Taylorian 2020

40 News News Oliver Lavelle’s essay commended in Oxford’s Julia Wood History Prize Oliver’s ambitious essay ranged widely across the intellectual and political worlds of the nineteenth century to assess Nietzsche’s claim that nations are ‘constructed’ rather than ‘naturally born’. Moving confidently across the nineteenth century, the essay began with the folktales of the Brothers Grimm and the romantic nationalism of Herder and Fichte before engaging in a sustained analysis of the intellectual and institutional roles played by nationalist historians in the aftermath of German unification in 1871 in constructing a national identity for the new Reich. Oliver thus traced the shift from the ‘liberal pluralism’ of Herder and Fichte to the exclusivist and propagandist Pan-Germanism of the early twentieth century, and therefore from a genuine to an artificial organicism in theories of German nationalism. This is not an easy field, particularly for a newcomer to German history, and the History Department would therefore like to extend its warmest congratulations to Oliver for his richly deserved success. Mr P D Hoyle Ishy Levy and Vincent Mastin’s essays commended in Fitzwilliam College Essay Competition Ishy Levy and Vincent Mastin (both L6th) have each been commended for their entries to the Classics Essay Competition at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Ishy, addressing the question of whether Classics is ‘merely the study of elite dead men’, argued that Greek myth offers a rebuttal to this accusation. Vincent, tackling the question of whether literature needs to be studied in the original language, argued that reading in translation forces us to see a text through the interpretive lens of the translator, while reading a text in the original language allows the reader to judge the nuances for themselves. Ms M A Bergquist Thom Haynes’s essay commended in Bio-sciences Essay Competition Thom’s entry to the Bio-sciences Essay Competition 201, run in collaboration with the University of Gloucester and marked by Professor Adam Hart and Julia Webb, was deemed to be excellent and demonstrated his genuine interest in Biology. The judges shortlisted his essay as one of the top ten nationally. Mrs S N Stuteley Samir Sardana awarded second prize in Gonville and Caius Schools’ Prize in Engineering This year, the task was ‘to devise a sustainable strategy to power the UK’s electricity supply’. My entry recognised the impact of climate change and focused on harnessing the limitless power of the increasingly extreme weather in the UK, Essay Prizes and Academic Competitions: 2019-20 Highlights Isaac Bettridge Oliver Lavelle Vincent Mastin and Ishy Levy Thom Haynes Samir Sardana