Honour for french Professor

A University of St Andrews Professor is to receive a prestigious honour from the French Government for “services to French culture”.

Professor Malcolm Scott, Professor of French and Head of the School of Modern Languages, will be designated Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques at a ceremony at the French Embassy in London on Friday 2 June. The honour is conferred on relatively small numbers of non-French nationals.

Professor Scott has been a long term promoter of French culture, having recently completed the first ever study of the relationship between President Charles De Gaulle and the Nobel Prize winning writer Francois Mauriac. The book, prefaced by Mauriac’s son (who was also De Gaulle’s press agent) was well received in France and resulted in invitations to lecture at the Charles de Gaulle Foundation, the Association of the Free French and the British Council in Bordeaux.

Professor Scott is now working on an edition of Mauriac’s and De Gaulle’s writings, as well as on a further book on Mauriac’s intellectual relationship with another great French novelist, André Gide.

Professor Scott said, “It is quite hard to persuade the French of the quality of contributions from non-French scholars to the study of French culture. It is even harder to persuade my French in-laws and my two bi-national children! So I am very pleased and deeply touched, for personal as well as professional reasons, to have received this recognition.”

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Issued by Beattie Media on behalf of the University of St Andrews For more information please contact Claire Grainger on 01334 462530, 07730 415 015 or email [email protected] Ref: malcolmscott honour/standrews/chg/31may2000