European Languages PhD

The Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University offers PhD programmes in a wide range of topics. Students undertaking a PhD often spend a considerable part of their research period working from libraries abroad and / or archives, while remaining under supervision from their mentor at Aberystwyth.<br/><br/>Areas of research include:<br/><br/><br/>- <strong>French:</strong> historical linguistics; early modern literature and ideas; modern literature; cinema; Anglo-Norman; Romance linguistics; history of travel and travel literature; 20th- and 21st-century French thought, especially existentialism and feminism; (auto-)biography and life-writing; and theoretical approaches to reading.<br/><br/><br/>- <strong>German:</strong> 20th- and 21st-century German prose; autobiographies and life writing; women’s writing; German-Jewish literature; history and culture; Holocaust texts and translation; German-speaking refugees from National Socialism and especially the Kindertransport; postdramatic theatre and translation; German grammar and language anxiety; new tragic in European theatre and performance.<br/><br/><br/>- <strong>Spanish:</strong> stylistic comparison of 19th-century Spanish novels; North African comparative colonial literature; cosmopolitanism; geopolitics; landscape; science in Latin American literature and film; gender, identity and nation; cultural legacies of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict; avant-garde; 20th-century Hispanic poetry; women’s cultural practice; and language learning and foreign language anxiety.<br/><br/><br/>Our postgraduates have been researching such topics as:<br/><br/><br/>• Translating René Le Payss Amitiez, amours, amourettes: rendering travelogues in the language of their destination<br/><br/><br/><br/>• The early 20th-century German women writers Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum<br/><br/><br/><br/>• The translation of audio-visual Holocaust testimony<br/><br/><br/><br/>• Regional Refugee Committee supporting refugees from National Socialism<br/><br/><br/><br/>• Kindertransport autobiographies and fiction<br/><br/><br/><br/>• A comparative analysis of Second Generation Kindertransport in the US and the UK.<br/><br/>