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Were you helped with School Fees by The Frank Buttle Trust
Claire
Shouksmith (1991-94) is looking for help to
MOSA members address list is available from the school (cost £5). There
are many vacancies on MOSA committees.
This Day in History This Day in History provided by The Free Dictionary |
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The Previous
Past MOSA President
2007 - 2009
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a past President of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Council Member of the Royal Society. Since 2005 she has been President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science - Physics and Astronomy Section and a Patron of the Einstein Year/International Year of Physics. She is a Member of the InterAcademy Council panel on Women for Science. It was while she was working as a graduate student at Cambridge that she was involved in the discovery of pulsars, rapidly rotating neutron stars which give off signals detectable on Earth. Professor Bell Burnell discovered the pulsars when she noticed some unusual marking on chart paper from a radio telescope she was operating. The discovery opened up a new branch of astrophysics and led to a Nobel Prize for her supervisor. She later worked at the University of Southampton, University College London and at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, as well as raising a family. She has served on the Council of the Open University and has recently completed a term as President of the Royal Astronomical Society. During her distinguished career the Oppenheimer prize, the Michelson medal, the Tinsley prize and the Magellanic Premium have been awarded to her by learned bodies in the US, and the UK's Royal Astronomical Society has presented her with the Herschel Medal. UK and US universities have conferred honorary doctorates on her, and she holds an Honorary Fellowship in New Hall, her former Cambridge College. She was made a CBE in 1999 and that year also won the Edinburgh Medal for services to science and society. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003. She was made a Dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2007. The public appreciation and understanding of science have always been important to her, and she is much in demand as a speaker and broadcaster. In 1999 she toured Australia giving the Women in Physics Lecture. In her spare time she walks, gardens, sews, swims and knits, listens to choral music and is active in the Religious Society of Friends |
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Past MOSA President (2003 - 2004) , Ruth Finnegan writes I was born in Londonderry,
N. Ireland, and was at The Mount 1947-1951, ending up as I’ve authored or edited various publications on anthropological aspects of communication and expression, among them books on Oral Literature in Africa (1970/1976), Oral Poetry (1977/1992), Literacy and Orality (1988), The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), and South Pacific Oral Traditions (jt ed. 1995). My most recent book is about the multisensory nature of communication and how this can vary across cultures (Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Interconnection, 2002). I was honoured by being elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996 (currently on its Council) and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford in 1997, and in 2000 received an OBE for services to social sciences. At present I’m involved in various academic projects, including preparing a compilation of essays on story-telling, language and unwritten literature in Africa. I still enjoy singing in amateur choirs (started off by that wonderful Mount-Bootham choir led by ‘Percy’), walking the dogs in the local woods with my husband, and engaging in mutual learning with our four young grandchildren.
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grammar school. Access to the school
library gave me an enduring love of literature, which occasionally got me
into trouble at school, since I frequently read under the desk during
lessons. After five very happy years at The Mount from 1946 to 1952, I
went on to Oxford to read German and French, spending my afternoons
rock-climbing on a railway bridge, and my evenings singing in several
choirs. Teaching seemed to be the obvious career, so I started my career
in Spalding, and discovered to my amazement that I loved it. Marriage and
the birth of two sons interrupted my career briefly, but I returned to The
Mount in 1961 as a part-time member of the Modern Languages Department.
head girl in my final term. I then studied classics at Oxford (1952-6),
but as a graduate switched to social anthropology and after fieldwork
among the Limba people of northern Sierra Leone in the 1960s completed a
doctoral thesis (and later a book) about Limba stories and story-telling.
I met my husband David Murray as a fellow postgraduate student at Oxford
and after our marriage in 1963 we taught at universities in Africa: first
in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then for nearly 5 years in Nigeria.
Returning to the UK in 1969 with our three young daughters, we were among
the first academic staff to join the then-new Open University. Apart from
some periods abroad, most memorably in Fiji 1975-8, I’ve remained at the
OU ever since, and have greatly relished tackling the challenges presented
by its distance-teaching system, one of the highlights in recent years
being the chance to co-operate with students in their projects on family
and community history. I ‘retired’ in 1999 but in practice continue as
Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor.