The call for the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme is now open, and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures welcomes expressions of interest from candidates wishing to apply to undertake PhD study at University College Cork. The scholarship application deadline is 4pm on 12th October 2023.
Colleagues in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, can offer co-supervision in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural projects in a range of areas including those covered by the research clusters within the School’s Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC) –
- Language: Cognition, Practice, Policy and Ideology
- Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past
- Rethinking Spatial Humanities
- The Life Writing Cluster
- Translation as Creative Practice
- Violence, Conflict and Gender
For further details on the work of the research clusters, please see below. Our doctoral students are also supported in their graduate education, research training and career development by the Graduate School of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences.
Interested candidates should send a 2-page CV and a short project proposal to the potential supervisor, or to the School’s Director of Graduate Studies, Dr Hannah Silvester (Hannah.silvester@ucc.ie) indicating the department or research cluster which is most relevant to the proposed research by Tuesday 12th September.
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Language: Cognition, Practice, Policy and Ideology
The aim of this cluster is to provide a dialogic space for researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to critically explore the affordances and tensions inherent in the study of language theories, practices, policies and ideologies within and across societies. We will do this by focusing on a number of interrelated domains including, but not limited to:
- Multilingual landscape
- Transnational mobility and plurlingual identities
- Language and the globalised workplace
- Minority language spaces
- Virtual language practices
- Language education
- Language in/of education
- Translanguaging
- Language learning pedagogies and policies
- Standardised language ideologies
- Native speakerism
- Linguistic discrimination
- Language in conflicts
- Language in/of the media
- Linguistic variation and change
- Language as a cognitive phenomenon
- First language acquisition
- Additional language acquisition
- Language processing
Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past
This cluster provides a space for interdisciplinary collaborations that are grounded in the growing field of memory studies. We aim to propose and contribute to new directions in the study of memory and commemoration by:
- Scrutinising the struggles for memory and engagement with the past as made manifest in the legal sphere, historical discourse, literature, theatre, human rights activism, oral testimony, artwork, social and digital media etc.
- Examining cases of memory construction emanating from both traumatic and non-traumatic events, thus challenging the close relationship between memory and trauma theory.
- Considering the ‘entrepreneurs’ of memory (Autry, 2017) not only as victims of violence, but as protagonists in the construction of memory and productive engagement with the past in the present.
We welcome proposals for collaboration with postgraduate and early career researchers and offer opportunities to get involved and meet other researchers across the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences.
Rethinking Spatial Humanities
This cluster is dedicated to the study of spatial theories and practices from an interdisciplinary perspective in the Humanities and beyond. Spatial thinking plays a vital role in a wide range of disciplines. This cluster explores the spatial connection points between these disciplines and fosters the exchange of ideas, theoretical frameworks and methods, both in research and practice. We are also committed to engaging in spatial practices with the wider community. We are happy to supervise PhD and Post-doctoral projects in spatial theories and practices from an interdisciplinary perspective in the Humanities and beyond. Potential research areas for projects include the following:
- Chronotopes of the Future.
- Gendered spaces.
- Language & space.
- Literary geographies.
- Socio-spatial activism.
- Space & environmental issues/ ecocriticism.
- Space & memory.
- Space, identity & alterity.
- Space, power, ideology & conflict.
- Spatial mobilities and migration.
The Life Writing Cluster
Life Writing is a term that is wonderfully broad, and worryingly vague, encompassing many media, genres and styles. The cluster deliberately uses this more inclusive term to include practices beyond biography and autobiography in order to interrogate all the ways in which life is moulded into narrative form. In other words, within this cluster, we interrogate everything which falls within the collocation’s ambit, from what exactly we mean by a narrated life, what and who we include and exclude, and, when coupled with the word writing, who or what is deemed worthy of having their life recorded in certain ways, and what is the relationship between the lives of the inscribers and the lives of the inscribed, or the pact between reader and writer, which Philippe Lejeune saw as the cornerstone of autobiographical practice.
The age of social media, the virtual and the digital, has changed the landscape of life writing, with new inscription techniques in the age of new media requiring new theoretical paradigms. Beyond new theorisations, the cluster also explores the different uses to which life writing can be put, including as a hermeneutic method.
PhD projects recently and currently being supervised in this area include work on the University of Greifswald collection of testimonies by women raped in Germany at the end of World War II, the private papers of Cork Mayor Gerald Goldberg held by the Boole Library, and the classroom uses of the diaries of Victor Klemperer. The Cluster welcomes doctoral research proposals on any aspect of Life Writing, from the theoretical to historical to literary.
Translation as Creative Practice
The Translation as Creative Practice research cluster focuses on translation as creative practice and provides a space for reflection on the ways in which translation practice might be considered to be research. The cluster’s emphasis on practice builds on capacities already present within the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and within the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, specifically in areas such as creative practice in writing, screen media, music and drama. The CASiLaC translation cluster seeks to foster creative translation practice among scholars within the cluster and create a hub or centre of excellence that promotes synergies between creative practice and translation practice within UCC. We aim to facilitate engagement with, and critical thinking on creative practice and translation in minority languages and support applications for funding that would enable the creation of a centre of excellence in translation practice within UCC. We are working to establish research links with international centres for literary translation, and promote reflection and discussion of translation as creative practice and as research through the organisation of regular seminars, workshops and conferences, to which international scholars, translators and creative practitioners are invited. Translation Studies research currently being undertaken within the School also includes areas such as audiovisual translation, theatre translation, translation in minoritized cultural contexts, linguistic variation and translation, activism and/in translation, public translation studies and the translation and reception of canonical texts.
Violence, Conflict and Gender
This cluster is a dedicated intellectual and creative space for critical reflection on the gendered construction of violence and conflict. It is attentive to cross-cultural thinking on the nature of violence and covers a range of time periods. Much work in the cluster is centered on the cultural politics of representational practices in a range of genres including writing, performance, testimonial archives and visual culture. We combine a programme of academic seminars, reading groups and invited speakers with community-engaged research activities. With support from the Centre for Advanced Study in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC), we welcome proposals for projects that include transdisciplinary interventions and approaches from a diverse set of perspectives including feminist theory and praxis (global, intersectional, decolonial, among others), and are particularly receptive to perspectives that challenge orthodox modes of thinking and promote social justice. Our cluster has a longstanding tradition of supporting postgraduate and early career researchers’ professional and academic development, providing constructive and supportive spaces to organise events, deliver research papers and co-convene the cluster. We also welcome visiting postgraduate researchers on the Erasmus+ scheme.