We are delighted that the SMLC will host a Midlands4Cities Collaborative Doctoral Award:

'Refugee Narratives: World University Service's Ethiopian and Eritrean Scholarship Programmes in the Light of Current Practice'.

More information is available at:

• Chancellor's International Scholarships: the scheme is aimed at students from outside the UK and includes Overseas applicants, including students from the EU.
• China Scholarship Council / University of Warwick Scholarships: this scheme will fund 25 students across various subjects for up to 4 years, with the University covering the full cost of tuition fees and CSC providing a maintenance stipend and return international airfare between the UK and China. Note that Foreign Languages and Literature is among the priority areas listed.
• Monash Warwick Alliance Scholarships (Warwick): this scheme is open to all students applying to Warwick for the Alliance Joint PhD. For 2021/22 entry there will be up to 3 scholarships available across the university.

The deadlines for these schemes are all on Thursday 21st January 2021, 23.59 GMT. Note that all supporting evidence (including transcripts and references) must be uploaded by the same time.

We welcome applications for our PhD programmes in:

• French and Francophone Studies
• German Studies
• Italian
• Hispanic Studies
• Translation and Transcultural Studies

Prospective applicants are encouraged to identify possible supervisors through our staff expertise pages. Early enquiries are strongly encouraged. Please send a draft proposal (up to 2 A4 pages) and CV to pglanguages@warwick.ac.uk by Friday 27 November 2020, 12 noon.

We continue to welcome enquiries also for the AHRC Midlands4Cities doctoral awards (deadline 13 January 2021).

As part of the Women in German Studies conference, Warwick is honoured to be hosting an online keynote lecture by Dr Rosemarie H. Peña, which will be open to all who register via the booking form (deadline: 3rd November).

Rosemarie H. Peña holds a PhD in Childhood Studies from Rutgers University-Camden where she also earned her MA in Childhood Studies and BAs in German and Psychology. She identifies as a dual heritage Black (Senegalese) German American transnational adoptee and is the founder and president of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA).

Rosemarie has published in several academic journals, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies (2020), and is a contributing author in five edited volumes. Her most recent essay, “Stories Matter: Contextualizing the Black German American Adoptee Experience(s)” is included in Marion Kraft’s edited volume Children of the Liberation: Transatlantic Experiences of Black Germans of the Postwar Generation (2019).

"Scholarly Activism: The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and Black German Studies in the United States"

Black Germans were among the first children whose natural lives would be forever altered by postwar “child-saving” initiatives that inspired the institutionalization of transnational adoption in the United States. The adoptees are thereby among the experiential pioneers of the juristic process effectuating multicultural families by awarding guardianship of children born to mothers in one country and culture to genetically unrelated persons living in another. For nearly three decades, Black Germans born in the wake of the World War II who grew up in Germany, Denmark, and the United States have been searching for their original families and sharing their life experiences.

As this postwar cohort re-emerges as a topic of academic interest, the adoptees and their non-adopted peers who grew up in Germany without their fathers are reconnecting with their biological kin. The U.S. adoptees are, therefore, concomitantly reuniting in discourse and actuality with other Black Germans having disparate backgrounds, cultural roots, and connections to Germany. Many of the adoptees, whose ages now range from the early sixties to mid-seventies, are learning about their German ancestral roots in dialogue with journalists, academics, and filmmakers who are eager to hear their stories, write about them, and portray their adoption experiences in documentary films.

In her keynote, Rosemarie Peña will discuss the role of the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) with respect to Black German family and community reunification, and the expansion of Black German Studies in the U.S. as an interdisciplinary field of academic research.

Please register for the keynote lecture using this booking form by Tuesday 3rd November. Once registration has closed, you will be sent a link to join the virtual keynote.

Warwick is delighted to host the 32nd Annual, and 1st virtual, Women in German Studies conference on 5-7th November. The event will include a keynote lecture on “Scholarly Activism: The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and Black German Studies in the United States” from Dr Rosemarie Peña (Black German Heritage & Research Association), which is open to all, as well as a PG/ECR workshop on "Finding your Academic Voice" and a special workshop on online teaching. The full programme and details of how to register can be found on the conference website (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/ks/womeningermanstudies).

Raquel Navas, Teaching Fellow in Hispanic Studies, has been awarded with the 𝗔𝗦𝗘𝗟𝗘 (Asociación para la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera) 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗕𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗠𝗔 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 for her work on Linguist Landscapes as a tool to promote connections with the target language and culture. This award recognizes the best dissertation of the year and will publish Raquel's work in 2021.

For more information: Asele research prizes

Di Zhao, PhD student in Translation and Cultures in Warwick's School of Modern Languages & Cultures, has published a translation into Chinese of the award-winning true-crime book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep (William Heinemann, 2019). The translation was published by Straits Literature and Art Publishing House in Fuzhou, China in July 2020. https://book.douban.com/subject/35092879/

Provincialising Nature: Politics of the Environment in Latin America, edited by Dr Michela Coletta, Hispanic Studies, now open access

https://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/provincialising-nature

Over several years, working with Dr Benedict Schofield (KCL) James Hodkinson has curated an important volume of essays that asses the state of German Studies in education, but also in the worlds beyond it. Published by Camden House (Boydell & Brewer), James has written a blog reflecting on the book and its relevance. Read the entry here!

The account of bureaucracy under neoliberal capitalism which I present in this article, under the innocuous heading it prefers to use to describe itself (‘governance’), draws together recent critical work by the late David Graeber, Wendy Brown, William Davies and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, which it repositions in relation to Jacques Rancière’s conception of the ‘police order’. I suggest that the massive production of insecurity by proliferating bureaucracies which structure neoliberalism’s project of competitive hierarchisation creates the ideal conditions for a vicious circle of securitarian inflation. To read the full article click here

The combination of spectacle and elaborate scenery, orchestra and obligatory dance number made early nineteenth-century French melodrama expensive to produce and, consequently, the genre is strongly associated with the Parisian boulevard theatres. Provincial performances required creative solutions, not least because the music composed for – and central to – the Paris performances remained in manuscript form and was not, therefore, distributed automatically to regional theatres, whereas the play text was printed and widely available. This means that different scores existed for the same play, opening up the possibility that provincial audiences were presented with a different concept of melodrama to Parisians. Using as a case study La Forteresse du Danube (1805) by self-proclaimed leading exponent of the genre, Guilbert de Pixerécourt, this article will explore how comparing scores through performance-led research can further our understanding of the changes needed to make a Paris hit performable in the provinces.

For more, see Studi francesi, 191 (autumn 2020), pp. 248-360.

Douglas Morrey has recently published a major new appraisal of the legacy of the French New Wave

The book looks at both the subsequent careers of New Wave filmmakers and the work of later film directors and film movements in France. It is organized around a series of key moments from the past 50 years of French cinema in order to show how the meaning and legacy of the New Wave have shifted over time and how the priorities, approaches and discourses of filmmakers and film critics have changed over the years. Morrey tackles key concepts such as the auteur, the relationship of form and content, gender and sexuality, intertextuality and rhythm. Filmmakers discussed include Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol and Rohmer plus Philippe Garrel, Luc Besson, Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Christophe Honoré, François Ozon and Jacques Audiard.

Oliver Davis and Chris Watkin co-hosted a major virtual colloquium in July on 'The Ends of Autonomy'. The conference had over 100 registered participants from all continents of the world. Recordings of some of the papers can be accessed here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/beyondautonomy/warwick. Oliver and Chris will host a second Monash colloquium on the same theme on December 15 and 16 2020.

Philippe Le Goff has just published with Bloomsbury a major new book on the nineteenth-century French political activist and leader Auguste Blanqui.

Few individuals made such an impact on nineteenth-century French politics as Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Political organiser, leader, propagandist and prisoner, Blanqui was arguably the foremost proponent of popular power to emerge after the French Revolution. Practical engagement in all the major uprisings that spanned the course of his life - 1830, 1848, 1870-71 - was accompanied by theoretical reflections on a broad range of issues, from free will and fatalism to public education and individual development. Since his death, however, Blanqui has not been simply overlooked or neglected; his name has widely become synonymous with theoretical misconception and practical misadventure. Auguste Blanqui and the Politics of Popular Empowerment offers a major re-evaluation of one the most controversial figures in the history of revolutionary politics. The book draws extensively on Blanqui's manuscripts and published works, as well as writings only recently translated into English for the first time. Through a detailed reconstruction and critical analysis of Blanqui's political thought, it challenges the prevailing image of an unthinking insurrectionist and rediscovers a forceful and compelling theory of collective political action and radical social change. It suggests that some of Blanqui's fundamental assumptions - from the insistence on the primacy of subjective determination to the rejection of historical necessity - are still relevant to politics today.

Professor Jim Shields discussed Macron’s government reshuffle and presidential reset in the France 24 Debate and News; he gave interviews to the Colombian daily Portafolio and online news site The Local (here and here) and had columns published in the Spanish daily La Razón on France’s municipal elections, rounds one and two.

We've now got an SMLC LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13877964

The hope is that it will allow languages alumni to share their experiences of professional life after Warwick with fellow alumni and to offer advice and tips to current students. Join now!