The Queen's College Record 2023

Reports and College Activities
an article for publication (at twice the length. Hey presto!). Now it’s back to work on
my latest go-to, the Swiss-French poet Philippe Jaccottet (1925-2021). I have begun
to write a book on him, and I very much hope it will be short.
Jan Petrov (Law)
In the second year of my Junior Research Fellowship in
Law at Queen’s, I continued my research on two issues:
analysing the role of courts in the context of democratic
erosion and improving methods of detecting misuses and
abuses of constitutional law for anti-democratic purposes.
I worked on a couple of articles addressing the international
and comparative dimensions of these issues and on a
book project tracing the developments of East-Central European constitutional
courts’ treatment of European human rights law. The turbulent developments in the
real world made the research topical but also intensified the challenges of aiming
at a moving target.
While participating in the College and University life in Oxford was a great pleasure,
I also had the luck to be involved in international academic events and collaborations.
I benefited from presenting my work at conferences and workshops in Amsterdam,
Berlin, Cambridge, Chicago (online), London, Oslo, and Prague. Those events led to
a closer cooperation with colleagues from the Universities of Glasgow and Oslo on a
project concerning the European Court of Human Rights’ responses to authoritarian
practices. This project included co-organization of workshops in Oslo and Berlin and
hopefully a joint publication next year.
Frances Reynolds (Assyriology)
Joining the welcoming and vibrant community at Queen’s
has been an undoubted highlight this year. My OUP book
publishing an Akkadian treatise on the calendar, rituals, and
astral mythology has opened up new avenues of research
(A Babylon Calendar Treatise: Scholars and Invaders in the
Late First Millennium BC). I have been working on three
articles on Late Babylonian scholarship related to the Esagil
temple and on the broader cuneiform reception of the Babylonian ‘Epic of Creation’.
Research collaborations benefited from a return to more normal conditions. I gave
invited conference papers in person, with more invited talks planned for next year.
Consultancy work included advising on etymologies with Akkadian or Sumerian
content for the Oxford English Dictionary.
20 The Queen’s College | College Record 2023