News and Events
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Post in Portuguese Studies
For more information on this post in the School of Modern Languages please click here.
Reminder - Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013 - The Cultures of Popular Culture
Royal Irish Academy Biennial Conference - Queen’s University, Belfast, 13th - 14th December 2013
Popular Culture has long been absent from the syllabus, eschewed by researchers and viewed condescendingly sometimes even by its most adept practitioners. It has come a long way to become the thriving academic discipline it is today. Just as the term Popular Culture describes the widest range of practices, Popular Culture Studies cover the most heterogeneous objects. While this very diversity makes it exciting as a research field, it presents a challenge in terms of methods and approaches. To promote scientific exchanges at international level, Popular Culture Studies need elements of comparability and theorization. The biennial conference of the Royal Irish Academy, hosted by the School of Modern Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, intends to offer a forum for discussion between academics, teaching and researching in the fields of Popular Cultures. It will consider the benefits of studying Popular Cultures in Modern Languages Studies and seek to map current areas of research. It presents a distinctive opportunity to discuss corpora and contrast approaches.
Keynote Speakers
Professor Diana Holmes (Leeds): ‘The Way We Read Now: Popular and Middlebrow Fiction in Twenty-First Century Europe’
Professor Andrea Noble (Durham): ‘Killing and Crying: The Work of the Emotion in Nineteenth Century Mexican Popular Culture’
Topics for discussion include but are not restricted to:
- Translation and interpretation of Popular Culture
- Cultural icons and cultural iconicity
- Popular cultures as media cultures
- Visual and digital cultures
- Teaching Popular Cultures in their original language
- Cultural categories, normativity, canonicity
- Consensualism, sensationalism and mass appeal
- Global mainstream cultures and resistance
- Fetishism, tosh and trash
- Crime fiction and crime cultures
- Self-reflexivity and parody
- Mass education
- Sport cultures and the body
- Democratic culture and satire
- Folk cultures
Papers (to be given in English) are welcome on topics relating to popular cultures in any area of Modern Languages Studies. Postgraduate research students are encouraged to submit proposals.
Please send 200-word proposals by the 1st of October 2013 to the conference organisers:
Dr Tori Holmes, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, QUB : t.holmes@qub.ac.uk
Dr Dominique Jeannerod, French Studies, QUB : d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk
Dr Federico Pagello, Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, QUB : f.pagello@gmail.com
For more information and updates please visit the conference blog at http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/popularculture/.
National Student Survey Results 2013
All three subject areas in the School – French, Irish and Spanish & Portuguese – have been given top ratings by our final year students who took part in the National Student Survey earlier this year.
The overall student satisfaction with their course in the School of Modern Languages was 91% (above QUB and national averages).
QUB received an overall satisfaction score of 90% for all courses, which puts it in 12th place in the UK university results.
The School of Modern Languages scored extremely high satisfaction ratings in key areas of teaching and learning:
- 97% agreement that staff explained things clearly
- 94% agreement that staff made the subject interesting
- 91% approval for staff enthusiasm
- 96% satisfaction with Library and IT resources
- 82% satisfaction with the promptness and detail of feedback on written work (10% above QUB and national averages)
The full results for all universities can be found by clicking here.
Many thanks to all our students who took the time to complete the survey earlier this year.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Biennial conference of the Royal Irish Academy Committee for
Modern Languages, Literary and Cultural Studies
13-14 December 2013, Queen's University Belfast
Popular Culture has long been absent from the syllabus, eschewed by researchers and viewed condescendingly sometimes even by its most adept practitioners. It has come a long way to become the thriving academic discipline it is today. Just as the term Popular Culture describes the widest range of practices, Popular Culture Studies cover the most heterogeneous objects. While this very diversity makes it exciting as a research field, it presents a challenge in terms of methods and approaches. To promote scientific exchanges at international level, Popular Culture Studies need elements of comparability and theorization. The biennial conference of the Royal Irish Academy, hosted by the School of Modern Languages at Queen’s University Belfast, intends to offer a forum for discussion between academics, teaching and researching in the fields of Popular Cultures. It will consider the benefits of studying Popular Cultures in Modern Languages Studies and seek to map current areas of research. It presents a distinctive opportunity to discuss corpora and contrast approaches.
Keynote Speaker Professor Diana Holmes (Leeds): ‘On Popular Cultures and the Middlebrow’
For full details please click here.
Please send 200-word proposals by the 1st of October 2013 to the conference organisers:
Dr Tori Holmes, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, QUB : t.holmes@qub.ac.uk
Dr Dominique Jeannerod, French Studies, QUB : d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk
Dr Federico Pagello, Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, QUB : f.pagello@gmail.com
For further information and updates about the conference please visit http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/popularculture/.
PG Skills Day in Medical Humanities
Date: 7 November 2013 Location: Postgraduate Centre, Queen's University Belfast
This one-day workshop is organised across the Schools of Modern Languages, English, and History and Anthropology and supported by the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities. It is open to MA and Doctoral level research students who are interested in or are currently pursuing research in the medical humanities. It brings together a broad range of specialists across different subject areas and institutions who will provide their own personal insights into the opportunities and resources available to students interested in the Medical Humanities across history and literature and ranging from the 17th - 21st centuries, as well as a focus on the development of a range of skills essential for postgraduate development.
*There is no attendance fee for any student wishing to attend but registration is required - for more details please click here.*
The paths of medical un/orthodoxy? Colonial Latin America and its World
Friday 8th - Saturday 9th November 2013
This exciting two-day international colloquium sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the History of Medicine will bring together scholars from across the UK, Latin America, and the United States, to discuss the different processes by which individuals and ideas impacted on the promotion, defence, criticism, or prohibition of medical practices in early modern Latin America, the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic.
For further details on participants and abstracts, please click here.
For more information, contact: Dr Fiona Clark f.clark@qub.ac.uk
Doctoral Success
Congratulations to French PhD student Tanya Campbell for successfully defending her thesis entitled ‘Representations of Slavery in French Writing: From Revolution to Abolition’. Tanya’s thesis engages with articulations of the concept of slavery in the period between 1789 and 1848, and covers a wide range of novels, plays and journalism from the period. Tanya was jointly supervised by Dr Nigel Harkness and Dr Maeve McCusker, and her examiners were Professor Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool) and Professor Margaret Topping. Tanya is currently taking a year out to travel in Australia, and is working on an article from one of her PhD chapters.
Tanya at the ANZAC shrine in Melbourne (city skyline in the background)
Modern Languages Prize Giving Ceremony
The School of Modern Languages was delighted to host a Prize Giving Ceremony for students, parents, sponsors and teachers on 1 July 2013. The School ceremony celebrated successes across all levels including some of the students who had just graduated that afternoon. There was a range of prizes including Certificates of Recognition for Student Ambassadors who support the School in a variety of events throughout the year. We would like to thank all our sponsors including Santander for their continued support.
Pictured is one of our second year students in French, Daniel Parsons receiving the Samuel and Sarah Ferguson Travel Prize from Ms Norma Sinte. This travel bursary is donated by Ms Sinte in memory of her parents and is to help enhance the compulsory year abroad experience in third year.
Green Awards May 2013
Green Awards
The School of Modern of Languages was delighted to recieve its environmental Bronze Award at the recent Queen's Green Awards.
Our Environmental Champion, Dr Marcas MacCoinnigh led the Languages team and we plan to go for Silver next year. You can see our current environmental activities by clicking here.
(Dr Marcas MacCoinnigh, back row, third from left with all the award winners)
PhD Student Wins International Conference Prize
A second-year PhD student, Daniel McAuley, has won a prize for best postgraduate paper at a recent international conference. Daniel gave a paper entitled 'L’innovation lexicale chez les jeunes des quartiers urbains pluriethniques : « c’est banal, ouèche » at the recent Association for French Language Studies conference in Perpignan. His PhD, which is based on a corpus he collected using participant observation methodology, looks at lexical innovation amongst young speakers in the suburbs of Paris and Marseille and the impact this is having on the phonology, morpho-syntax and lexis of contemporary French. Many congratulations to Daniel!
Student exchange with University of São Paulo, Brazil
Since February of this year, Jacqueline Gallagher, a student on the BA Spanish and Portuguese pathway at Queen’s, has been studying at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil as part of her year abroad. The five-month placement was arranged through an exchange agreement between the two universities, and Jacqueline is the first undergraduate student from the School of Modern Languages to take part. At the end of her first year Jacqueline successfully completed a summer internship scheme with Santander and was subsequently able to secure a scholarship from the bank which covered some of her travel expenses.
During a recent visit to São Paulo, Queen’s Lecturer in Brazilian Studies Tori Holmes caught up with Jacqueline and heard about her experiences at USP, where she has been taking classes in Portuguese language and Brazilian culture. As Jacqueline told Tori, “My semester here at USP has been an unforgettable experience. Being able to spend time at a top-notch Latin American university, in an amazing city with incredible people has been invaluable not only to my language skills, but also to my cultural awareness of a fascinating country and its people”.
Photo caption: Jacqueline on USP’s leafy campus
Education Award Winner
Congratulations to Tony Russell who won the Course Rep of the Year for the Faculty Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the recent Students' Union Education Awards. Tony is a final year Spanish and Portuguese student but has also been an excellent Student Ambassador for the whole School over the last few years.
Popular Download
Dr Sarah Bowskill's article 'The Representation of the Female Body in the Multimedia Works of Regina José Galindo' published last year in the Bulletin of Latin American Research was the fifth most downloaded article of the year for that journal and was accessed over 400 times.
International Scholarships
All international students enrolling on the MA in Interpreting or MA in Translation are eligible for the following scholarships:
New Opportunities Scholarship (£1,000 reduction in tuition fees) Please click here.
Early Bird Reward (10% reduction in tuition fees). Please click here.
Congratulations on award
Congratulations to Agata Dziadul, one of our MA Translation students, who has been awarded the Emily Sarah Montgomery and Sir Thomas Dixon Travel Scholarship. These awards are keenly contested and the School is proud of Agata's achievements.
Melanie Henry, The Signifying Self
Congratulations to Dr Melanie Henry on the publication of her book, The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-Perspective Aesthetic, with the MHRA Texts and Dissertations Series.
The series exists to promote important work by younger scholars by making the most accomplished doctoral research available to the widest possible readership through a policy of affordable pricing and not requiring a publication subvention.
You can buy copies of the book via the MHRA website - http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/henry.html
Postgraduate Funding for 2014/15
Details of funding available for taught and research courses once finalised can be found by clicking here.
School Seminar Series - 2012-13 Semester 2
Please click here to view our programme of seminars for semester 2.
Everyone is most welcome to attend.
Students outside the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid just before a trip to see Picasso's Guernica with Dr Gabriel Sánchez
Challenge Yourself to Look at the World in a Different Way: The Year Abroad in Spain
Recently Dr Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa visited some of our students spending their year abroad in Spain to find out how they were adapting to the Spanish way of life.
One of the students placed in Andalucía told him that: ‘The six weeks that have elapsed since my arrival in Spain have been the busiest and most rewarding of my life. I cannot recall another time when I have learned and experienced so much within so short a space of time.’
A student living in the Basque country described their idyllic life saying: ‘I have had no problems settling in here in Irún and everyday just gets better. The culture is very different but in a good way. I love the buzz of the ‘Plazas’ on a fine evening and it is so family orientated. I find great pleasure sitting in the square reading, ‘in Spanish of course’, with a little glass of ‘vino’. I have just finished reading La Casa de los Espíritus by Isabel Allende. I feel that this opportunity has given me the confidence to step outside my comfort zone.’ Needless to say, we are all very jealous of the ‘vino’ in the buzzing ‘plazas’ back in rainy Belfast!
And finally, when Gabriel asked the students to give some advice to second year students who are just beginning to think about placements abroad for next year, a student currently living in Madrid said: ‘Overall, I feel I am settling in to life in Spain better than I initially thought I would. Although I was extremely nervous leaving home, I tried not to have too many expectations about my year abroad, preferring to let things fall in to place when I arrived. Everything from finding accommodation to integrating in to Spanish society has all came to together perfectly and as my first month in Spain finishes I am left hoping that the next seven don’t go as fast!’
Undergraduate Awards Success
Many congratulations to Christina McCloskey, a second-year French and Spanish student whose essay for her Spanish module, World as Stage, was highly commended by the judges in the Languages & Linguistics category of the 2012 Undergraduate Awards. This is an excellent achievement, and means that Christina’s essay was ranked in the top 10% of the almost 3000 essays that were submitted for the Undergraduate Awards this year from 100 universities around the world. Professor Isabel Torres, Christina’s tutor and Head of Spanish at Queen’s commented: ‘I am absolutely delighted that Christina's essay has been recognised by the Undergraduate Awards. To be included among the top 10% of undergraduate work in the discipline is a wonderful achievement and richly deserved. This is an impressive performance for an individual student at level 2. It also reflects upon the whole class, whose dynamism and willingness to participate fully in all the activities of the module facilitated a range of outstanding work. My warmest congratulations to Christina and my thanks to everyone on the module - a pleasure to teach!’
Grant Success – AHRC Research Networking Scheme “Translating Cultures”
Dr Piotr Blumczyński has been awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant to launch an international research network exploring “English Evaluative Concepts in Translated Religious and Devotional Texts.”
The project combines a keen local focus with a broad transcultural research perspective provided by a group of collaborative partners working, across a range of disciplines, in markedly different regions of Europe: Northern Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Spain.
Through a series of thematic conferences, community events and workshops held at diverse locations in 2013–2014, the network will seek to (1) develop our understanding of the interactions between linguistic, cultural and religious communities by exploring shared and conflicting systems of values; and (2) contribute to raising awareness of the nature of translation and interpreting as a process of conceptual and cultural – rather than merely linguistic – mediation.
The total value of the reward amounts to £44,376. Piotr is the Principal Investigator in the research project.
Double Grant Success
Dr Fiona Clark has been awarded two grants for a 14 month period to complete a project into medical history linking Ireland, France, Spain, and Mexico in the eighteenth century, entitled: 'Scratching below the Surface: Empire, Authority, and Venereal Disease (Mexico City, 1789-1798)'. This funding comprised Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine (£27, 974) for the period September 2011-January 2012, and an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship (£63,535) for the period February - October 2012.
This project has grown out of the discovery of reports and correspondence written by an Irish surgeon, Daniel O'Sullivan relating to a series of trials into the effect of a non-mercurial treatment for venereal disease held in Mexico City in the early 1790s. The materials clearly indicate a level of tension, manipulation, and suspicion in relationships among the medical and ecclesiastical authorities that has, to date, remained unexplored. As such, O'Sullivan's work throws potential new light on the internal governance of local Mexican hospitals and raises questions relating to the exercise of medical authority on a transatlantic level, the means by which individuals progressed in their medical careers, and the use of patronage within the eighteenth-century Spanish court.
Castellano-leoneses por el mundo
The regional TV station of Castilla-Leon in Spain recently produced a programme about people from the region living in Belfast.
Spanish PhD student, Leticia Villamediana, who works on Eighteenth Century Periodical Press, features in the progamme.
The programme can be viewed on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEkCBNpIjwQ
EU job opportunities highlighted on Ministerial visit
Dr Anthony Soares (Spanish & Portuguese Studies) with PhD students Alexandra de la Torre and Catherine Arthur
"Connected Communities: Connected Memories' - Latin American Studies Forum Postgraduate Conference sponsored by Banco Santander
On the 25th April 2012, postgraduate students from Queen's University Belfast and University College Dublin gathered together to share and discuss a wide range of research projects relating to a variety of issues across Latin America. Under the umbrella of the Latin American Studies Forum theme for 2011-2012, the presentations focused on the analysis of the idea of 'community' in its various forms and the connected issue of representation of memory, including the impact of these themes within the contexts of identity, migration, dictatorship, and conflict resolution. This student-led initiative was organised by two Queen's doctoral students, Sandra Collins (Spanish and Portuguese Studies) and Renato Castro (Ethnomusicology), and featured a keynote address by world-leading ethnomusicologist Dr Samuel Araújo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) entitled: "Amidst walls, wired fences and armoured cars; connecting sonic memories and heritage in post-industrial society". This highly successful day underlined the ongoing importance of humanities research in enhancing our understanding of the complexity of 21st century global relations, as well as challenging students to become aware of how their research can directly impact and benefit the local society within which they work.
Queen’s students at the EU Parliament
Languages Students gain insights into EU Careers in Brussels
18 Queen’s students, including 11 studying Languages, took part in the first ever Brussels Study Tour organised by the Careers Service in the final week of the Easter Vacation. The aim of the tour was to introduce Queen’s students to the EU institutions and to promote the aspiration of living and working at the heart of Europe. The group was hosted at the Irish College in Leuven, and was accompanied by Ms Roisin Copeland, Senior Careers Advisor, and Dr Nigel Harkness, Director of Education in the School of Modern Languages.
The group visited the EU Parliament and Commission, had meetings with a range of people working in the EU institutions as translators, policy advisors, journalists, and diplomats, and gained insights into the wide range of career opportunities there are for linguists in Brussels and the application process. Among the social highlights of the tour were dinner with the Irish Ambassador to Belgium, and an alumni reception hosted by the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels. As one of our students commented, ‘Meeting the QUB alumni really showed us that there is a place for Queen’s graduates in Brussels and that working in the EU is a really attainable goal’.
Dr Nigel Harkness welcomed this important initiative: ‘Not only did the study tour make our students aware of the career opportunities that are available to Languages graduates in the European Union, but it also reinforced what we have been saying to them since day 1 of their degree: that learning a language really does give them a head start when it comes to careers. Everyone they met in Brussels stressed that speaking English simply is not enough. To work in the EU institutions you need to be able to speak English and French as basic working languages, and then at least one of the other 24 official languages, which include Spanish, Portuguese and Irish.’
Pictured at the Alumni reception are Russell Donaldson (Law with French), Dr Gerry Mulligan, Director of the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels, and Dr Nigel Harkness, Director of Education in the School of Modern Languages
Dr Gerry Mulligan welcomes students and alumni to the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels. Also pictured is Ms Roisin Copeland, Senior Careers Advisor and Tour Leader.
Launch of New Placenames Website
Congratulations to our colleague, Dr Mícheál Ó Mainnín, who had a successful launch of the new Placenames website at Stormont on 21 January 2013. People are invited to explore the origins and history of their local place-names through www.placenamesni.org.
For more information please click here.
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School of Modern Languages
10 University Square
Queen's University Belfast
BT7 1NN
Email: ml@qub.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 5363
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