News Articles

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.

Selwyn’s undergraduates are away from the College until mid-April, but there’s a programme of events continuing in the College through the vacation.

Saturday March 28th saw a Congregation for those returning to Cambridge to be awarded their Masters degrees. Selwyn’s contingent is pictured below as they were lining up in Old Court before setting off for the Senate House. Later there was an MA celebration dinner in College. We were delighted to welcome back so many former students and their guests.

You can read more about the degree ceremonies here: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/students/studentregistry/current/newstud/graduation/index.html.

On Easter Monday, April 6th, there will be a children’s party and Easter Egg Hunt. Children of Fellows, staff and graduate students are invited; and lunch in Hall will be followed by a chase for chocolate eggs around the gardens.

Alumni will be coming to the College on Saturday, April 11th, for a reunion for those who matriculated in 1965 and 1975. Before dinner, there’ll be a chance to cheer on one of our current students – Hannah Evans – who is in the Cambridge crew for the women’s Boat Race. This year for the first time the women’s race will be rowed on the Tideway shortly before the men’s event. Click this link for information about the Cambridge crew: http://theboatraces.org/cuwbc.

 

Deputy head porter Bob Watson with a spring in his step outside Ann’s Court.

Congratulations to Tom Hollander, who studied English at Selwyn, on being named Best Actor at the Royal Television
Society’s 2015 programme awards. Tom was honoured for his portrayal of Dylan Thomas in the BBC’s "A Poet In New
York". A review of the programme at the time said Tom was "startlingly good" in the role, and we congratulate him now
on his recognition by the television industry.

The College held its annual lunch for parents on Saturday March 14th, to coincide with students getting ready to go home for the Easter vacation. The parents invited were those with undergraduates in their first year, and almost 200 people had lunch in the College Hall.

The Master, Roger Mosey, explained the reason for the event in a short speech at the end of the lunch: "We want to thank you for the support you've given to your students over the years. Parents are very much part of this community, and we're looking at more ways in which we can involve parents and families in what we do. It's partly that family involvement strengthens us all: to use a political phrase, we're all in this together. We don't want the feeling that your student goes off to somewhere you never see, and emerges as part of some kind of club from which feel the rest of the family feels excluded. It's partly because it's just a good thing to do: my own parents would have absolutely loved to have lunch in my Oxford college, but this would have been unheard of in the 1970s. What we also hope today is that this will help you fly the flag for Selwyn - so that you can tell people in your wider family or neighbourhood, or in schools your other children might go to, that this is a good place and one you'd recommend. "