The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick welcomes expressions of interest from early-career researchers who would like to apply to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme in 2016-17. Closing date for proposals: 16th September 2016. 

More information

Hispanic Studies have launched a research blog, where you can read about new research by members of the department. Read the first entry, Rosalía de Castro, un reto para los estudios hispánicos, by Honorary Associate Professor Helena González (Universitat de Barcelona) now!

Dr Peters will join Angolan art critic Adriano Mixinge at New York University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies on 6 November 2015, in A Conversation about History and Literature on Cuban-Angolan Relations. The conversation is part of the CLACS-hosted conference #CubAngola40: Rethinking the 1975 Africa-Cuban War. Click here to find out more!

Dr Hooper visited Cambridge on October 28th to present her current research to the Hispanic and Lusophone Research Seminar. Her paper, Ríos, fuentes, muelles, océanos: Hydropoetics and the Galician Cultural Imagination, takes the case of nineteenth-century Galicia - a crucial hub on global shipping networks - as a starting point to reflect on the implications of turning the gaze of Iberian cultural history outward towards the ocean. The paper reads the canonical poetry of Rosalia de Castro alongside forgotten works by the geographer Gabriel Castro Arias and the naval officer and novelist Patricio Montojo, to argue for the transformative potential of reading Galician cultural history from an oceanic rather than land-based perspective.

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick invites applications to the university’s annual funding competition for doctoral students, for entry in 2016-17.

SALTS (School of Languages at Lunchtime Series) is a new interdisciplinary research forum for the entire research community in the School of Modern Languages and beyond. The School strongly promotes interdisciplinary research across several fields including comparative medieval and early modern studies, Film History and Film Aesthetics, Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, Migration Studies, Translation Studies, Renaissance Studies, Memory Studies, Gender Studies and Disability Studies.

Members of our vibrant research community also engage in editorial and archival work, sociocultural and political contextualization, philosophical and theoretical interrogation, medical and psychiatric history. Their research addresses the urgent issues of linguistic, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity in Europe, Africa, North America, the Caribbean and Central and South America. By examining the reception and reshaping of philosophical, intellectual and literary traditions, they also contribute to a nuanced understanding of what is involved in transcultural and intercultural encounters and translations.

Designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue, SALTS adopts a dynamic and informal format. Presenters from a particular discipline will team up with a respondent from a different subject area who is working in a related field. A short paper or position statement will be circulated ahead of each lunchtime talk and form the basis for the response and the ensuing discussion.

Term 2 (1 - 2pm)

Week 4 (3 February) – Eliana Maestri (Italian) and Mary Harrod (French): Women’s Autobiography and Cultural Production - H545

Week 8 (2 March) – Santiago Oyarzabal (Hispanic) and Jenny Burns (Italian) – Politics on Screen - H060

Term 3 (1 - 2pm)

For all further information about SALTS, contact Professor Anne Fuchs, Director of Research, School of Modern Languages and Cultures.

Dr Michela Coletta (Hispanic Studies) is co-hosting a one-day conference at Senate House in London on Friday 22 May 2015. Nature and Knowledge in Latin America: New Historical Perspectives will bring together different historical perspectives on the study of nature in Latin America from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. It will approach the topic of historical understandings of landscapes, environment, natural resources, natural disasters, flora and fauna from interdisciplinary historical perspectives. Papers will contribute to our understanding of how scholars and communities in Latin America have historically engaged with the nature and the landscapes surrounding them, and the relationship of such engagement to broader intellectual, social, political and economic currents.

Professor Alison Ribeiro de Menezes will give the keynote address, 'Raising Spectres: Cultural Memory and the Necropolitics of Spain's Civil War Dead,' at a one-day conference on Competing Victimhoods in Spain and Italy to be hosted by the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin, on 22 May 2015.

Click here to see the full conference programme (PDF).

Associate Professor of Hispanic and Caribbean Studies, Fabienne Viala, is travelling to the Caribbean as a special guest at the inauguration on 10th May 2015 of the Memorial ACTe, the first public slavery memorial on the island of Guadeloupe. Click on the news headline above to read more!

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures was highly successful in the most recent national research exercise, the 2014 REF, with our research outputs ranked 5th in the UK. 79.7% of our work, and 100% of our environment, was judged to be world-leading or internationally excellent. With three of the four submissions ranked above us specialising entirely in Linguistics outputs, we are one of the very best UK institutions for comprehensive research in modern languages. This output ranking also places us above all other Russell Group universities, including Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, King's College London, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, and UCL. The School is also top-ranked for Modern Languages overall in the Midlands region.

Professor Seán Hand, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, commented: ‘We are delighted with this strong endorsement of our research capabilities across the whole of our School, in French, German, Italian and Hispanic Studies. As we do not pursue research in Linguistics, the proportion of our outputs deemed to be in the highest possible category of 'world-leading' also places us just behind Cambridge and Kent (which both also included Linguistics in their overall return). And our output's 'intensity' ranking (which takes account of the proportion of staff entered into the exercise), again ignoring Linguistics returns, places us 2nd in the UK, just behind Cambridge. In conjunction with our University’s overall rankings, where we are rated the 7^th best research university in the UK, and with our status as the current Times/Sunday Times University of the Year, this result really emphasizes how Warwick offers a truly world-class research-intensive environment for the comprehensive study of modern languages.’

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick again welcomes applications for the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme.

Dr Christabelle Peters (Hispanic Studies / IAS) is now a member of the research team for the UNESCO project ‘A Rota do Escravo’ based in the Centro de Estudos sobre África, Ásia e América Latina at the Universidade Técnica in Lisbon.

Warwick Hispanic Studies are delighted to welcome 2014 Leverhulme Visiting Professor Thomas Glave, who will be joining the department from January-December 2014. Click on the headline above to find out more about Professor Glave and his work!

Fabienne Viala will speak on bilingual Creole/French street theatre in Martinique in the paper “Performance and Collective Memory in Martinique: Teat’lari and the Caribbean anamnesis,” to be delivered at the Islands in Between: Language, Literature and Cultures of the Eastern Caribbean, Aruba, 6-10 November 2013.

Conference website.

Christabelle Peters will be giving a paper entitled "Présence Africaine and the Post-WWII Construction of Mobile Africanicities" at The Traveller’s Eye: Narrating Dis/Location in 20th Century Travel Literature conference, to take place at the University of Bucharest from October 24^th-26^th 2013.

 Conference website.

Kirsty Hooper will speak on 'Extraimperial Archives: Other Mobilities and Memories in the Hispanic Transatlantic World' at the Iberian & Latin American Transatlantic Studies Symposium to be held at the University of Oregon from 1-2 November 2013.

Conference website.

Congratulations to Dr Christabelle Peters, who has been awarded a Santander Mobility grant to fund research visits to Bahia, Minas Gerais and São Paulo in order to investigate the concepts of ‘Bahianess’(bahianidade) and ‘mixedness’ (mestiçagem). Dr Peters plans to travel to Brazil in May 2014.