St Andrews honours two St John’s Fellows

Professor Terence Cave CBE FBA, Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite, Emeritus Fellow and Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, is a leading figure in French and literary studies who has influenced the understanding of literature for almost sixty years. The Degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Cave at St Andrews on 13 June.

Known for his contributions to French Renaissance studies (The Cornucopian Text, 1979; Pré-histoires I and II, 1999 and 2001), Professor Cave has also written on Aristotelian poetics (Recognitions, 1988) and on the relations between literature and music (Mignon’s Afterlives, 2011). In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500; he subsequently directed the Balzan project ‘Literature as an object of knowledge’, which explored cognitive approaches to literature. His books Thinking with Literature (2016), Reading Beyond the Code (jointly edited with Deirdre Wilson; 2018), and Live Artefacts (2022) are among the outcomes of this project.

Professor Linda McDowell CBE MA MPhil PhD DLitt FBA, Emerita Research Fellow and Professor Emerita of Human Geography, is an ethnographer of work and employment with interests in the connections between economic restructuring and divisions of labour in Great Britain, in migration and in feminist theory and methodology. The Degree of Doctor of Science was conferred on Professor McDowell at St Andrews on 21 June.

One of the leading figures in academic Geography, Professor McDowell's research has focused on understanding the implications of economic and social restructuring in Britain. She has completed a range of studies involving interviews, including with bankers in the City of London, with young unskilled men searching for employment, with European migrant women workers in the immediate post World War II period, with South Asian women strikers in the 1970s, as well as a large study of women migrants who came to seek work in the UK between 1945 and 2010. This was published as a monograph Migrant Women’s Voices (Bloomsbury 2016). The Royal Geographical Society awarded Professor McDowell both the Back Award for contributions to economic geography (in 1998) and the Victoria Medal (in 2014) for her research in human geography, focusing on the changing nature of employment in Britain. Professor McDowell is currently finishing a Leverhulme Trust-funded study of inequality and (un)employment in English coastal towns.

Our warm congratulations to Linda and Terence on this recognition of their distinction.