News and events

Naples Research event

The Departments Dr Daniela La Penna has organised an exciting research event which will look at the most contradictory Italian city - Naples.

The workshop entitled 'Naples: Past and Present' is a full day event and will include talks by two leading academic authors; Dr Lorenza Gianfrancesco who's research areas include the Historical and Ethnographic study of contemporary Naples, and Dr Nick Dines who's research areas include early modern Southern European intellectual history, the Renaissance, and early 17th century Naples and Southern Italy.

The workshop is being held on the 27th April 2012 at the University's Whiteknights Campus, in room G74 of the Humanities and Social Science Building, between 10.30am and 4.30pm.

Archives and Texts seminar series

The seminar series has been developed and is being run by the Departments Dr Sophie Heywood in conjunction with the English Department.

The summer term series continues with a seminar by Dr Rosa Maria Medina Granda entitled 'Intercomprehension between related languages: reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince and its translations into several spanish languages'. The seminar is being held on Tuesday 8th May 2012, at 5.00pm in HumSS 287.

 

Key Words Workshop

One of the Departments latest research projects, the AHRC funded 'Researching and Documenting Key Words in European Migration Discourses' project, held its first two-day workshop on the 30th and 31st March 2012.

The project is being led by Dr Melani Schröeter and brings together researchers from different countries with a background in (critical) discourse analysis and/or corpus linguistics as well as cognitive linguistics and/or specifically migration discourse(s) in order to discuss ways of researching and documenting discourse key words in European migration discourses.

The aim of this new networking project is to lay the conceptual and methodological foundations for a comparative dictionary of Europeanmigration discourse key words.

The second workshop is due to take place in June 2012 and further information can be found on the Researching and Documenting Key Words in European Migration Discourses pages of this website.

Italian postgraduate seminar series

This week sees the first seminar in a new seminar series being organised by the Departments Italian postgraduate students. The series covers a variety of hot Italian topics, starting with Valentina Ciciliot's seminar "La politica delle canonizzazioni di Giovanni Paolo II".

This weeks seminar is to held on Thursday 15th March at 3pm in room G09 of the Old Whiteknights Building.

The event is open to all, but please be aware the discussion will be in Italian.

Stories Without Borders.

Anant Kumar will be visiting the department on Thursday 15th March 2012 to give a reading in both German and English from his work 'Stories Without Borders'.

Full information can be found here

Research success!

The Departments own Dr Sophie Heywood has been selected as the winner of 'The Best Research Output' competition this year.

The prize was awarded for her recently published monograph on Catholicism and Children's Literature in France.

Congratulations to Dr Heywood on this important personal success and on contribution to the Department's research reputation as a whole.

 

Holocaust Memorial Day events

As part of the Holocaust Memorial Day the Department's Italian Programme has organised for Dr Aline Sierp, from the Education Department Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, to give a talk entitled 'The difficulty of remembering Nazi crimes: from concentration camps to memorial sites'.

The talk is being held on Friday 27th January 2012 between 2pm and 5pm at the Whiteknights campus' Palmer Building, room 109.

All are welcome to attend the event and attendance is free. If you would like to book a place or would like more information please contact Dr Daniella La Penna

To find out more about Dr Sierp, take a look at her Biography

Students achievement

Several of our Joint degree students were recently recognised for their outstanding work recieving Chancellor's Awards for 2011.

The awards are given to students who have achieved the highest results in their subject at the end of either their first or second year of study, highlighting the brightest and best of the University's students.

This year the following students from the Modern Languages Department received the award;

• Sophie Payne - German and Italian
• Chloe Richardson - IMBA with French
• John Southgate - IMBA with Italian
• Christine Forrest - English Language with Italian

Italian crisis interview

Leo Goretti, one of the Departments postgraduate students in Italian History, was recently interviewed by an international Russian channel with regards to the Italian crisis and Prime Minister Belusconi's resignation.

The interview, which is recorded in English, can be viewed by following this link; Interview with Leo Goretti

DAAD Scholarships available

Every year the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) offers scholarships for three- to four-week summer courses at German instituations of higher education. These courses focus on German language, literature, and cultural studies.

The programme is open to students of all disciplines, provided they have a good knowledge of German at the time of application.

For more information and to see where you can undertake these summer schools please visit the DAAD German Summer Schools website.

Please be aware that applications must be made via the Department of Modern Languages, if you are interested please see Gillian Williams, room 268 of the Humanities Building, before 10th December 2011.

First 'Dante and Art' exhibition

The 'Dante and Art' exhibition which was run by our finalist students and was the first of its kind for teh University of Reading took place on Thursday 24th March 2011 was a thorough success with staff, students and public alike visiting the event. The exhibition was such a success that the organisers took the descision to extend the opening hours! 

Leverhulme Research Grant awarded

Dr Catherine Leglu from the Department of Modern Languages has been successful in her grant application to the Leverhulme Trust.

The research project, entitled 'Genealogies, Histories and Translation', will run for two years from Spring 2011 and involves the edition and study of a 14th century world history told largely through pictures, translated from the original Latin into Occitan. The project will explore the uses of translation into the non-literary vernacular to wield or affirm power.

Dr Leglu will be joined by two research assistants; Dr Nick Chare, a art historian, and Dr Alex Ibarz, a specialist in medieval and early modern Occitan and Catalan literature.