European Languages (Research)

The Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University offers an MPhil programme in a wide range of topics. Students undertaking an MPhil 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.

The main focus of your research degree will be a detailed dissertation, and you will receive regular supervision from specialists within the Department on its planning, creation and writing.

The MPhil normally takes one year of full-time research (two years part-time), after which students complete and submit a dissertation of up to 60,000 words.

Areas of research include:

• French: 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.

• German: 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.

• Spanish: 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.

Our postgraduates have been researching such topics as:

• Translating René Le Pays's Amitiez, amours, amourettes: rendering travelogues in the language of their destination

• The early 20th-century German women writers Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum

• The translation of audio-visual Holocaust testimony

• Regional Refugee Committee supporting refugees from National Socialism

• Kindertransport autobiographies and fiction

• A comparative analysis of Second Generation Kindertransport in the US and the UK.