Friday 10th May was a day of celebration for the School of English.
At a reception in Keynes Senior Common room Professor Peter Brown (Head of the School of English) welcomed alumni and previous staff members back to the campus. The reception, which was the first of what is hoped will be many such events in coming years, was well attended with a cross-section of English alumni from the local area. As the university begins to plan for its 50th anniversary celebrations the School of English is looking forward to many more such celebrations of both its students and long history.
Professor Brown then invited visitors to attend his Inaugural Lecture entitled ‘Reading Chaucer’. The Inaugural Lecture series (organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) recognises the appointment of professorships across the faculty and brings together academics, students and members of the public to celebrate this achievement. The lecture looked at Chaucer’s poemTroilus and Criseyde and considered some of the larger issues with which the poem is concerned: piety, love, and the processes involved in ‘reading’. The lecture also recognised a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between medievalists in the Centre Medieval and Early Modern Studies, English, History and colleagues in Prague on ‘Chaucer in Bohemia’, which will be marked by a workshop at Charles University on 14-17 June.