TML Conference, ‘Transnational Modern Languages’
The Italian Cultural Institute, 2-3 December 2016

Challenging the assumption that cultures are self-contained units that correspond to sharply defined national boundaries must become an essential part of all disciplinary fields and sub-fields that make up Modern Languages, as they seek to avoid the risk of methodological nationalism and of participating in the very structures that it is their purpose to critique.

A great deal of research within Modern Languages is already, albeit often implicitly, concerned with the transnational dimension of culture. In so doing, it poses questions about language, translation and multi-lingualism; about the set of practices that make up a sense of location and of belonging to a geographically determined site; about the notions of temporality that obtain within cultures; about modes of understanding subjectivity and alterity. All these questions are of fundamental importance for the study not only of the contemporary world, and its likely future, but for the study of the past.

The aim of the conference was to explore how the ‘cultural’ and the ‘transcultural’ cannot be studied in isolation but rather need to be seen as part of a complex system of circulation which goes beyond national boundaries, canons or linguistic discreteness. The conference sought to bring together researchers who are working on the transnational across Modern Languages and whose work poses questions both on how we study culture and how we produce a version of Modern Languages that is fully respondent to practices of human mobility and cultural exchange.

Conference programme. Attached.

Below are the recordings of the plenary sessions of the conference. On the morning of the first day, the introduction to the conference and the keynote lecture by David Gramling.

The afternoon session of the first day with presentations by Hilary Foottit and Wine Tesseur; Catherine Boyle and Debra Kelly; Derek Duncan.

The evening session on co-produced research with Jenny Burns, Naomi Wells and Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and on the project exhibition with Viviana Gravano and Giulia Grechi.

On the second day, the morning session on the ‘Transnational Modern Languages’ book series with Liverpool University Press.

The first afternoon session with the presentation by Ulrike Draesner.

The final roundtable with interventions by Charles Forsdick, Loredana Polezzi and Rita Wilson.

The video recordings have been prepared by Glauco Canalis and Nivi Jasa.