Catriona Seth elected to Académie Royale de Belgique

Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Catriona Seth, has been appointed an associate member of the Académie Royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique.

A scholar of French literature and the cultural history of the Enlightenment, Catriona Seth is Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls.

In her vote of thanks on behalf of the new associate members, Professor Seth, who spent her adolescence in Brussels, recalled that the first president of the Belgian Royal Academy was an Englishman, John Turberville Needham, and noted that the UK and Belgium have always enjoyed close ties. She quoted Germaine de Staël on whom she has worked extensively and whose words, she stressed, are fitting for the field of academia and elsewhere: “we should do well in all countries to welcome foreign thoughts and foreign sentiments, for such hospitality makes the fortune of those who exercise it”.