Research blog

This year has seen everything change for theatre and teaching. With the support of the Open World Research Initiative, the School of Advanced Studies and the Institute of Modern Languages Research however, I was able to adapt my way of working, enlarging the...

It’s a frosty night in March 2018, but inside the 7000-capacity Moscow’s Adrenaline Stadium a band is heating up the crowd. The band sings in English, and people seem to know the lyrics by heart, tune after tune. On stage, however, is not a British or American band....

Cultural diplomacy’s relationship with language seems on the face of it to be readily apparent and unproblematic. Cultural diplomacy strategies invariably include a strong emphasis on teaching the relevant country’s main language to target audiences; it is central,...

The Sector and the DegreeWhen diagnosing the ‘crisis’ of Modern Languages (ML) in the UK, the most widespread supporting illustration is the significant reduction in the number of student enrolments on degrees in ML, especially for certain languages. For sure, as a...

As part of my PhD research, I am studying Brazilian culture and community as translated by online food spaces in the UK. During the course of my research, I have taken the time to understand the different Brazilian restaurants that are available in the UK. I was...

In an earlier post (‘After Herder’), I argued that the division of humanity into communities by language was vital to the ontology of Modern Languages. I also hinted that this principle of humanity’s divisibility was where Modern Languages (ML) and Area Studies (AS)...

A spectre is haunting the UK Modern Languages community: a feeling of being under siege. The principal source of the anxiety is the continuing decline in student numbers both in secondary schools and in higher education. This gives rise to a...

When researchers try to initiate change in policy, they are likely to run against the complexity of procedural constraints imposed on the civil service – that’s one of the lessons I learned at a meeting with officials from the Office for National...

Naomi Wells reports on the British Academy plenary round table hosted at the ‘Uncommon Ground: Modern Languages and Cultures for the 21st Century’ conference held at Durham University on 16-18 April 2018 Last month, Durham’s School of Modern Languages and...

Modern Languages (ML) are said to belong to the humanities, yet it is never made entirely clear what space precisely they occupy within them. In the phrase ‘Modern Languages’, the term ‘language’ is largely a metaphor. There are literal referents, specific modern...