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

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.

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.

Professor Anne Fuchs (German Studies) to mark the anniversary of the Dresden bombing at high profile memorial events in Germany next week

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick welcomes strong applications to the Leverhulme Trust Early-Career Fellowship scheme. The School has enjoyed important successes in this scheme in recent years and is keen to support postdoctoral candidates whose profiles fit the scheme and whose proposed research speaks to the School’s key research strands within and across French, German, Hispanic and Italian Studies.

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.’

Warwick German colleagues James Jordan and Stephen Lamb are proud to announce the publication this month of a new ‘kritische Studienausgabe’ of the complete works of Ernst Toller.

Call for Papers

 Iran and the West: Converging Perspectives

To be held from 1-3 July 2015, and hosted by the University of Warwick. Introductory speaker – Dr James Hodkinson, the University of Warwick. Keynote speaker – Prof Ali Ansari, the University of St Andrews.

We cordially invite scholars from diverse fields to contribute towards a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conference which aims to further our understanding of Iranian perceptions of the West and Westerners and Western perceptions of Iran and Iranians, from c. 500 BC until the present day. The aim of this conference is to improve our understanding of Iranian and Western cultural perceptions of the other’s culture, people, and politics, both from popular and elite viewpoints, and the points of convergence and divergence between them.

For further details, and for any questions regarding the themes of the conference, please consult the conference web page.

For any further clarifications, contact Dr Margaux Whiskin by email at M dot Whiskin at warwick dot ac dot uk

Wednesday 19 November, 16:00 in H202

Professor Carol Tully (Bangor)

Paper: "European Travellers to Wales: Making the Minority Count.

Congratulations to Leigh Anne Casey on the successful defence of her doctoral thesis on Jacques Maritain. Pictured here with Leigh are internal examiner Dr Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, supervisor Professor Seán Hand, and external examiner Professor Mike Kelly of Southampton University.

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

Congratulations to Professor Ingrid de Smet of Warwick French Studies for having been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.