Research in Modern Languages
We explore how the study of languages, discourses, and cultures challenges our understanding and experience of the world. Our key concerns involve asking how foreign languages, discourses, and cultures – as objects and methods in their own right, and in all their multiplicity – relativize our ways of thinking, and how an awareness of this enables us to identify links and interconnections where there appears to be only difference and otherness.
The exploration of these questions involves challenging and blurring boundaries, forming and transforming knowledges, interrogating identities, and engaging in multiple kinds of translation. Interconnectedness is thus central to the method and the ethos that unites the research we carry out, in particular via interlingual, intermedial, and interdisciplinary work which is international in both its object and reach. We make connections between knowledge forms and disciplines that urgently need to be placed in dialogue with each other, beyond the limitations of traditional partnerships and conversations.
Our research projects
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Exploring collective memory and political identity in the process of migration, and the growth in support for anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic parties across Europe
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The nexus of cultural expectations and judgments brought to bear on women who express ‘extreme’ views or who commit acts of (political/ ideological) violence that are at odds with sex-role stereotypes.
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Asking not what the ‘all-powerful’ Stasi knew about society, but what and how East Germans knew about the ‘secret police’
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How language and translations shape memories, public narratives, and enhance campaigns for transitional justice
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Documenting and analysing a range of voices in contemporary debates on urban terrorism in Europe
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Reinvigorating the discipline of literary studies by looking at non-European approaches and focusing on texts from Islamic cultures
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Leading a step-change in understanding language and optimising language learning
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Translating, explaining and re-interpreting the 189 letters exchanged by two seminal Swiss reformers whose wider influence needs urgent re-assessment
Research Centres and Networks
Department of Modern Languages
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At the College of Arts and Law our research matters, so it needs to be open
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Profiles of our current phd students
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Latest stories from the Department of Modern Lanuages