It’s been a busy year at the School of Advanced Study with a range of activities contributing to the translingual strand’s four subprojects focusing on translingual minorities, modernities, networks and music. Researchers organised and contributed to  ‘Unsettling Communities: Minor, Minority and Small Literatures in Europe’ a two-day conference which brought together scholars from the UK and Europe to explore the comparative study of the content, form, status and reception of minor, minority and small literatures in Europe. The SAS team also worked with Birkbeck Department of Applied Linguistics and the AHRC-funded Translating Cultures programme on the workshop  ‘Language, Communities and Moving Borders: Theories and Methodologies’ which showcased research in modern languages and applied linguistics.  In the workshop researchers shared their latest findings and exchanged ideas on different disciplinary approaches to the problem of shifting borders and identities. 

Other highlights include ‘Be not afeard: Language, music and cultural memory in the operas of Thomas Adès’, which considered the influence of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican film El ángel exterminador on the works of contemporary composer Thomas Adès, and a poetry translation workshop and film screening of Africa is You, a documentary about the Somali-Dutch community in Birmingham, for the European Day of Languages, in collaboration with SOAS. Digital-related research projects have been launched with the UK Web Archive, the British Library and the Royal Opera House, exploring questions relating to cross-language audience and community engagement with archives and instances of cultural production.

The strand has also awarded small grants to film students from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, for projects exploring language communities in Miami, Mexico and Africa, now mostly completed. 

In September, SAS welcomed Francielle Carpenedo, who has started her PhD on community engagement via social media by the Brazilian food community in the UK. Three short-term fellows have been appointed for 2017-18. Georgia Wall (Warwick) will be based at the IMLR from 1 November to 31 January and will work on “Consuming Italy: Language, meaning and value in food-centred life narratives”. Anje Gjesdal (NHH Norwegian School of Economics) will follow from 1 February to 1 March, working on “Translingual practices in literary representations of exile and migration: the case of Abdellah Taia’s Une melancholie arabe” and finally Catherine Barbour (St Andrews), focusing on her topic “Language, gender and displacement: Contemporary translingual Iberian immigrant identities”, will join the IMLR from 1 May to 31 July.

Researchers are developing plans for the coming year with partners in the UK, across Europe and further afield, including Argentina, Spain, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. We look forward to the exciting research and activities that 2018 holds in store!

In February the Strand and Consortium partner the Guildhall School of Music and Drama premiered a new opera The Tale of Januarie, the first to be written in Middle English, composed by Julian Philips with the libretto by Stephen Plaice. This work feeds into the translingual music strand, which is looking at contemporary works of opera employing multiple languages, ancient languages, indigenous languages and invented languages.

Catherine Davies, strand lead, presents the Open World Research Initiative to delegates at the Buenes Aires International Book Fair. Professor Davies is working with researchers at the Universities of the South (Argentina), Salamanca and Seville on the translingual modernities project, investigating modernity, literary and cultural translingualism in Argentina, resulting from mass immigration from Spain and Italy, and British settler migration.

The School hosted the OWRI Post-Doctoral Research Associates’ training day at Senate House, organised by Janice Carruthers, AHRC Leadership Fellow in Modern Languages.

Giles Foden (author of The Last King of Scotland) pictured with participants at the ‘Literary Translation Summer School’ in April in Buenos Aires, organised by strand partners the Argentine Association of Translators and Interpreters (AATI) and the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT), University of East Anglia. Participants worked with Foden to develop creative writing and literary translation techniques.

Writer and artist Ahmed Magare reads extracts from his book When Heroes Hide Behind Rope Curtains, exploring the subject of diasporic belonging, at the screening of Africa is You. The Somali-Dutch Community in Birmingham, UK for European Day of Languages, in collaboration with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Aisha Afrah, Mohammed Artan, Ahmed Magare and Linde Luijnenburg reflect on the relationship between language, community and identity after the screening of the documentary Africa is You. The Somali-Dutch Community in Birmingham, UK.

Still from Jan-Holger Hennies’ film Subversive Diversity, which captures the uses of indigenous languages used today in Mexico City. On the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, more than 200 languages were spoken in the area that now constitutes Mexico. Just 68 are still in use today, with some on the verge of extinction, while some are being revitalised by speakers who refuse to let them disappear.