The annual meeting took place at Newnham College, Cambridge on 23 and 24 March. This was the first meeting held at Newnham and, as those invited were advised, the first time that the Society had ever met at a “ladies’ college”. In consequence, organisers were looking forward to welcoming  “a particularly large number of our lady members”.

PROGRAMME

Friday 23 March

2.15pm           Committee Meeting

4pm                  Business Meeting

4.30pm           STEP: Examiners’ views of the First Three Years, Dr John Cameron Wilson (Jesus College, Cambridge), Dr David Midgley (St John’s College, Cambridge) and Dr Christopher Pountain

More recently, David Midgley provided delegates at OPS 2014 with an overview of the Cambridge admissions procedure during a roundtable discussion with MML Faculty Chair and OPS President Professor Ian Roberts and Dr Napoleon Katsos.

Christopher Pountain is a Life Fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge. He was Professor of Spanish Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London between 2004 and 2013.

7pm                  Conference Dinner

8.45pm            Images of Kingship in 16th and 17th Century France, Dr Philip Ford (Clare College, Cambridge)

Philip Ford died in April 2013. Draper’s Professor of French Michael Moriarty wrote an obituary for Professor Ford, published in the Independent: 

Philip Ford was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge in 1977. He then went onto a Lectureship in French at Aberdeen University, but returned to Cambridge in the early 1980s as an Assistant Lecturer (then the normal position for a junior academic), and in 1982 became a Fellow of Clare College and Director of Studies in Modern Languages. He was confirmed in post as a Lecturer in 1986, ascending to a Readership in 1999 and a personal Professorship in 2004.

Saturday 24 March

9.30am                Hermann Hesse’s Therapeutic Fiction: Der Steppenwolf, Dr Edward Timms (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)

Edward Timms went onto a Research Professorship at the University of Sussex where he founded the Centre for German-Jewish Studies. He remains a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius.

11.30am             Language Teaching in the Schools: the Crisis and the Solutions, Michael Heafford (Department of Education, University of Cambridge)