Professor Emma Tyler

I am the Head of the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music. I am based in Modern Languages and have a background in French Studies. I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Birmingham and the Université de Bourgogne in France, and my doctoral research, on women's writing in Renaissance France, at the University of Birmingham in 1999, working under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer Birkett.

Latterly I have specialised in Translation Studies, receiving a personal chair in Translator Education in 2020. I hold the Institute of Linguists' Diploma in Translation (2001) and I have been an Associate Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting since 2015. In August 2015, I was awarded a Senior Fellowship at the Higher Education Academy.

I teach translation theory and practice at all levels, and specialist modules on Translation Technology, Specialised Translation and Multimodal Translation.

I have wide-ranging interests across the field of Translation Studies. My current PhD students are working in translation competence, translation industry requirements, ego-targeting in tourism translation, measurement of translator style using computational methods, the use of AI in legal translation and the use and translation of evaluative adjectives in tourism translation.

Find out more - our PhD French Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

In around 2008, while conducting research into the history of Thorngrove House in Worcestershire on behalf of its owner, I became interested in Lucien Bonaparte and his family and household, who made their home as prisoners of war during the Napoleon Wars. In 1804, Lucien had been sent into exile in Italy by his brother Napoleon. In 1810, as relations worsened, he attempted to flee to the US, but was captured by the British. He, his wife and children, his retinue and servants were held as 'prisoners' in England for the next four years, firstly in Ludlow and then at Thorngrove.

In 2015, I co-edited, with my colleague Andrew Watts, a book to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. Fortunes of War: The West Midlands at the Time of Waterloo explores some of the little-known connections between our region and Waterloo, and was published by History West Midlands in the summer of 2015. The collection contains an article I wrote on Lucien and Alexandrine's time as prisoners of war.

More recently, I have returned to this theme and am currently working on a larger project examining Lucien Bonaparte's relationship with England, and specifically the two periods during which he lived here, 1810-1814 and 1833-1838. The work draws upon Lucien's own memoirs, and other printed and archival sources to study this much neglected aspect of his life.