BARDA Award for Peter Thompson

The Department is delighted to announce that Dr Peter Thompson has been awarded £86,606 by the British Academy for a 3-year BARDA Research Development Award to support the work of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies. The funds will be used to support a series of Symposia and Conferences on Bloch-related themes - and in particular the Return of Religion.

The Department has been awarded a subsidy of €16,584.45 by the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) to update two Dutch internet grammars for beginners and for advanced learners. The grammars are a component of the Virtual Department of Dutch (http://www.dutch.ac.uk/). The main improvement will be the addition of a large bank of exercises, but the content of the grammars will also be revised and extended, and their presentation enhanced. The project will be carried out by Roel Vismans and An Vanderhelst.

Duke University Press have agreed to publish Dr Peter Thompson's forthcoming edited volume "Ernst Bloch and the Privatisation of Hope" in their SIC series, edited by Slavoj Zizek. Contributors will include Slavoj Zizek, Juergen Moltmann, Jan Robert Bloch, Roland Boer, Tom Nairn and others. The volume will appear in 2009 to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Bloch's "Das Prinzip Hoffnung".