SMLC - News and events

Warwick German Studies is second to top in the table of UK German degree courses in the Sunday Times University Guide League Tables

On our brand new BA in Modern Languages, you can study three languages: two major languages chosen from those taught by our French, German, Italian and Hispanic Studies departments, plus one minor language: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish.

Dr Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Associate Professor and Reader in the Department of French Studies at Warwick, has published V. Y. Mudimbe. Undisciplined Africanism with Liverpool University Press. This major monograph charts the intellectual history of the seminal Congolese philosopher, epistemologist, and philologist from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring his major essays and novels, and demonstrating that Mudimbe’s intellectual career has been informed by a series of decisive dialogues with some of the key exponents of Africanism (Herodotus, EW Blyden, Placide Tempels), continental and postcolonial thought (Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Claude Lévi-Strauss), and African thought and philosophy from Africa and the diaspora (L.S. Senghor, Patrice Nganang, and Achille Mbembe).

The Department of French Studies was once again highly successful in the recent Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence (WATE) for those PGR students who teach. Jonathan Durham, a PhD student in the department, was one of five winners of the WATE PGR Awards, winning a cash prize of £500 to be spent on teaching and research activities. Dr Victoria Turner was commended in the same competition, winning a £200 prize. We congratulate Jonathan and Vicky on their success and wish them every success in their future plans. Jonathan is teaching as a lecteur at the University of Nanterre Paris X this academic year, while Vicky has joined the Department of French at the University of Leeds as a Teaching Fellow.

This latest success at the WATE awards, for which teachers are nominated by their colleagues and students, follows on from recognition of the department’s teaching excellence in 2012, where both Dr Cathy Hampton and David Lees won their respective teaching awards. To find out more about the teaching offered by Warwick's Department of French Studies, see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/french/prospective/ug/degrees/

The Department of French Studies at the University of Warwick will give vigorous support to outstanding early-career applications to this year's British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme.

We encourage eligible candidates working in appropriate subject areas to select Warwick as the host institution, and to benefit from the support and guidance of both Department and Faculty expertise when preparing the application. All initial or informal enquiries should be directed to the Department’s Director of Graduate Studies, Dr Kate Astbury (katherine.astbury@warwick.ac.uk). Draft applications should then reach the Department by 22 September, for eventual submission to the British Academy by their deadline of 9 October.

The Department energetically maintains a long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary research in French and francophone literature, history, thought, and culture across a wide chronological range from the Middle Ages to the present.

Departmental members are also strongly engaged in several key University research centres, including the Centre for Caribbean Studies, the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, the Centre for Research in the History of Medicine, the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century Centre, and the Humanities Research Centre.

Details of our research activities and strengths can be viewed here.

Details of the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme can be viewed here.

Eligibility criteria are as follows:

1.Applicants must be supported by the UK host institution in which they wish to hold the Fellowship

2.Applicants must be within three years of the award of a doctorate (for the 2013-2014 competition this means either already having been awarded a doctoral degree following a viva voce examination held on or after 1 April 2011; or having a reasonable expectation that they will have submitted and had their thesis examined by 1 April 2014)

3.Applicants in the 2013-2014 competition awarded a PhD following a viva voce examination held prior to 1 April 2011 who are unable to offer extenuating circumstances, such as interruption to their academic career for maternity leave or illness, will not be considered

4.Applicants must be a UK or EEA national, or have completed a doctorate at a UK university. Any applicant who does not fall into one of these categories must demonstrate a strong prior association with the UK academic community, for example through already having been employed in a temporary capacity (longer than six months) at a UK university.

Jennifer Burns and Fabio Camilletti are co-organizers of the interim conference in 2014 of the Society for Italian Studies. The conference - Interstitial Italy: Reassessing global questions through the 'peculiar' Italian case - will take place on 27th-28th March 2014 at the British School at Rome.

The latest QS World University Rankings table of universities that are under 50 years old, published on Tuesday 11 June 2013, has once again placed the University of Warwick at 3rd in the world. This also makes it the highest ranked European university.

This project is funded by an AHRC Research Networking award, under the Care for the Future theme. It will run from July 2012 to Spring 2014, and has a lively programme of upcoming events inthe UK, Italy and Germany. Including two conferences, one workshop, and a seminar series, overlapping with an itinerant artistic exhibition and two film screenings.

The 'Roman Modernities' network will allow scholars, artists, and urban planners to engage in joint enquiry on Rome as a paradigmatic location for reconfiguring the trajectory of Western modernity. It will interrogate existing/potential representations of the city from a strongly multi-disciplinary perspective.

On 20th May 2013, Warwick Hispanic Studies was excited to host the IV Galician Encontro for UK-based researchers in Galician Studies.

Nicki Williams and Dorothy Allen-Pickard have won The Guardian/Intergenerational Foundation/NUS film competition in the category of Young filmmaker documentary for their short film 'In the Name of Greatness'. Nicki, who graduated from Warwick in 2012 in English and Italian Literature, wrote and performed the poem featured in the film. The poem is combined with images to tackle questions of debt, greed, consumerism and the need for community. The film can be viewed at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2013/may/08/documentary-award-winner-name-greatness-video?INTCMP=SRCH

Warwick university is blazing a trail in working with other universities internationally to extend the reach and quality of our research, the scope of our teaching and the opportunities we can offer students and staff alike. Warwick is cooperating closely with Monash University in Melbourne Australia. The Department of German Studies at Warwick already has connections with German at Monash. Now a new joint PhD programme has been launched with funding - read on to find out more!

Find out more about how languages at Warwick have been performing in a global context. Click the main link for this news item to read more!

In the latest annual QS World University Rankings by Subject, modern languages at Warwick are collectively rated 26^th in the world. This places them above similar offerings in the universities of Cornell, Duke, Manchester, and King’s College London.

For the full table, see here.