Karen Hewitt, PSU Emeritus Professor, was awarded an Order of the British Empire

Mrs. Karen Hewitt, Emeritus Professor of PSU, was awarded an Order of the British Empire by Decree of the British Queen Elizabeth II for services to building academic and cultural understanding between the UK and Russia. As a knighthood the Order is a part of the British system of awards and has been given annually since 1890 on the New Year eve.

 

According to Vladimir Malanin, PSU President, it is a symbolic and honorary award. “It is very nice that our collaboration with Karen Hewitt became the basis of her systematic, successful and effective work on the development of relations in the field of education with Oxford University, the city of Perm, Perm region and Russia. It gave the push to the development of humanitarian cooperation of Great Britain and Russia. Karen has done a lot for this”.

 

Since 1991 Mrs. Karen Hewitt regularly has been coming to Perm for delivering lectures and classes to the PSU students of the Humanities. She is an initiator of making one-time visits and exchanges of faculties and graduates to a solid interaction of universities. For several years Karen Hewitt has been a leader of “Oxford – Perm” Association numbering several hundred English people who keep visiting Perm. 

 

Since 2005 an international seminar "Modern British Literature at Russian universities" funded by Oxford–Russia Fund and led by Karen Hewitt and Prof. Boris Proskurnin, Dean of the Faculty of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures is held annually at PSU. More than 150 teachers from 87 Russian and Byelorussian universities have become its members over the years. For every workshop session in September Karen invites leading experts on modern British literature from the UK universities. Such prominent English writers as Hilary Mantel, Adam Thorpe, Jill Dawson, Esther Freud worked with the Literature Seminar participants.