We are saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Simon Gaunt, a world-leading scholar and Warwick Languages graduate.

Applying to Warwick to read languages? Which languages, which combinations? Ab initio or post high school entry? What are our campus, courses, and community like? Chat online to staff and students and have all your questions answered.  

Wed 24 November, 5pm. Register here: https://meetandengage.com/universityofwarwick

The School for Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick warmly invites expressions of interest in its MPhil/PhD programmes in French Studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian, and Translation and Transcultural Studies (including a theoretical/academic and a practice-based route).

We have free tickets available to an event which may interest you and your networks/students. The following event celebrating the soft launch of Warwick Arts Centre and as part of an ongoing call out for submissions for a co-curated exhibition in Spring 22.

Head of School and Professor of French Kate Astbury and her PhD student Abigail Coppins welcomed a delegation of Garifuna people to Portchester Castle on Wednesday 8th September 2021 to show them the fruits of Abigail's research into the prisoners of war from the Caribbean held their during the Revolutionary wars. You can watch the BBC South report of the visit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=JOVWmfZuDuU

and read the Portsmouth News article about it here: https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/people/descendants-of-banished-caribbeans-visit-portchester-castle-to-find-out-about-revolutionary-heroes-3376145

The UK Government has announced today (4 August 2021) that the University of Warwick will be awarded £2.6 million for international student mobility, as part of the inaugural Turing Scheme.

Warwick is one of the world’s top 100 universities, and one of the ways it has achieved that position is because it is a globally connected institution. Its staff and students learn, work, and research as part of a highly international community, and more than 1000 Warwick students each year also take the opportunity to study and work abroad at one of the University’s many worldwide partner institutions.

Join teaching colleagues and the Teaching Café team for a summer get together in Gather.town.

Come along to chat with teaching peers in a relaxed online social space, whilst also getting an insight into what Gather.town offers.

Virtual Results Celebration #WarwickGrad.

Here is a video message from the Head of School on behalf of all the staff in the SMLC. As part of Warwick's celebrations today, we'd love it if you could submit an entry in the Faculty Yearbook. The link is below:

• Arts

We hope you have a great day celebrating with friends and family and hope that we get to see you in person at a special 'catch-up' graduation next year.

Coventry: Lost, Found, Imagined

Where large scale and a smaller trail of black and white photographs are 'added to' with illustrations and my tiny glass pieces specially designed to tell stories about what was there and what could be there.

It's approachable, family friendly and designed to chime with both Coventry Kids young and old, adopted Coventry kids and visitors alike.

If you've never visited Holy Trinity, it's a really beautiful church with plenty of permanent objects of interest including an exceptionally rare medieval Doom Painting.

Coventry: Lost, Found, Imagined is free entry and Full details are here

To book a timed slot please go to the City of Culture website

Whilst not essential, this will help us with social distancing on the trail around the church.

Thank you and hope to see some of you there!

Amanda Glanville, Warwick Arts Centre

We will be holding a fun Balsam Bashing Challenge on 23^rd June from 1-4.30pm where teams of volunteers will be competing against each other to pull up Himalayan Balsam plants along the banks of Canley Brook. The team with the biggest pile at the end will win Warwick Volunteers goodie bags including branded t-shirts, water bottles and much more!!

Himalayan Balsam is an invasive plant that grows rapidly in tall dense colonies by brooks and rivers. It has large leaves that block sunlight, causing native plant species to die. When Himalayan Balsam dominates the bankside, biodiversity is reduced. With fewer plant species, the brook supports less wildlife, endangering creatures like the fluffy water vole.

Students interested in joining us can sign up here: https://myadvantage.warwick.ac.uk/students/events/detail/2163213

Warwick Careers Society has re-established in 2020 and aims to support students throughout the journey of career planning which can be overwhelming. Our goal is to bring visibility to not so well-known careers and to help students understand more about the world and themselves when exploring. Over the past year, we have organised one of the biggest career conferences, regular CV and cover letter workshops along with a series of podcasts. While continuing these events, we will also introduce more exciting programmes for the upcoming year and are looking for passionate students to join us and grow with the society.

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!

The first in a series of events for this network Producing the Post-National Popular (warwick.ac.uk) took place this Friday 23rd April online, with 50 registrations and much dialogue generated.

Ahead of the anniversary of the death of Napoleon, SMLC colleagues Kate Astbury and Paola Perazzolo will be hosting an afternoon of papers exploring theatrical representations of Napoleon via YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krd7Fzo2Xak

13h00: Accueil et introduction (Katherine Astbury, University of Warwick)

13h15-14h30 – Session 1, Président Katherine Astbury (University of Warwick)

13h15-13h35 : Clare Siviter (University of Bristol), « Bonaparte et la censure du Directoire »

13h35-13h55: Paola Perazzolo (University of Warwick, Università di Verona), « Les « Journée(s) de Saint-Cloud » : les pièces de circonstance autour du 18 Brumaire »

13h55-14h15: Vincenzo De Santis (Università di Salerno) et Pierre Frantz (Université Paris-Sorbonne), « Les ombres de l’Empereur »

14h15-14h30 : Discussion

14h30-14h50 : Pause

14h50-15h45 – Session 2, président Pierre Frantz (Université Paris-Sorbonne)

14h50-15h10 : Maurizio Melai (Docteur des Universités de Pisa et Paris-Sorbonne) « "Otez à Sylla la mèche de Napoléon, et la pièce n'allait pas jusqu'à la fin" : sur un "succès de perruque" de Talma en 1821 »

15h10-15h30 : Laura O'Brien (University of Northumbria), « L’émergence de l’acteur "napoléonien" au XIXe siècle »

15h30-15h45 : Discussion

15h45-16h00 : Pause

16h00-17h00 – Session 3 Président Clare Siviter (University of Bristol)

16h00-16h20: Nicole Cochrane (University of Exeter), « La mise en scène de la défaite : expositions napoléoniennes et culture matérielle de la victoire à Londres au XIX^e siècle »

16h20-16h40: Katherine Astbury (University of Warwick) : « Napoléon Harlequin »

16h40-17h00: Discussion et conclusion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krd7Fzo2Xak

This month's film is by Dr James Hodkinson on "Building back Empathy: Research and Engagement during Lockdown."

It is available, alongside previously released films, on our Faculty of Arts at Home webpage, Twitter feed (@ArtsWarwick), Facebook page (WarwickFacultyofArts), and YouTube channel (Warwick Arts Faculty).

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.

New flagship programme which brings you a wide range of cross-departmental undergraduate modules with a multi-focal and interdisciplinary approach and study alongside students based in other leading international universities.

Oliver Davis has published a new article on the work of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, as part of a special issue of Angelaki on Sloterdijk, edited by Patrick Roney and Andrea Rossi. 'Anthropotechnical Practising in the Foam-World' can be accessed here. Abstract: I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of Sloterdijk’s account of originary spheric being-with in the trilogy, focused on its culmination in the foam-world; I suggest this account is too ambiguous on key matters of basic ontological structure and I question whether the foam metaphor is adequate as a description of intersubjectivity today. Against the backdrop of this discussion I consider whether the general ascetology of Sloterdijk’s second anthropotechnics involves practising in, or practising on, the shells of symbolic immunity and conclude the latter. Setting this alongside the trilogy’s insistence that cells in the foam are “co-fragile,” I argue that anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world is suffused with a violence which Sloterdijk is reluctant to theorize. Registering one significant undeclared context of his discussion of self-enhancement, in postmodern management theory, I suggest that successful anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world requires the capacity to ignore other people and their interests. I note that Sloterdijk’s one-eyed embrace of competitive self-enhancement in You Must Change Your Life has since been qualified in brief remarks in What Happened in the 20th Century? [2016] but not substantively reconsidered. In conclusion, I pay tribute to the anthropotechnical lesson of Sloterdijk’s theoretical project, notwithstanding its design flaws and continuity errors.