News Articles

The BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall gave the Selwyn College Ramsay Murray lecture on Friday May 1^st about Vladimir Putin, Russia and the West. Ms Kendall is a former Moscow correspondent, and she has interviewed Putin and many other world leaders for the BBC. There was a capacity audience for the event, and much praise afterwards for the range and ambition of the lecture. It looks at the history of Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine – and seeks to assess the future of Moscow’s relations with the west. You can watch it in full by clicking on this image:

The Selwyn College Choir will be touring in the Pacific North West this summer. They'll be performing in Seattle and Sequim in Washington state, and then crossing the border to Canada for appearances in Victoria and Vancouver. The dates can be found on the poster below. The College is planning events for Selwyn and Cambridge alumni around the Choir's performances, and there will be an additional reunion for Selwyn alumni in the San Francisco bay area on Tuesday 14 July. For more information, please contact the Development office on alumni-office@sel.cam.ac.uk - and there will be more details nearer the time on this website.

The Master of Selwyn, Roger Mosey, has been writing a weekly column for the New Statesman magazine about media coverage of
the general election campaign. They are now online:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/paxman-and-other-traps-how-should-media-tackle-election

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/westminster-goes-local-interviews-outside-london-too-often-offer-politicians-soft

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2015/04/playing-it-safe-election-coverage-has-failed-capture-depth-and-range-voters-feelings

http://www.newstatesman.com/2015/04/it-s-all-too-safe

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/broadcasters-must-be-more-robust-tackle-multiparty-britain

Selwyn College's 2015 Ramsay Murray lecture will be given by the award-winning BBC broadcaster Bridget Kendall. She will speak about President Putin and Russia, sharing her extensive experience of the country in recent decades.

 

 

 

 

Bridget Kendall was educated at Lady Margaret Hall and St Antony’s College, Oxford, and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard. She is a former Moscow correspondent; and now, as BBC diplomatic correspondent, she returns to Russia frequently and was one of the main commentators on the Ukraine crisis which made global headlines in recent months.

 

 

The Ramsay Murray lecture is an annual event organised by Selwyn College following a bequest from the late Lt Col Ramsay Murray, a loyal alumnus of the College, who was resident at Selwyn during the 1930s. Since the series began in 1994 we have attracted distinguished speaker including Sir Michael Howard, Sir Keith Thomas, Roy Porter, Ian Clark, Lawrence Freedman, Onora O'Neill, Niall Ferguson, Ian Kershaw, David Cannadine, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Quentin Skinner, Ludmilla Jordanova, Richard Carwardine and Judith Herrin.

 

 

Ms Kendall's lecture will take place on Friday May 1st at 5.30pm in Room LG19, Faculty of Law, Sidgwick Site - which is just two minutes' walk from the College. There is a Facebook event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/1414049742246223/, and please note that seating will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. A video of the lecture will be available online after the event.

 

The College congratulates three of its alumni on recent prestigious appointments.

Dr Nicolas Bell, who matriculated at Selwyn in 1991, has been named as the new Librarian of Trinity
College Cambridge. He will take up the position on 1 October, succeeding Professor David
McKitterick. Dr Bell is currently Curator of Music Collections at the British Library.

The Reverend Canon Chris Chivers, who read theology and religious studies at Selwyn in the 1990s,
has been selected as Principal of Westcott House in Cambridge. Click on this link to read the
announcement: http://www.westcott.cam.ac.uk/chris-chivers-appointed-principal/

Dr Dmitri Levitin has been appointed a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Dr Levitin took a BA in History (2007) and MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History
(2008) at Selwyn. You can read more about his work at

http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/people.php?personid=2275

 

Selwyn is welcoming back students for the Easter term with its trees in blossom in a wonderful display across the College gardens. Our cover photograph shows the Prunus TaiHaku Cherry Trees outside Ann’s Court along the walk towards West Road, and the trees are at their best too outside the main entrance in Grange Road.

 

Exams lie ahead for many of of our students, but there will also be key College events in the coming weeks:

• 
  Friday May 1st sees Bridget Kendall, the BBC diplomatic correspondent, deliver the Ramsay Murray lecture about Vladimir Putin and the west. All are welcome, and details will follow soon.
  


• 
  On Saturday May 16th the College will be marking the life and career of Professor William Brock, who died last year at the age of 98.
  


• 
  Saturday June 6th is the Lyttelton dinner for our major benefactors.
  


• 
  Saturday June 20th marks the return of the Selwyn May Ball.
  


• 
  Friday June 26th sees the main degree ceremony and celebration for new graduates.
  


• 
  Friday July 3rd is our commemoration of benefactors at which we welcome back alumni and friends for a Chapel service and dinner.
  

Selwyn welcomed back students who had matriculated in 1965 and 1975 for a reunion dinner on Saturday, April 11th. The event coincided with the first rowing of the women's Boat Race on the Tideway in London, and alumni and current students gathered in the College bar to watch the women's and men's races. There was a disappointing outcome in both competitions for Cambridge, but Selwyn was proud to have one of its students taking part in the historic women's event. Hannah Evans rowed at stroke in the Cambridge boat, and her achievement was applauded at the dinner. The Master of Selwyn, Roger Mosey, congratulated Oxford on their win, but added: "Today the result doesn't matter as much as the event itself. It's a great day for women's sport, and we're thrilled that a Selwynite was part of it."

 

Hannah will continue her studies for a PhD in Physics. She is working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and will be heading to Geneva now the demands of Blue Boat rowing are over.

 

Meanwhile, some of the media coverage of the event noted that some at Selwyn have not always been supportive of women rowers. It was reported that "as late as 1962, the captain of Selwyn College at Cambridge was moved to write to the university's women's boat club to chastise them for perpetrating something that was 'a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous.'" You can read the full story about the long battle for equality at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rowing/32130222

 

Easter Monday saw the College’s annual party and Easter Egg Hunt for the children of Fellows, staff
and graduate students. There was a lunch in Hall, with sausages and chips on the menu, and then
participants in the hunt assembled in the College garden.

A star attraction this year was a giant tortoise, brought along by Selwyn’s veterinary Fellow,
Stuart Eves.

But the greatest satisfaction seemed to be for those with most chocolate in their bags at the end
of the Egg Hunt!

One of Selwyn’s Fellows, the neuroscientist Fabian Grabenhorst, was featured on a BBC One science programme this week. He
was interviewed for ’The Truth About Fat’, seeking to discover whether our brains are hard-wired to like fats. Keen-eyed
observers will note that he was filmed in the Diamond in Cripps Court. You can watch the whole programme on the BBC iPlayer,
and it’s available for the rest of April at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b05psf4l/the-truth-about-3-fat

 

 

Selwyn’s Hannah Evans (second left in the photograph below) will be competing in the first women’s Boat Race to be held on the Tideway in London. The women’s event has been moved to the same day and location as the men’s, and it will take place – with live television coverage – on Saturday, April 11th.

 

 

 

Hannah is a PhD student in Physics, and she has a previous Dark Blue allegiance from her time as an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford. But she didn’t row there at University level, and tells us that the Boat Race has only been an aim since her arrival at Selwyn. “When I came to Cambridge to start my PhD last year I decided that I would like to see how far I could get at the university level. I was selected for the reserve crew last year and raced in the Blondie versus Osiris race at Henley where we lost by half a length. After that, I kept rowing and competed in quite a few summer regattas, and I also raced for Selwyn in May bumps. We started training in September for the 2015 Boat Race, and the selection for the Blue Boat has been going on all year performances on the water and also in the gym being taken into account. It has been a very challenging year but I am very excited and honoured to be part of the first Women's Boat Race on the Tideway.”

 

There’s more about Hannah and the Cambridge crew at http://theboatraces.org/cuwbc, and live coverage on the day starts on BBC One at 4.15pm.