University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a ‘redbrick’ university: originally one of the nine civic universities founded in the major industrial cities of England in the 19th century. It is the first to receive its own royal charter, and the first English unitary university. It is a founding member of both the prestigious Russell Group of British research universities and the international network of research universities, Universitas 21. The University of Birmingham is a global top 100 university tackling some of the world’s most significant issues.

The Department of Modern languages

The Department of Modern Languages is one of the most forward-thinking and prestigious centres for Modern Languages in the UK. It explores how studying languages, discourses, and cultures challenge our understanding and experience of the world. Our key concerns involve asking how foreign languages, discourses, and cultures – as objects and methods in their own right and all their diversity relativise our ways of thinking and how an awareness of this enables us to identify links and interconnections where there appears to be only difference and otherness.

Exploring these questions involves challenging and blurring boundaries, forming and transforming knowledge, interrogating identities, and engaging in multiple kinds of translation. An interdisciplinary approach is thus central to the methods and the ethos that unites the research we carry out, mainly via interlingual, intermedial, and interdisciplinary work, which is international in both its object and reach. We make connections between knowledge forms and disciplines that urgently need to be placed in dialogue with each other beyond the limitations of traditional partnerships and conversations.