The Queen's College Record 2023

Credit: John Cairns
Richard Parkinson (Egyptology)
As part of the Bodleian’s exhibition, the anniversary of
the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun was marked
with a small ceremony on 4 November 2022 in which the
Egyptian novelist, Ahdaf Soueif laid a commemorative
wreath (https://bit.ly/3LD2Ybu). Over 120K visitors saw this
exhibition during its run, and the Provost hosted a closing
party at Queen’s for the exhibition and curatorial team.
Legacy projects include a version of the exhibition on Google (https://bit.ly/3PwZybd),
but our plans to make the archive more accessible for Egyptian colleagues were
curtailed when the intended funds were assigned to other purposes by the Faculty.
Exhibition events included a concert by the counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo at
Queen’s, entitled ‘Songs for a Young King: Responses to the Tutankhamun Archive’,
and a conversation at the Bodleian about his interpretation of Tutankhamun’s father
Akhenaten in Philip Glass’ opera. I subsequently presented (remotely) reflections on
the anniversary as a keynote lecture of the international colloquium on Tutankhamun
in Lisbon in February (www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/media), and March saw the world
premiere in Berlin with the Egyptian soprano Fatma Said of James Whitbourn’s
‘Zahr al-Khayal’, a setting of my translation of some Late Egyptian love-songs.
Reports and College Activities
As well as Tutankhamun pieces, publications have included an essay on poetry for
the catalogue of the British Museum’s Rosetta Stone exhibition, and two articles
from ongoing research with C. D. Hollings on the historiography of Ancient Egyptian
mathematics. Work on a commentary on the poem Sinuhe has finally resumed, with
a contribution to a cross-cultural project on National Epics (nationalepics.com), and
an article and celebratory lecture in Mainz to celebrate the retirement of a much-loved
colleague Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen (https://bit.ly/46s8nKl).
Credit: John Cairns
Roger Pearson (French, Emeritus)
Two highlights of my academic year. One was being
shortlisted for the R. Gapper Prize for my book The Beauty
of Baudelaire: The Poet as Alternative Lawgiver (OUP,
2021) – along with Career Development Fellow in French
Dr Macs Smith for his brilliant Paris and the Parasite: Noise,
Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021).
Macs should have won but, unaccountably, neither of us
did. The other highlight was the invitation to deliver a plenary lecture at the annual
conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, held this year in late March with the
theme of ‘Magic: Enchantment and Disenchantment’. The venue was Christ Church,
Oxford (aka Hogwarts), and my bewitching talk was entitled ‘Lyric Spells: The Poet
as Magus from Staël to Mallarmé’ – which I spent the next three months turning into
College Record 2023 | The Queen’s College 19