SMLC - News and events

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.

Many congratulations to Warwick French Studies PhD students Hannah Grayson, Rebecca Pillière and Clare Siviter, who have received commendations in the Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence for Postgraduates who Teach (WATE PGR).

Warwick Hispanic Studies' Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is in Dublin this weekend (2-4 October) for the ISLA Irish, Spanish, Latin American Literary Festival hosted by Dublin's Instituto Cervantes. Writers, readers and critics from all three places will come together for panels, interviews, conversations and presentations. Check out the programme here!

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.

The most recently published Complete University Guide (2016) sees German Studies at Warwick rise a further two places to 3^rd position in its national league table, placing Warwick German just behind Cambridge and Durham, and ahead of Newcastle, Oxford, King’s College London, and St Andrews.

Dr Mary Harrod (French Studies) appeared on BBC Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' programme on Thursday 9th July 2015 to discuss French intellectual culture.

Dr Seán Allan (German Studies) Screening Art. Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema

Congratulations to the winners, runners-up and commended entrants of the Poetry competition organised as part of the 'Troubadours, trouvères and the Crusades' project led by Professor Linda Paterson (French Studies). The standard of entries was especially high; well done to all!

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!

Professor Seán Hand, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick, will participate in the international symposium in the HERCuLES series jointly organised by the Academia Europaea and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, on Emerging Models of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: from Books to MOOCs, at the Wenner-Gren Center Stockholm, from May 21-23, 2015. For more information see here.

Professor Seán Hand, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, will give the opening address at the Levinas Reading conference to be held at the University of Chicago, April 8-9, 2015. Featuring speakers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Adriaan Peperzak, the international conference is sponsored by Chicago’s Divinity School, Martin Marty Center, and Philosophy Department, the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Chicago France Center. More information here.

As part of Warwick’s day-long celebration on 10 March of International Women’s Day, the School of Modern Languages and Cultures congratulated its large cohort of students who recently graduated from Warwick’s 2015 ‘Sprint’ female personal and professional development programme. In thanking the students for their participation and commitment, Dr. Joanne Lee spoke of the continung need to develop female leaders, especially those with multi-lingual skills and real international experience.

Four PhD students in the School have been successful in their bids to win funding from Warwick's Humanities Research Centre to stage their own events and projects.

Congratulations to our own David Lees, who successfully defended his PhD thesis on documentary film produced by the Vichy regime during the Occupation of France, including in terms of the continuity of themes propounded between the Third Republic and the Vichy regime. David's external examiners (pictured) were Dr Jackie Clarke (Glasgow) and Dr Steve Wharton (Bath). David's thesis was supervised by Professor Nick Hewlett and Dr Jessica Wardhaugh, both of French Studies in the School of Modern languages and Cultures.

Hispanic Studies are delighted to welcome Visiting Associate Professor Helena González Fernández to Warwick. Helena is a specialist in Galician Studies, contemporary literature and culture and gender studies at the Universitat de Barcelona, where she directs the Centre Dona I Literatura. She will be in Warwick from March to May 2015.