 | Professor Philip Ford
Professor of French and Neo-Latin Literature, University of Cambridge (H5) French and Neo-Latin literature, with special emphasis on the relationship between humanism and writing; George Buchanan, Ronsard, Renaissance mythography and the reception of Homer in the Renaissance
Philip Ford was born in Ilford, where he attended the County High School before going up to King’s College, Cambridge to study French and Latin. The presence there of Patrick Wilkinson and Robert Bolgar nurtured his interest in the classical tradition, and in 1972 he began a PhD in the relatively unusual area at that time of neo-Latin literature, under the supervision of one of the British pioneers in the field, Ian McFarlane. A research fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge gave the opportunity to work on French Renaissance poetry (Ronsard). Following a lectureship in the French Department of the University of Aberdeen for three and a half years, he returned to the Cambridge French Department in 1982. Since then, he has continued to work on both French and neo-Latin authors. In 1985, he organised the first of what has become a series of colloquia on the French Renaissance, and he was a founder member of the Cambridge Society for Neo-Latin Studies. His interests include cooking, travel, and learning new languages. ‘It is an enormous honour to be elected to a fellowship of the British Academy. I have benefited a great deal in the past from various Academy awards, including conference grants and a two-year Research Readership which enabled me to write my latest book on the reception of Homer in the Renaissance. I look forward to contributing to the Academy’s work in the future, including their invaluable efforts on the promotion of language learning in the UK, which has suffered so much in recent years.’ |
