Modern Languages Newsletter Winter 2016 17

MODERN LANGUAGES NEWSLETTER Winter 2016/17

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Hello! I am delighted to share with you some of the exciting developments in our language-teaching provision, here at the University of Manchester.

Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish: we teach them all across a vast range of courses, drawing on cuttingedge expertise and offering a broad spectrum of course units. Whether you study these languages from scratch or are already proficient, a language degree at Manchester will allow you to realise your potential, and will very likely represent the most fruitful and constructive four years you will ever spend. In our globalised world, the ability to speak languages is central to leading richer, more interconnected lives, and students here develop the communication and critical skills that not only enable them to understand others better, but also to grow into socially responsible and culturally attentive citizens. With flexibility of course options, native-speaker staff, superb facilities, round-theyear cultural events and numerous employment opportunities, we are confident that we deliver one of the best learning experiences for modern languages in the UK. Take a look through this magazine for highlights of our courses, events and partners. I really hope to see you next year!

Dr Barbara Lebrun, Modern Languages Undergraduate Admissions Director.

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1 CONTENTS Arabic

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Chinese

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French

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German

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Italian

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Japanese

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Russian

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Spanish

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Portuguese

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Business and Management

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Politics

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Residence Abroad

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Careers

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Contacts

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2 NEWS FROM OUR LANGUAGE SUBJECTS Arabic This year, our L-PAL ‘language buddy’ scheme which teams up final-year Arabic students with local native Arabic speakers is being extended to level 2 students. Our year-long programme of Middle Eastern Studies research seminars kicked off on 4 October with Dr Tom Woerner-Powell, who talked on ‘Conversion, colonisation and conversation: a competition of Mediterranean (Meta -)Religions’; other talks this year will cover topics as wide-ranging and fascinating as ‘Palestine solidarity in the long 1970s: Jean Genet and the humanitarian turn’, ‘Life after ruin: Struggles over Israel’s depopulated Arab spaces’, ‘Palestine in the Popular Imagination: From Refugees to Negotiators’ and ‘The Living Martyr: disability in Middle Eastern visual and media culture’. In November, we held a special Feedback Week for all our students, who were able to discuss their progress with course convenors and to get advice on how to improve and succeed in the exams of Semester 1. Such advice can of course be had at any stage during the year, but we believe that our special Feedback Week brings awareness on the importance (and the possibility) of progress.

In December, our final-year students and staff will be going out for a festive meal in a local Middle Eastern Restaurant to celebrate the end of Semester 1 –all expenses paid! We really hope you’ll come and enjoy our department –and our food– next year!

Chinese The Chinese Studies department regularly teams up with the Confucius Institute, which is conveniently housed on the premises of the University of Manchester. Together, we run numerous cultural events throughout the year, a highlight of which is the annual Dragon Boat Race, taking place in Salford Quays. Externally, we have an exciting project organized with the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Salford University and Manchester Metropolitan University, focusing on contemporary East Asian art. Metaphorically speaking, we are planting seeds for the development of Greater Manchester as a centre of creative and engaged exploration of East Asian art,in all its forms. Of special interests to our many students on the Chinese and Business & Management degree is our ‘Study China’ programme, the UK’s largest student mobility programme which fosters work opportunities abroad for graduates of Chinese at Manchester. The advantage of studying Chinese at Manchester goes beyond opportunities for business and internships however, as we equip students with fundamental knowledge about the fascinating culture and history of China.

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This year, a new course unit called ‘The City in Chinese Visual Culture’ examines mainland China’s urban transformation through photography, independent 3D animation, installation art, cinema, the Internet and urban propaganda. You can read more about what we offer and watch videos featuring current Chinese Studies students on our subject page and keep in touch with staff, current students and alumni via our new official Facebook page.

French In French Studies we hold numerous events bringing students from all year groups together, engaging them with the wider francophone and francophile community of Manchester. In November, we held our annual ‘Working with French’ workshop at the Alliance française de Manchester, which put students in touch with alumni working in the private sector, and treated them to a talk by the boss of ‘Madame Vacances’. How to apply for summer and Year Abroad placements was flagged up, as well as the company’s Management Trainee scheme for future graduates. Each Autumn, as our second-year students consider their options for going abroad, they receive support from their Academic Advisors and language tutors, who incorporate the skills of writing a French CV and doing a job interview into the programme.

In April, the first-year ab initio group and our finalists will be able to follow a stage de perfectionnement (intensive language tuition or revision course) in the beautiful surroundings of the Institut de Touraine, in the Loire Valley. This year in April too, our alumna Prof. Kiera Vaclavik will give a talk on her research interests in the translations and illustrations of French children’s books. In terms of teaching, we’re currently udpating a firstyear module on French identity in order to reflect recent challenges, examining the meaning of Republicanism and the place of ethnic minorities in France. For news on our curriculum, research and cultural activities, please check out our French Studies at Manchester Facebook page.

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German Our programme of activities for students of German is fully packed this year again. Starting this November, there was a whole weekend of performance and film about Berlin at HOME, our theatre and cinema complex. Our colleague Dr Cathy Gelbin was recently interviewed about the figure of the Golem in GermanJewish mythology for a TV programme on the Franco-German TV channel Arte.

The German Society will be hosting this year’s Great German Bake-Off before Christmas, and this year’s German play is to be Bertolt Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. We continue to be an active part of the North West German Network (www.nwgn.co.uk), which is a joint initiative by local schools, businesses and universities to promote all things German in the North West of England. Up-to-date news about language courses, German films and markets, and about business and work opportunities in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, are available on the website. And like every year, we continue to offer specialist teaching covering the 18th century to the present, with particularly popular courses that examine representations of gender and race, films about the Holocaust, Turkish immigration to Germany, or the complex relationship between culture and dictatorship.

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Italian Italian Studies welcomed the new Year 1 cohort this autumn together with the returning Finalists who have all spent time in Italy during their Year Abroad. Staff are gradually hearing the many stories of the adventures, discoveries and friendships formed in Bologna, Palermo, Naples and the other centres where our students studied and taught.

This year there seems to be a particular enthusiasm for returning to Italy after the completion of degrees in July 2017, a possible reaction to the reality of Brexit. There are also new staff members as we are joined by Dr Alessandra Diazzi from Cambridge and Dr Teresa Franco from Oxford who will be teaching across all year groups on matters cultural and linguistic. It was gratifying to see our labours recognised in the recently announced National Student Survey (NSS) in which our Final year students who graduated in 2016 awarded us 93% satisfaction, placing the department in the Top 3 in the UK for Italian Studies. On the research front, Prof. Stephen Milner returned to Harvard recently to give a lectures at the Houghton Library and the Morgan Library in New York on printed parchment books, many of which are held at the Rylands Library, here in Manchester. Dr Francesca Billiani has been awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship to work on a project on the arts during the Italian dictatorship (1922-1943). Dr Walter Baroni is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, working on a project investigating narratives of self-awareness as articulated by members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and feminist groups in 1970s Italy. Dr Antonio Bibbò, another Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Italian, has recently organised the Irish in Italy exhibition at the National Library of Rome (Italy).

Looking forward, Dr Guyda Armstrong has secured an award from the School’s Research Impact Support Fund to work with a playwright and students on a new theatre production based on three tales taken from Boccaccio’s Decameron. For more news and views from the Italian department, you can follow us on Twitter at @UofM_Italian.

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Japanese As new students are now settling in, we are as busy as ever! Our East Asian Studies seminar series, ran in partnership with Chinese Studies, kicked off on 20 October with a talk by Dr Leon Rocha (University of Liverpool) on one of the greatest Sinologists of the 20th century, Joseph Needham. Our new staff appointments, Dr Bill Mihalopoulos and Dr Barbara Geilhorn, will give talks in this seminar series. This year again, our long-term friend and part-time colleague, Mr Takayasu Takemoto, a.k.a. ‘Taka-san’, hosted a sushi demonstration event in November. In March 2017, we will hold a Sixth Form and GCSE Japan Day in collaboration with the Japan Society. Year 2 students are now preparing for kaiwa kissa (the Japanese conversation café) that brings Japanese exchange students and our own students for mutual benefit. On the academic side, our two colleagues Dr Erica Baffelli and Dr Peter Cave published their new monographs this summer, Media and New Religions in Japan and Schooling Selves on Japanese school reforms respectively. Dr Aya Homei became a commissioned scholar at the Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, and further transnational collaborations are on the horizon as Dr Homei is organizing a workshop inviting Japanese scholars working on fertility and ageing to Manchester, and Dr Baffelli is currently in Japan carrying out her new research.

Finally, we are delighted that we received extra funds to make a further progress with the project to digitize historical Japanese maps at the John Rylands University Library. Please keep checking our Japanese at Manchester Facebook page for regular notices on our forthcoming events. We look forward to meeting you, or catching up with you, in these events!

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Russian Russian and East European Studies is a hive of activity this Autumn, with teaching in full swing and lots of extracurricular activities going on. Recently we hosted the one-day research workshop ‘Visualising the Nation’, which brought together scholars working on Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Lusophone Africa to explore ways in which analysing visual imagery can help us understand national identities and nationalist movements in the modern world. Nearer Christmas we will be holding an interactive demonstration of Russian folk music and art, when students will learn about the history and music of the balalaika (a Russian stringed instrument with a distinctive triangular body) and about khokhloma handicrafts (wooden spoons, bowls and other dishes painted with vivid red-and-gold floral designs). Our students will also have the opportunity to paint their own matryoshki (Russian nesting dolls) under expert guidance. Our third-year students, who are currently on their year abroad, are no less busy than we are here. From Petrozavodsk, one student writes, ‘I just wanted to let you know how wonderful we think it is here. Being in a city that’s more rural than St. Petersburg or Moscow means we have so much more opportunity to speak Russian. Our lessons are almost exclusively in Russian, and our teachers have also introduced us to groups of Russian students inside and outside of lessons. We have found interesting things to do every week, [and] the university staff have been very helpful’ in organising excursions to places like Kizhi and the Kivach waterfalls, as well as to ‘a pop concert (Sergei Lazarev — the Russian singer from Eurovision 2015), the ballet and the opera’. We will soon be meeting with our second-year students to discuss residence abroad options for next year—and with reports like this, we will definitely encourage them to consider Petrozavodsk!

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8 Spanish The 2016-17 academic year is typically busy and exciting for us in Spanish and Latin American Studies (SPLAS). Through our newly redesigned core courses, first-year students are exploring such topics as Amerindian responses to the arrival of Spaniards in the Americas, the significance of ‘the Gypsy’ in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, the link between nationalism and terrorism in 20th-century Spain, and the continued importance of Simón Bolívar, political hero of the Spanish American Wars of Independence.

Meanwhile, second- and final-year students are busy with optional courses ranging from modern Spanish music to cultural revolutions in Latin America, and from representations of the supernatural in Latin American film and literature, to Spanish linguistics. The Café en Español, our regular Spanish-language get-together, is running again this year and the student society (SPLASSS) has a calendar packed with new events. To mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, we recently celebrated the symposium Cervantes Reborn: Textual Reception and Authorial Resurrection in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute. This year’s Spanish and Portuguese Research Seminar Series has also begun with a session commemorating the author of Don Quixote. Members of the department are currently involved in planning the 23rd ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival at HOME. Our Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies is running its annual seminar series: we kicked off this year with a screening of the documentary film Yagé is Our Life (Neil White, 2016) which explores how Indigenous communities in southern Colombia respond to growing foreign demand for ayahuasca. We hope you decide to become part of it all, and join us in September 2017!

An additional language? 

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Our Language Centre offers evening classes in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu and TESOL (English for foreign speakers). You can study any of these for a certificate, starting from beginners’ level, intermediate or proficient.

When studying Spanish, you can choose to learn Portuguese or Catalan; when studying Russian, you choose to learn Polish.

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9 Portuguese It has been an exciting summer for us in Portuguese Studies, with the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and the spotlight they shone on Brazilian culture generally. With this very much in mind, Professor Lúcia Sa organised in July a Brazilian Film weekender at HOME. While a group of year-abroad students has recently returned from Brazil, brimming with stories of life in the country in the run-up to the games, another cohort has already replaced them at our partner universities in São Paulo and Florianópolis, and in a variety of work placements: teaching English, working in a Pousada or doing subtitling work, amongst other activities.

At the same time, another group of students is about to start classes at our three Erasmus partner universities in Portugal. Our Portuguese language tutor, José de Souza, recently hosted this academic year’s first session of the Café Lusófono, a series of regular, informal gatherings for coffee, cake and Portuguese-language conversation, open to all Portugueselanguage speakers on campus. Also, a group of our final-year students is getting ready to participate in the Languages XP programme which sees them deliver Portuguese language tasters to pupils in state schools across Greater Manchester who have no previous experience of the language.

For all languages 

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Please check out our 2017 Modern Languages Brochure where a selection of current course units is listed. Beyond the core language modules, and some core Year 1 culture modules, a general principle of choice among optional units applies.

Each new student is paired up with an ‘Academic Advisor’ upon arrival, an individual academic staff member who gets to know the students best and remains their point of contact throughout their studies. This colleague is best placed to support students if personal matters affect their academic progress.

All languages have excellent support mechanisms in place for both academic and personal issues, ranging from our efficient Mitigating Circumstances Policy to Disability Support, Counselling Services, peer-support sessions, academic writing sessions, student reps, and more.

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Business and Management A Modern Language and Business & Management (MLBM) is fast becoming our most popular programme across all languages, and for very good reasons. With as many as 28 different second-year and 24 final-year course units to choose from, across Business, Management and Economics, the Business & Management side of the degree is unique in its breadth, and delivered by world-leading experts. To illustrate, Prof. Leo McCann, who lectures on a core course at Level 2, recently published a book on International and Comparative Business that is fast becoming a leading textbook for students the world over.

In their second year, students can also choose the Manchester Leadership Programme, an optional course unit that offers hands-on training in Management, with leaders from all sections of society, including academia, business, charities and the public sector, giving master classes. On the Language side, students not only receive dedicated business language classes but also, and importantly, specialist knowledge in many aspects of foreign culture, including history, politics, literature, film, popular culture, linguistics or translation.

This ensures that a Manchester graduate on the MLBM programme is not just a competent linguist, but also, and perhaps above all, a well-rounded, adaptable professional whose cultural knowledge gives them the edge when ‘doing business’.

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Politics The Politics and a Modern Language degree at Manchester is an innovative collaboration between the School of Social Sciences and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. It offers great flexibility through its combination of core and optional politics modules, in addition to the study of your chosen language and culture (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish). After Year 1 core units on comparative political theory, you can choose to study modules such as ‘The Politics of (In) Security’, ‘The Politics of Development’, ‘Chinese Politics Today’, ‘What is Europe?’, ‘Gender, Sex and Politics’, ‘Africa and Global Politics’… from a list of 20+ choices. From Year 2, you may study another language for 20 credits as part of your Degree.

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RESIDENCE ABROAD All students spend Year 3 abroad. Depending on your proficiency in a given language, and which languages you combine together, you will spend between 2 and 8 months in a single country, or much more time abroad overall, across at least two destinations. Not only do you have a choice in where you go, but also in what you do. For most destinations, you’ll be able to study, teach English or get an internship, and usually mix and match these possibilities.

Example 1: a Single Honours French student may study for a semester in La Martinique (French Caribbean), then do an internship in Paris for 6 months.

Example 2: a Joint Honours German & Chinese student may work in Berlin for 3 months, then study in Shanghai for 6 months.

Example 3: a Joint Honours MLBM-Italian student may work in Rome for 8 months, then follow an Italian language course in the summer.

If you choose to work, our superb Careers Service provides a database of reliable foreign companies where our students have already had positive experiences. If you are interested in studying abroad, see the full list of our current university partners.

And remember‌ French, Spanish and Portuguese are not just spoken in Europe: you can immerse yourself in these languages further afield.

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And remember‌ French, Spanish and Portuguese are not just spoken in Europe: you can immerse yourself in these languages much further afield.

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Careers in Languages Modern Foreign Languages graduates from our University have gone on to a huge variety of careers. Recent job titles include: Culture and Development Manager at the British Council, Production Coordinator at the BBC, Translator at The Big Word , Editor at MacMillan Education, Analyst at Goldman Sachs, Graduate Buying Trainee at Lidl.

Every year, the Careers Service runs special events for Language students, such as the popular ‘Meet the Language Graduates’ where students can network and talk to University of Manchester graduates about the jobs they do and how they use their languages.

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Languages in Manchester – it’s not just for the Degree! 

Being the large urban centre that it is, Manchester is particularly multilingual, multicultural and student-friendly, and the ideal place to learn languages given its long-established partnerships with cultural institutes, chief among which are the Confucius Institute, the Alliance française de Manchester and the Instituto Cervantes.

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Manchester is itself a highly popular destination for foreign students, and the University’s links with European and world-wide institutions means that the campus is always abuzz with foreign visitors. It couldn’t be easier meeting up with students whose native language you’re hoping to learn!

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CONTACT US ug-languages@manchester.ac.uk Undergraduate Admissions Office School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Room A19, Samuel Alexander Building The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PT United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)161 275 311

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