Sophia Buck wins Sylvia Naish Lecture Prize

Merton Prize Scholar Sophia Buck has won the Sylvia Naish Lecture prize and will deliver her lecture on Friday 28 April at the German Postgraduate Symposium in Senate House, London.

The Sylvia Naish lecture prize is run by the Institute of Modern Languages Research. Each year, the winner of the competition is selected from among the proposals submitted by research students registered for higher degrees at Universities in the United Kingdom.

Sophia is a DPhil candidate in modern languages and her research concerns literary criticism and theory, European cultural thought, intercultural optics, knowledge transfer, and the history of the discipline. She is currently writing a doctoral thesis titled “Moscow – Berlin – Paris: Walter Benjamin’s Transnational Spaces of Comparison”. Since 2020, she has been an associate of the Research Training Group Transfer of Culture and “Cultural Identity”. German-Russian Contacts in the European Context in Freiburg. In 2021, she was a visiting researcher at the École normale supérieure Paris, and until summer 2022 a visiting researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin. In Berlin, she co-organised a conference on "Walter Benjamin in the East – Networks, Conflicts, and Reception" (https://jhiblog.org/2022/12/05/walter-benjamin-in-the-east-networks-conflicts-and-reception/). Since 2022, Sophia is also a Board Member of the International Walter Benjamin Society.

Sophia's lecture, entitled 'Baedeker durch das Geistige Paris'. Walter Benjamin's (National) Literary Histories as Travel Guides', took place on Friday 28 April at the German Postgraduate Symposium in London, Senate House.