Over the summer the first ever Let’s Play Staff Cup will take place. It will run in a similar fashion to the VC’s Cup held on the Canterbury campus, whereby departments compete against each other in a different sporting activity each month, in order to be crowned overall winner.

The competition will take place on the first Thursday of every month, beginning the 2nd July.

The competition will start at approximately 13:15 and end by 13:50 at the latest to ensure all staff members have time to change and eat in their lunch hour.

The dates of the competition and the individual sports are as follows:

• 2nd July – Volleyball (Minimum 6 players required per fixture)
• 6th August- Petanque (Minimum 4 players required per fixture)
• 3rd September- Sports Day (Minimum 1 male and 1 female participant per competition, 5 competitions, participants can compete in more than one competition)
• 10th September – Pub Quiz and Presentation (Minimum 3 participants)

Weather permitted all competitions will take place outside on the Rochester Lawn although the Greenwich Hall has been booked in case of adverse weather conditions.

Each team will receive points based on where they place in each competition. The team with the most points after all four competitions (Pub Quiz included) will win the overall Cup.

All staff are encouraged to come along and support at these events and if there are departments who haven’t already entered but would like to, please contact Francesca Plom via email or on 01227 824081.

If successful we hope to make this a bigger annual event for all Medway staff to enjoy throughout the year.

Monday 6th July – Friday 14th August, 2015
You are made aware that a contractor has been appointed to undertake the above work.

During this period, a scaffold will be erected around this particular block of the college.
Estates will be liaising directly, with the various groups that occupy and use B block.

This work is expected to be completed by 14th August.

Apologies in advance, for any inconvenience caused by these essential maintenance works. If you should have any queries then please contact the Estates Helpdesk on ext. 3209.

Dr Anna Strhan from the Department of Religious Studies has just published a new book entitled Aliens & Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2015).

The book is an ethnographic study of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London, and examines evangelical relational practices and everyday interactions in a cosmopolitan, global city. St John’s is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle – a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s as in wider media portraits of conservative evangelicals – see themselves as increasingly counter-cultural, moving against the grain of contemporary culture in London and in British society, yet they also take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian.

The book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness in a global metropolis. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church – including their experience of a relationship with God, which shapes their desire for coherence – Anna shows how the everyday experiences of members of St John’s are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these.

For more details about the book, please see the publisher’s page here:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198724469.do

A new collection of plays reflecting aspects of life in the Middle East has recently been compiled and edited by Ken Pickering, Hon Professor of Drama at Kent. Among the plays included is ‘Bitterest of Foes’: a remarkable play by Josh Hinds that deals with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Josh graduated with an M.Dram degree from Kent in 2014 and has subsequently enjoyed increasing success as playwright.

The entire play collection is called ‘Sykes-Picot: the Legacy’and is published by Arts Canteen and available from Amazon for £7.99. Professor Ken Pickering, its Editor is a prolific writer and has taught numerous Modules in Drama for the last ten years at Kent but this new book is the first in which he has been able to include the work of a recent student alongside plays by authors of international reputation.

SharePoint will be unavailable on Thursday 2 July from 08:00 – 13:00 and maybe into the afternoon if work takes longer than expected.

Save a copy of any files today that you might want to access tomorrow.

We need to apply monthly updates to SharePoint. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused – we chose this date/time in conjunction with departments to try and minimise impact.

The next monthly update will be on 30 July. All IT maintenance is advertised on advanced on Service Alerts.

Yesterday we received the very sad news that our colleague and friend Isabel Noble (Izzy) died. Izzy was one of our longest serving members of staff at Gulbenkian with more than 30 years’ service. We were all very lucky to know and work with her and are fortunate that she has given all who worked and knew her so many happy memories. Our thoughts are with those closest to her. In recognition of a life that touched so many of us, the Registry flag is being flown at half-mast.

Liz Moran,
Director of Gulbenkian

The funeral for David Ashworth will take place at Barham Crematorium on Friday 10 July at 2.40pm.

Professor Mike Fairhurst, a former colleague in the School of Engineering and Digital Arts, has written the following tribute:

‘All who knew Dr David Ashworth were shocked and immensely saddened to hear recently that he had died in a brave attempt to rescue a member of the public involved in an accident. David was a long-standing member of the Department of Electronics (later to become the School of Engineering and Digital Arts, its present name) and, indeed, was one of its earliest academic appointments, joining the University almost from its inception. He retired in 2005, but maintained regular contact with the University.

‘Generations of David’s students will have fond memories of a skilful, kind and sympathetic teacher who was unstinting in the time and support he gave to those he taught, and his ability to make them feel that he was as much their friend as their teacher. In research, David was one of the early collaborators with Roger Jennison, founding Professor in the Department, cheerfully and expertly grappling with some of the more abstruse mathematical problems in relativity and physical electronics. His colleagues will remember him as an outgoing, reliable, conscientious and thoroughly committed member of the academic community, always playing a key part in smooth operation of the Department, and his legendary long service as Undergraduate Admissions Officer was, as one colleague once put it, the engine room of the Department for many years.

‘That it was his act of kindness towards someone in need of help which led to David’s untimely death makes this all the more tragic, yet is entirely characteristic of him. We will miss him for his warmth, his easy friendship and his generosity of spirit, and we will remember him as a talented academic and a much-valued colleague and friend.’