Sir Michael Edwards, a founding member of the Department of French Studies at Warwick, has become the first Briton and first native English speaker to enter the prestigious Académie française, France's highest learned body charged with defending the purity of the French language. He was elected by standing members in 2013, and was received on 22 May 2014. He will occupy seat F31 in the Academy.

The Modern Languages subjects at Warwick achieved some impressive rankings in the 2015 Complete University Guide, published 12 May 2014. French moved up one place to 3^rd, and now sits above Cambridge and just behind Oxford. German moved up to 5^th position, on the heels of Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter. Italian is in 7^th position, on equal footing with St. Andrew’s. Our new Department of Hispanic Studies does not yet feature in these tables.

The next SFPS Postgraduate Study Day will be held on Thursday 5 June 2014, at the University of Warwick, in the Wolfson Exchange Centre. The theme of the day willl be: 'Migrations in Francophone Culture'. For full details of papers, location, and registration, see here.

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.

The Department of German Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Mary Cosgrove as Professor of German Studies from January 2015

Prof. Glave's Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh has been named a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Nonfiction. Many congratulations!!!

We are delighted to announce that the Language Centre and the Hispanic Studies department have been certified by Instituto Cervantes to allow students to take the Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (DELE). These diplomas, administered on behalf of Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, help to provide non-native Spanish speakers with a legitimate and certified method of proving their proficiency in the Spanish language.

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!

Warwick scholar Dr James Hodkinson, together with colleagues from his Occident-Orient Research Network, have published a volume of essays on the the still under-researched theme of Germanic, central and eastern European forms of Orientalism during the long nineteenth century.

Article published in the December 2013 E-Newsletter for Research Active Staff from the Learning and Development Centre. Full E-Newsletter can be accessed at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/ldc/researchers/about/newsletter_december_2013.pdf

The Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick currently has a thriving postgraduate research community with 18 PhD students, and welcomes applications for the following fully-funded PhD studentships (academic fees at home/Euro rates + maintenance or academic fees at overseas rates + maintenance) commencing October 2014.

* 3 prestigious Wolfson Foundation Scholarships in the Humanities recently awarded to the University in the areas of History, Literature and Languages. The first 2 Warwick Wolfson Languages Scholarships in 2012 and 2013 have gone to students from French Studies. The Wolfson scholarships include £6000 a year to spend on research travel, books, etc.

* 25 University-wide Chancellor's scholarship studentships for entry October 2014. Funding is for 3 1/2 years and covers academic fees at either home or EU rates + maintenance.

* 25 University-wide International Chancellor's scholarship studentships for entry October 2014. Funding covers academic fees at oveseas rates + maintenance.

The competitions are combined; applicants only apply once and will be considered for all awards for which they are eligible. More information about the application process can be found here.

To be considered for these awards, you must have applied for admission to the University by 13 January 2014.

Potential candidates should make contact initially with the Department's Director of Graduate Studies, Dr Katherine Astbury: katherine.astbury@warwick.ac.uk, preferably as soon as possible but by mid-December at the latest in order to allow sufficient time to work on the research proposal before the funding deadline.

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.

Dr. Oliver Davis, Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies, has edited an important new collection of specially commissioned critical essays on Rancière, published by Polity Press. Oliver has also contributed an essay and a substantial interview with Rancière to the volume. The essays encompass Rancière’s early historical research of the 1960s and '70s, his critique of pedagogy and his later political theory of dissensus and disagreement, his ongoing analysis of literature and 'the aesthetic regime of art', his resistance to psychoanalytic thinking, and his recent publications on film and film theory.

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.

Dr Fabienne Viala will deliver a paper, 'Sabotage, commemoration and performance: The Black Jacobins and Maryse Condé's An Tan Revolysion', at the conference The Black Jacobins Revisited, International Slavery Museum / The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 27-28 October 2013.

Conference Website.