume complete works of Marie Krysinska (1857-1908) which
I’m co-directing: the poetry in these first volumes includes the first free-verse poems
published in French.
24 The Queen’s College | College Record 2022