The Queen's College Record 2023

Credit: David Fisher
SENIOR TUTOR’S REPORT
Prof Seth Whidden
The College enjoyed many academic successes this year.
Too numerous to list in full, some notable achievements
include the following:
Professor José Carrillo de la Plata received the 2022
Echegaray Medal from Spain’s Real Academia de Ciencias
Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (Royal Academy of Sciences)
for his work in pure mathematics: on differential equations
in physics, particularly nonlinear diffusion equations,
kinetic equations, and the calculus of variations.
Reports and College Activities
Professor Karen Leeder, the Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German, was named one
of the first Einstein Fellows in a new partnership between the University of Oxford,
the Berlin University Alliance, and the Einstein Foundation. She will collaborate
with a research group at the Freie Universität Berlin, working on the temporality of
20th and 21st century German poetry.
To celebrate Professor Leeder taking up the Schwarz-Taylor Chair, the College
hosted ‘German in the World’, a special event moderated by Professor Charlie Louth,
Fellow in German. In addition to Professors Leeder and Louth, the participants
were writer, translator, and publisher Michael Eskin; Nan Gibson, Senior VP at Lidl
International; writer Durs Grünbein; and Katharina von Ruckteschell-Katte, Director
of the Goethe Institute London and regional director for Northwest Europe, focusing
on the development of the EU in the context of Brexit.
In the year when we celebrated the 100 th anniversary of the Harmsworth Visiting
Professorship of American History with a gala event with the Rothermere American
Institute (see page 91), the College welcomed Harmsworth Professor Bruce
Schulman from Boston University. His lecture, ‘The Forgotten Constitutional
Revolution: Amending American Democracy in the Early Twentieth Century’, and
his ongoing research on the relationship between politics and cultural change, were
particularly relevant to ongoing global concerns. The next Harmsworth Professor
will be Professor Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia.
Dr James Unwin, the College’s first Academic Distinguished Visitor, discussed
theoretical physics as part of the Queen’s College Symposium: QCS continues
to play a vital role in presenting ongoing scholarship and fostering lively academic
debates, as do the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures and the translator-inresidence
programme of the Queen’s Translation Exchange (see pages 48-50). The
Academic Distinguished Visitor in 2023/4 will be Professor Mary Ann Smart, the
Terrill Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley.
College Record 2023 | The Queen’s College 9