In modern languages research, we interrogate the link between language and identities, researching our languages as transnational phenomena in a global context to understand the cultural and society impact. This means examining the cultures of languages’ global contact zones across the languages we research including; the wider Iberian world, Lusophone Africa and Brazil, the transnational cultures of German, and the Francophone world.
Prominent among our large-scale collaborative enterprises has been Language Acts and Worldmaking, a flagship project (2016-21) funded by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative. This project was conceived to interrogate language use and transformation in an Iberian world context; by its nature, the project was designed to make long-term contributions to the continuing vitality not only of the research and teaching of languages at King’s, but of Modern Languages more widely.
Similarly global in scale, multi-centred research funded by both the AHRC and ERC reconstructed Europe’s multicultural past through the lens of the medieval Francophone world. This research project integrated scholarship and digital methodologies to make visible premodern multilingualism and multiculturalism; aims included ‘decentreing’ French literary history and reaching beyond universities in challenging a nationalist view of literary and linguistic traditions and their relationship to identities.
Challenging the limitations of nation-state frameworks and reaching new audiences has also been central to the work of the German Screen Studies Network: an Anglo-German media public funded by DAAD and King’s. The research explored the transnational archive as a resource for the retrieval, curation and dissemination of Anglo-German cinema, and has traced German connections across colonial and postcolonial Anglophone cinemas, in locations including India and West Africa.
Our research impact was rated 87.5 per cent at ‘world leading’ (4*) or ‘internationally excellent’ (3*) and 100 per cent for ‘world leading’ (4*) research environment at the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF2021).
Our staff are specialists in their fields
With eleven permanent staff members, all of whom are research active, we are committed to the full chronological range of literary studies in the German-speaking countries. We have further interdisciplinary research strength in German Screen Studies, History and Politics and Comparative Literature with a number of colleagues working across departments and faculties.
PhD in German
Our PhD programme has grown to become one of the most dynamic in the UK with a current cohort of eighteen doctoral students. We offer a range of distinct PhD programmes, including those with opportunities for co-supervision in the UK and Germany. Our active research seminar provides a fortnightly forum at which staff and students come together in dialogue.
Expertise
Research expertise in German covers an exceptionally broad chronological and disciplinary range.
We have core strengths in the medieval and early modern periods, and further specialism on the long history of European thought with particular focus on the Goethezeit. With two members of staff working across German and Film Studies, our expertise includes film history, archive and documentary. Further foci include literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and cultural production in the GDR.
Our major research strand ‘German in the World’ launched in 2011. It draws together colleagues working on colonial histories and legacies, transnational networks, multilingual poetics, as well as histories of displacement and post-migration cultures. In recent years, departmental staff have been awarded prestigious fellowships by the European and Arts and Humanities Research Councils, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Free University Berlin. King’s German enjoys particular success in attracting funding for our many PhD students through the London Arts & Humanities Partnership and international scholarships.
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