PhDs in Modern Languages and Cultures

The research staff and their areas of expertise: 

Professor Adrian Armstrong

Late medieval literature (French and Dutch); book history; reception studies; translation studies; visual culture; scholarly editing; Belgian culture; literary theory

Professor Leigh Oakes

Language attitudes, language ideologies and nationalism/national identity; language policy and planning (LPP), and normative approaches to LPP as developed in political philosophy/political theory

Dr Emilie Oléron Evans 

Dr Rebekah Vince

Francophone postcolonial studies; translation and multilingualism; transcultural memory studies; North African literature in French; Jewish-Muslim interactions; Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The discipline of German Studies has a long tradition at Queen Mary, University of London. We cover linguistics, literature, thought and culture in all periods from the early modern era to the present day, and our expertise includes GDR & FRG studies as well as Austrian and Swiss literature and culture.

A particular area of expertise is Anglo-German Cultural Relations, including the history of German Studies in the United Kingdom. We are home to the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations with its own Yearbook Angermion, its Writer-in-Residence programme and its BASF-funded Lecture Series.

Research areas in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin American Studies. 

Hispanic Research Journal (HRJ) 

This Research Journal is published on behalf of the Department and promotes and disseminates research into the cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The fields covered include literature and literary theory, cultural history and cultural studies, language and linguistics, and film and theatre studies.

Centre for Catalan Studies

Our Catalan Studies research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century Catalan literature, theatre, film, art and linguistic policy, including translation issues and cultural identity.

Latin American Studies

Our research explores the cultural, literary, and historical richness of Latin America. We study Cuban art and cinema, exile and diaspora, and the ways memory and identity shape these regions. Work spans Central American culture, poetry of resistance, and transnational perspectives on migration and creativity. Scholars also focus on gender and the state, Brazilian and Mexican cultural production, and the evolution of Latin American thought across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Spanish Literature & History

This area explores Spain’s cultural legacy from medieval to modern times, including how language, literature and identity shape the state. Research covers the history of emotions, early modern texts and their translations, autobiographical writing, travel writing, twentieth-century art and literature, fascist culture, and representations of migration in media.

Theatre

We investigate modern drama across Europe with a special emphasis on twentieth and twenty-first century Spanish and Latin-American theatre. Key topics include performance, comparative European theatre and how drama reflects social change.

Film & Photography

Research in this area examines cinema and photographic culture from the Hispanic world and beyond — including Cuban film, Brazilian cinema in major cities (Rio and São Paulo), Lusophone African cinema, documentary photography from Spain and Latin America, and medieval subjects in cinema.

Linguistics, Language Teaching & Translation Studies

We explore the nature of language and its teaching — second language acquisition, multilingualism, applied linguistics, digital language technologies, Spanish as a foreign language, historical syntax of Romance languages, and translation (including audiovisual and pedagogic translation).

Brazilian, Portuguese & Lusophone African Studies

This strand covers Brazilian cultural studies and literature abroad, world cities such as Rio and São Paulo, Brazilian and Lusophone African cinema, and translation studies in the Lusophone world.

Research and teaching in Russian covers a wide range of areas, both conceptually and geographically, around language, literature, theory, history and culture from Russia and the former Soviet world. The department has a longstanding expertise in Soviet cinema and writing, memory and trauma in 20th Russia, and 19th century literature and culture, with seminal studies on Dziga Vertov and films of the holocaust, artistic avant-gardes and Andrei Platonov, among others. There is also a strong focus on Soviet science and cybernetics, Postcolonialism and Post-socialism.

Research areas in Russian include:

• 19th century Russian literature (canon and postcolonial perspectives)
• Soviet literature (in particular Zoshchenko, Platonov, non-fiction, journalistic forms)
• Soviet Artistic Avant-gardes
• Soviet cinema (especially documentary, Dziga Vertov, wartime and Russian Holocaust cinema)
• Memory and trauma in twentieth century Russia
• The discourses of Postcolonialism and the Postcommunist condition
• Soviet science, cybernetics and AI
• Post-Soviet Art and Culture

Research staff and their areas of expertise: 

Professor Jeremy Hicks

• Soviet film and World War Two; Soviet Film and the Holocaust; Russian Film and Humanitarianism; Russian and Soviet Documentary Film; Dziga Vertov; Reception of Soviet film in the West (1920s-40s); Mikhail Zoshchenko, Soviet literature (1920s-40s)

Dr Maria Chehonadskih

• The dialogue of arts and sciences in the Soviet Union, Andrei Platonov and Alexander Bogdanov, cybernetics and AI, the geopolitics of knowledge and the political epistemology of science in relation to (post-)socialism and the Cold War.
• Author of ‘Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

We invite applications from highly motivated students who wish to apply to our new PhD programme in Translation and Adaptation Studies. The Department provides unique supervision in a range of languages and original areas of Translation and Adaptation Studies, we also offer a Practice-led Pathway.

For further information please contact Dr Elena Carrera via email e.carrera@qmul.ac.uk 

Research in Interlingual Translation covers:

• Catalan
• Chinese
• Dutch
• French
• Galician
• German
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish

Research in Translation Studies covers:

• Adaptation
• Cultural translation
• Intersemiotic translation
• Literary Translation
• Medieval/ pre-modern translation
• Postcolonial translation
• Queer translation
• Sub-titling
• Theatre translation
• Theories of translation (including East European, German, Latin American and Russian)
• Translation as activism
• Translation for museums

We invite applications from highly motivated students who wish to apply to our PhD Programme in Visual Cultures. This programme consolidates the intellectual position of students of Modern Languages and Cultures within an increasingly interdisciplinary framework. This distinctive programme goes well beyond other PhDs in the field, which often accommodate a language-based view of culture.

For further information please contact

Dr Elena Carrera via email e.carrera@qmul.ac.uk 

Focus

• Cultural memory
• Trauma and censorship in visual cultures
• Book history and visual culture
• Cultural transfers in the visual arts
• Intermediality and image-text relationships
• Representations of migration, mobility and gender in film and photography

Areas of Research

Visual Cultures and Literature

• Text-image relations and visual poetry
• Humour and screen arts

Visual Cultures and Theatre

• Twentieth-century art and stage design, especially in Spain

Photodocumentary of displacement

• Including photography, social documentary, migration, gender and society

Visual Cultures: Transnational Approaches

• Cultural and artistic transfers (Circulations of artists, objects and thoughts - 19th-20th century)
• Transnational history of art museums and collections, with a focus on the interactions between France, Germany and Britain
• History of the Modern Movement in art, architecture, photography and design

Gender and Visual Cultures

• Gender and sexuality in visual culture

 Visual Cultures in Europe across Disciplines

• Catalan art
• Futurism
• Art under fascism

 Visual Cultures and Politics: Film Documentaries

• Russian and Soviet cinema, especially documentary film and representations of the Holocaust
• Brazilian documentary with a particular focus on the documentaries of social exclusion in late 20th century Brazil
• Argentine documentary with a particular focus on labour exclusion and the role of Union-initiated documentary production for the recuperation of abandoned factories in Argentina
• Audio-Visual initiatives in postcolonial Lusophone Africa