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Calling all students: Survey on the Future of SMLC!

Please read more to find out about this important survey - and take part. Have your voice heard at this pivotal point in our School's journey!


University of Warwick Graduate Scheme

We are delighted to announce the launch of the University of Warwick Graduate Scheme. The three-year programme commences on 4th October 2021 and will involve working on a number of high-profile projects whilst obtaining on-the-job learning as well as a structured professional development programme and a project management qualification.

Applications are open until 25th June 2021 and internal staff applications are welcomed. Find out more on our webpages or come along to one of our virtual information events to hear more about the scheme from previous Warwick graduate trainees.

Please email any questions to gradscheme@warwick.ac.uk

 

Wed 26 May 2021, 13:55 | Tags: Modern Languages - News Postgraduates Undergraduate

Award of Rome Prize

Warmest congratulations to Mary Jane Dempsey, current visiting research student at Warwick and also PhD candidate at Cornell, on the award by the American Academy in Rome of the Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies, 2021-22. Mary Jane's project, which she first developed as a researcher in Italian at Warwick in 2016-17, is 'Remember to Forget: Migration, Gender, and Transnational Identities in Twentieth-Century Italy'.


New monograph: "Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization, 1945-1960" by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, published by Liverpool UP (April 2021)


Oliver Davis and David Lees appointed as Editors of Modern & Contemporary France

The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France announced today the appointment of its new Editorial Team to lead the future development of the journal Modern & Contemporary France, now in its fifth decade, two of whom are based in French Studies here in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures:

  • Executive Editor: Professor Oliver Davis
  • Co-Editor: Dr David Lees

Modern & Contemporary France is an internationally prominent peer-reviewed journal, offering a scholarly view of France from 1789 to the present day. It is a multi-disciplinary journal, drawing particularly on the work of scholars in history and in cultural, literary and post-colonial studies, in film and media studies and in the political and social sciences.

Oliver and David are looking forward to taking over from the current team in September.


PhD funding opportunities for International Students

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures welcomes applications from outstanding postgraduate students for the 2021 round of:
  • 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).


Lecture by Dr Rosemarie Peña (Black German Heritage & Research Association) on Thursday 5 November 2020, 17:30-19:00

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.


Di Zhao has published a Chinese translation of Lacey Cep's Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

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/



Dr James Hodkinson publishes a major volume surveying the position of German language culture in academia and beyond.

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!


new free-to-view article by Oliver Davis: 'Neoliberal capitalism's bureaucracies of "governance"'

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


New article: Kate Astbury and Diane Tisdall, ‘Sonorising « La Forteresse du Danube » : Functions of music in Parisian and provincial melodrama of the early nineteenth century’

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.



video message for finalists

Head of School Kate Astbury has an end of term message for finalists. You can listen to it here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/img_5704.mp4

We'll provide details of a virtual celebration of the end of term and of degree results in due course.

Stay safe, stay in touch and have a good summer.


video message for intermediate students

Head of School Kate Astbury has an end of term message for intermediate-year students. You can listen to it here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/img_5703.mp4

We gathered together some ideas for keeping up language learning for our offer holders but many work for more advanced linguists too - take a look: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/offerholder

Stay safe and have a good summer.


video message for first years

Head of School Kate Astbury has an end of term message for first years. You can listen to it here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/img_5702.mp4

We gathered together some ideas for keeping up language learning for our offer holders but many work for more advanced linguists too - take a look: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/applying/offerholder

We'll provide more suggestions of preparatory reading for year 2 in due course.

Stay safe and have a good summer.


Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres: 15th December 1942 - 23rd July 2019

It is with great sadness that we have to report that our colleague and friend Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres has passed away. Please click on the headline to read some dear memories from some of the people who knew him best.

Tue 30 Jul 2019, 17:01 | Tags: Modern Languages - News SMLC News Arts Faculty

SMLC students selected to join Brazilian summer school

At the start of 2019 Warwick was invited to nominate two students to attend the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)'s Summer School on Brazilian Studies. After a competitive selection process, Lucia Evans and Will Gennings from Warwick's School of Modern Languages and Cultures were awarded scholarships co-funded by UFMG and Warwick.


Professor Ingrid De Smet has been admitted as a member of the Academia Europaea

Professor Ingrid De Smet has been admitted as a member of the Academia Europaea (Section of Literary and Theatrical Studies). The Academia Europaea (formed in 1988) is the pan-European academy of science, humanities and letters, with a membership of over 3800 eminent scholars, drawn from all countries of Europe, and all disciplines, nationalities and geographical locations.


Multiple awards success for SMLC students and staff

Students and staff from across Warwick SMLC completed a clean sweep of Warwick awards.


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