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Funded Research

We conduct world-leading research projects, many of which are supported by external funding.

Significant sums of external funding have facilitated research within the School of Modern Languages. Examples include funding from the AHRC for work on Chinese independent cinema, on post-conflict imaginaries revealed through film screenings, and on poetry translation.

Our staff have won prestigious Fellowships to investigate subjects as diverse as the Anthropocene in contemporary literature, the Nazi past in German children’s school essays, and street art in Greater Paris.

Teacher leading class discussion
Independent cinema in China: State, market and film culture

This project works with Chinese independent filmmakers and curators to establish a research archive of Chinese independent films and film culture.

Screening violence

This project uses film reception to learn about experiences of conflict and transition to peace in Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland.

Inventing greater Paris: Visual Culture, regeneration and the right to the global city

This project explores the current expansion of Paris with a focus on how visual culture is involved in state-led practices of place-making and resistance to those practices.

West German student essays on the Nazi era

This project uncovers children’s impressions of the Nazi era through school essays written in the 1950s.

Environmental selves: Film, autobiography and the natural world

This project explores how contemporary autobiographical filmmakers identify with non-human elements of the natural world and unsettle the stability of the human.

Gendering Murakami Haruki

This project examines the literary worlds of Murakami, including the gendering of his characters as well as the processes of translation and transmedial production.

Poetry translation in poet-advisor-poet trios

This project looks at collaborative, cross-language and creative processes in the translation of poetry.

World literature influences on 20th century Chinese and Japanese literary scenes

This project investigates how political, economic and cultural contact with the West helped revolutionise literary culture in 20th century Japan and China.

Cultural narratives of crisis and renewal

This project examines cultural production and cultural practices in periods of societal crisis at the turn-of-the 20th Century on both sides of the Atlantic.