Welcome from the Head of Department
Welcome to the Languages, Cultures and Film summer alumni newsletter, in which you can read about the range of exciting projects and activities that have taken place over the past semester. Do have a listen to our Pódcast Con Tilde or dip into the student newspaper Scausländer Zeitung, both of which are testament to our talented and dedicated students.
This semester has also proven to be one for significant alumni anniversaries, with a successful 50th German anniversary in April, and a 40th French anniversary taking place this July.
We are very keen to connect further with our alumni community, to hear more about your careers and experiences after graduation, and to make connections between alumni and current students. If you have an interesting story to tell and would be willing to talk to current students, or even act as a mentor, please do get in touch – we would love to hear from you!
Professor Anna Saunders
Head of Department
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STUDENT NEWS
Spanish Podcast: project led by students and staff
Manuel Moreno, Paula Antela, and Paula Portela Cabana alongside students in Years 2 and 3 learning Spanish have set up a Spanish podcast called Pódcast Con Tilde (podcast with an accent).
You can read all about the experiences of those involved here. The first episode can be found here and you can also follow their Instagram account @podcastcontilde.
Scausländer Zeitung: German language newspaper created by students
“What if we were to turn this theoretical student newspaper into a real one?” That’s exactly what final year students in German Studies decided to do, when they turned a piece of assessment for their German language module into a real German language newspaper entitled the Scausländer Zeitung. The Anglo-German pun combines the term ‘Scouse’ with the German word Ausländer, meaning ‘foreigner’. The students created their own website to house the project after being inspired by Mrs Magedera’s language class and even had the chance to present it to German diplomat Dr Clemens Kohnen, Head of the Political Department of the German Embassy in London.
Read more about this initiative by clicking here and if you would like to take a look at the Scausländer Zeitung, it can be found here.
Placement in Film Studies: learning in a professional context and preparing for a year abroad
Second year Film and English student Laiken Downes had the opportunity as part of her course to go on a 30-hour placement, making a 16-minute short film alongside it. She ended up working with the LCR PRIDE Foundation, a charity that aims to support LGBT+ people in Liverpool by highlighting the struggles LGBT+ people face in order to build a more inclusive space. One of the things that Laiken stressed was how welcoming the people she was working with were. They not only made her feel welcome, but also helped to boost her confidence and made her feel like she was an important part of the team.
Laiken was particularly impressed by how involved they wanted her to be; she went into the placement thinking that she would just be helping with administrative tasks, yet ended up organising meetings and even conducting interviews. She got to meet leading figures in the film industry such as the creative director of Iris Film Festival. Subsequently she was given the opportunity to shortlist for the Iris Film Prize.
Laiken spoke about the people she was able to interview as a part of this placement, which she felt was important as it gave her the opportunity to meet and engage with people she didn’t usually interact with. She was introduced to new perspectives through LGBT+ people who were using their experiences in order to increase LGBT+ representation. This became a key part of her short film, where she conducted several interviews asking people about their opinions on the impact of representation in media. When asked the question of why LGBT+ representation in media is important, she replied that “cinema is for everyone”, and that because mainstream media can be highly focused on heterosexual experiences, it is vital to see a variety of identities reflected on screen. This film was submitted as 50% of the assessment for this module a key feature of the authentic assessment that we have implemented across our modules.
Laiken offered advice to students considering doing a placement, encouraging them to consider it as an option as she found it to be an amazing opportunity that gave her confidence and contacts for the future. However, she also advised students to go into placements with an open mind and not to put pressure on themselves, but to be willing to get involved and adapt to new circumstances and challenges.
Looking ahead, Laiken is currently preparing to go on a year abroad in Australia, now with renewed confidence in her networking ability and in the knowledge that she can communicate effectively in a professional setting.
Year Abroad Student Blogs
Take a trip with our students on their year abroad. Find out what our current students, Erin, Isla and Lewis, have been up to during their Year Abroad, please click here.
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EVENTS AND CELEBRATIONS
Catalan Event: Joan Triadú’s centenary anniversary
On the 30 March 2022 we celebrated Joan Triadú’s centenary anniversary. Triadú was a Catalan literary critic, academic and writer, as well as a lector in Catalan language and literature at the University of Liverpool from 1948 to 1950, appointed by Edgar Allison Peers.
The department hosted an afternoon of activities that celebrated his work and the history of Catalan Studies at the University. Attendees found out more about Triadú’s work, his time in Liverpool and his and Edgar Allison Peers’s instrumental roles in shaping Hispanic Studies in the UK. Novelist Llucia Ramis also took part in the event, discussing the clashes of cultures and cities in her work, and filmmaker Josep Alcover presented and discussed his new documentary on Joan Triadú.
Class of 1972 German reunion celebrate 50 year anniversary
The Class of 1972 German Studies have been gathering every five years since they graduated, and in April they met for their 50th anniversary reunion in Liverpool. The department was proud to support this event and enable attendees to visit our amazing Language Lounge, as well as to talk to staff and students about the curriculum and various current projects in German Studies at the University. To read more, please click here.
We also hosted a similar reunion in July 2022, when French graduates celebrated their 40th anniversary. These events offer a chance to create stronger connections between our alumni community and our current students. If you are interested in organising a reunion, do get in touch! Email us via: alumni@liverpool.ac.uk.
Celebrating languages and cultures with Routes into Languages
We are proud to announce that the department has taken on joint directorship of the North West branch of Routes into Languages, together with the University of Lancaster. We are planning to offer continued professional development sessions for modern foreign languages teachers and other activities aiming to support the promotion of languages in schools.
Join our new Routes Facebook group for more information. Through our refreshed Routes activity, we are also reconnecting with the very popular Spelling Bee Competition and sponsoring a number of local schools to participate.
If you are interested in finding out more, please visit the Spelling Bee Competition webpages.
Promoting languages through outreach events
Our department is keen to promote languages and support modern foreign langauges teachers in primary and secondary schools. We regularly invite school groups onto campus and provide various activities, workshops and tours. If you are interested and would like to see what we can offer, please visit the department's outreach webpage by clicking here or contact Claudia François c.francois@liverpool.ac.uk for more information.
When visiting our campus in June, Year 7 pupils learned about the department, visiting the Language Lounge and engaging in activities from various cultures, such as salsa lessons and Chinese calligraphy. You can see an example of their work below.
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RESEARCH IN FOCUS
New publication by Maria Flood: 'Moonlight, Screening Black Queer Youth'
Dr Maria Flood, Senior Lecturer in World Cinema at the University of Liverpool, recently published Moonlight, Screening Black Queer Youth. She is also author of France, Algeria and the Moving Image (2017) and has published on Francophone cinemas of the Maghreb, world cinema and political violence and terrorism and ethics in documentary film.
Moonlight: Screening Black Queer Youth was published with Routledge in 2021, and is available to purchase here. The book helps readers to understand Moonlight’s profound political and social importance, the innovative technical choices adopted by director Barry Jenkins, and the film’s adoption and disruption of traditional coming-of-age themes through the specific prism of Chiron’s childhood and youth.
Moonlight (2016) is an intensely moving and poetically rendered coming-of-age story about a young gay Black boy, Chiron. Highly praised by both critics and audiences internationally, it garnered a surprise Best Picture win at the 2017 Academy Awards, enshrining its significance within a global cinematic canon. This book provides an account of how Moonlight can be situated in relation to African American youth films, contemporary queer cinema and its appeal to the youth market and representations of non-normative childhood and adolescence. It analyses the reception of Moonlight in terms of its form and profound emotional impact on spectators offering new visions of African American boyhoods while also contributing an extended exploration of the social and political context of the film in relation to Obama, Trump and diversity in filmmaking.
Highlighting to students and scholars the powerful emotional pull of Moonlight and why it is a highly significant film, this book is ideal for those interested in critical race studies, queer theory, youth cinema, African American cinema and LGBTQ cinema.
“Chile in Liverpool: Music, Memories and Heritage” a project led by Professor Lisa Shaw
This project involves working with local people in Merseyside and the UK more widely, who came here as exiles from the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s-80s, as well as their descendants. It focuses on exploring the role of music in maintaining their sense of Chilean heritage, identity and community, and how music can be used to pass on this heritage to future generations within families. This project has been running on a small-scale for two years, and has greatly benefitted from previously involving undergraduate students via the Undergraduate Research Scheme and the Virtual Year Abroad in LCF. Thanks largely to the input of those students (6 in all) the project has developed a social media presence and begun to create episodes for a podcast series to ensure greater involvement of the local and national communities of Chilean exiles and their descendants as well as those with links to the Chile Solidarity movements of the 1970s/80s. The project also works with the Robert Pring-Mill Collection of materials relating to Latin American protest music (held in the Popular Music Archive at the University of Liverpool), to encourage the public to engage with this Collection and to promote it beyond Liverpool and the UK, linking up with other similar archives internationally.
To learn more about it click here.
Professor Claire Taylor oversees the AHRC-funded Memory Victims and Representation of the Colombian Conflict
Nominated for a Research Impact Award in the Staff Awards 2022, Principal Investigator, Claire Taylor oversees the AHRC-funded Memory Victims and Representation of the Colombian Conflict (MVRColombia), cooperating with multiple NGO partners, community groups and museums in Colombia and the UK who work in the areas of human rights, victim testimony, and beyond.
There are several strands of areas of activity to the project, including:
• Un Museo Para Mí/A Museum for Me, which provides specially designed kits and instructions so that participants may record and share their own experiences. Workshops are run across Colombia with, for example, the Organización Femenina Popular, the Museo Afro through the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá, and with Fundación Guagua in Cali, in April and May 2022.
• ArchiCom, a research, design, and training project, for the preservation of non-state collections, helping to safeguard irreplaceable community-based human rights archives
• Various collaborative academic publications and presentations, visiting doctoral and internship programmes, and a three-day, twenty-one panel international conference in April 2021
• Regular podcasts of interviews and project updates in a series called Irradiando Paz
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ACADEMICS IN FOCUS
Dr Marven looks back on family history through lost medal
Senior lecturer of German Studies, Dr Lyn Marven reminisces about the history of her great grandfather’s time in WW1, writing:
Back in 2014, the department of Cultures, Languages and Areas Studies (as LCF was known at the time) ran a blog tracing the lives of relatives of students and staff at University of Liverpool, as part of the centenary celebrations of the First World War. I contributed a short piece about my great-grandfather, whom I never met but about whom all sorts of family legends circulated based on his service during WW1: he was supposed to have flown a plane under the Forth Rail Bridge and allegedly once landed it on a local golf course in Fife. My great grandfather was called Jesse Jestico Marven – a name to conjure with and one that, it turns out, makes him pretty Googleable… In the summer of 2021, I received a message through Facebook from a woman I didn’t know, who had come across a WW1 medal belonging to a JJ Marven in a bric-a-brac sale in Leven, Fife, where my great grandfather had lived, and took it upon herself to try to return the medal to the family. She found him, and then me, through that blog post! By a series of happy coincidences and several people going out of their way to help us out, the medal was delivered back to my dad for safekeeping with a small but touching handover at the war memorial at St Luke’s, the bombedout church.
If you want to read the blog post that inspired this, then you can find it here.
Dr Almeida’s interview about famous Portuguese artist, Paula Rego
In April this year, Dr Ana Bela Almeida, Lecturer in Portuguese Studies, gave an interview to National Museums Liverpool about the life and work of Portuguese-British visual artist Paula Rego and how her work empowered women. Paula Rego died in June 2022 and left behind works that illustrate the experiences of women and their right for ownership of their bodies. She was especially passionate about the decriminalisation of abortion, a topic which resonates greatly today.
Read more about this interview by clicking here, or to listen to this interview, please click here.
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ALUMNI IN FOCUS
Nikoletta Michael (BA Hons Modern Language Studies, French and Spanish 2016)
Policy Officer at the City of London Corporation
Since graduating from the University of Liverpool in 2016, Nikoletta has lived, studied and worked in different parts of the world. Nikoletta received her undergraduate degree in French and Spanish from both the Universities of Montpellier and Liverpool, and her Master’s degree in European Studies from the London School of Economics.
While she was studying, Nikoletta interned as a Parliamentary Researcher at the House of Lords where she worked on policy areas related to education and young people. She also interned at the European Commission and the Permanent Representation of Cyprus to the European Union in Brussels where she had the opportunity to work with interpreters, participate in campaigns and attend conferences at the European Parliament.
Upon finishing her Master’s degree, Nikoletta spent nine months in Azerbaijan as a Visiting Research Fellow where she investigated the integration and identities of ethnic minorities in the region. She worked closely with NGOs and government bodies to improve access to education for refugees and internally displaced people. Nikoletta is passionate about education and human rights and has volunteered with refugee communities throughout the Middle East including in Lebanon, Jordan and Cyprus. She strongly believes that her languages and her global experiences have been the key factor in allowing her to forge a career in international relations.
Nikoletta worked for the Foreign Office in Spain as a Brexit coordinator where she had the opportunity to contribute to strengthening the bilateral relationship between the UK and Spain before the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. In her current role as a Policy Officer at the City of London Corporation, she works in the office of the Chair of Policy and Resources. In this role, she has been able to acquire more policy knowledge and expertise and hopes to be able to apply this knowledge to a future role within a multilateral organisation where she can work on initiatives that aim to reduce education inequality around the world. Nikoletta is a mentor for young people in Liverpool. She is passionate about helping disadvantaged young people access opportunity and uses her experiences to empower young people and connect them to their dreams.
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KEEP LEARNING
Open Languages
Open Languages, the University of Liverpool’s Institution-Wide Language Programme, launched a suite of language modules for students, staff, and the general public. Covering Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, we have a varied choice of languages, with a flexible new learning system.
Check our webpage for more information.
Wanted: your stories!
Did your degree in Modern Languages enable you to land an exciting job? Are you using some of the languages and/or transferable skills acquired during your studies at Liverpool in your job? Do you live within commuting distance of Liverpool and want to inspire new generations to study languages?
If this sounds like you then we would love to hear from you! We are looking for alumni to get involved in career related activities and events organised for our current students who would benefit greatly from your experience. For more information please contact Claudia François, at c.francois@liverpool.ac.uk.
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