Centre for Translating Cultures

The Centre provides a context to draw together work on ‘Translating Cultures’ within the University. Building on the work of our Translaton Studies research group we interpret ‘Translating Cultures’ broadly and explore migrations, border-crossing, exile, diaspora, adaptation, intermediality and multimedia from antiquity to the present day. We work with external partner the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter.

• We trace the trajectories of authors, texts and ideas that cross national borders: diasporic authors, musicians, composers, artists and filmmakers, including African filmmakers in France, literary translation in Russia, transnational trends in early-modern court culture and Global Dickens travelling texts like English film in China, transnational poetry in the 1930s and beyond, European game culture and poetic engagement 1350–1550; the migration and interaction of medieval musicians and the transmission and reception of medieval song; Woolf in Spain; roving ideas like German Romanticism in Spanish theatre, the ‘middlebrow’ in world cinemas, postfeminism in European cinema; wandering words like peninsular Portuguese in East Timor; language contact and multilingualism and variation in, and varieties, of French as expressions of culture in different social contexts; flowing images such as Chinese landscapes in 17th–18th-century Europe.
• Our research investigates intermedial cultural translation, including: adaptations of literary texts to film and TV; ekphrasis; the reception of the Middle Ages in visual media; redeployment of literary texts in visual media.
• Our research probes the translation of cultures across time, and we investigate: the transition of Soviet-era texts in post-Soviet culture; seventeenth-century French theatre in contemporary art; the legacy of the II Spanish Republic in contemporary Spain.
• Our digital scholarship considers the migration of texts across different formats: the digitization of German nineteenth-century literature and of medieval French lyrics and songs; the reinterpretation of medieval manuscripts via digitised image and App; and the intermedial reinvention of theatre texts as digital media and as mixed reality installation.
• Our research considers translating cultures intergenerationally: memories of Nazism in contemporary Germany; Holocaust narratives; legacies of wars.
• Translation Studies work focuses on translation and the construction of identities, the role of translation in the development of discourses of homosexuality in China and explores how the role of translating Chinese landscape images facilitated the reconstructions of social and moral structures in Europe in the 17th–18th century.
   

Professor Katharine Murphy is the Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures.

For all enquiries for the research seminars, please contact Prof. Katharine Murphy.

If you would like to be added to the Centre for Translating Cultures mailing list, please email us at LCVS@exeter.ac.uk. 

Key details:

• Centre for Translating Cultures Research Seminar with speaker Yongyan Zheng
• Location Queen’s Building, MR2
• Option to join via MS Teams - email LCVS@exeter.ac.uk if you would like the link
• Date: Wednesday 30 September
• Time: 15:15-16:30

You are warmly invited to join us for the first Centre for Translating Cultures seminar this term, co-hosted by the Global China Research Centre. Please share widely with colleagues, PGRs / PGTs and UG students - all welcome!

"Promoting multilingual education in face of challenges: A sharing of unique Chinese experiences" 

Speaker: Yongyan Zheng, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Fudan University, China 

Chair: Prof. Francesco Goglia 

 
Abstract: 

In this talk, I will first discuss the challenges of multilingual and multicultural education in East Asian contexts, where a national language usually dominates and foreign language education prioritizes English. I analyze the multilayered challenges, from sociohistoric, sociocultural and sociolinguistic aspects. Then I share two cases of successful multilingual education planning: one is about establishing an Arabic language program in a Chinese university, and the other is about setting up multilingual programs in secondary schools in Shanghai. In these two cases, I will discuss alternative approaches to promoting multilingual education in East Asian contexts.

Bio: 

Yongyan Zheng is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Fudan University, China, where she teaches English academic writing and applied linguistics. She has been selected for Elsevier’s Highly Cited Chinese Researchers since 2022, Stanford top 2% scientist (2024), and also Top 1% CNKI’s (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) Highly Cited Researcher. She has published 4 monographs/edited volumes, and more than 130 peer-reviewed journal articles. Her research interests include second-language development, multilingualism, and language-in-education planning. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Language, Culture and Curriculum, and also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of System. She is also one of the co-founders of Hamburg-Fudan-Macquarie “New Generation Literacies Network”, Co-Convenor of the WERA International Research Network on “Literacy in Multilingual Contexts”. 

Key details:

• Centre for Translating Cultures Research Seminar with Elena Caetano (University of Bristol/Bodleian Library) and Maite Caro (PhD candidate, Universidad Pablo de Olavide)
• Location Queen’s Building, LT6.2
• Option to join via MS Teams - email LCVS@exeter.ac.uk if you would like the link
• Date: Wednesday 14 October
• Time: 13:00-14:00

Rewriting History, Cross-cultural Transmission and the General estoria

In the 13th Century, Medieval encyclopedism in the form of universal histories reflected a rise in curiosity that involved collaboration, translation, synthesis, analysis, and diplomacy. The General estoria, a universal history commissioned by Spanish King Alfonso X, is a uniquely vast and rich resource, bringing together Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources, as well as Classical and apocryphal ones, translated into the newly evolving Castilian language. At over 6000 pages long, the text aimed to tell the entire history of humanity, though it remained unfinished after Alfonso’s death in 1284.  

Now, thanks to a Partnership Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, an international and interdisciplinary team of over 50 researchers across eight countries are collaborating to unlock the secrets of this enormous text. Combining traditional humanities skills with digital innovations, we are producing a digital edition of the text complete with annotations; translations into English, French and modern Spanish; educational materials and interactive resources.  

In this seminar, Elena Caetano (University of Bristol/Bodleian Library) and Maite Caro (PhD candidate, Universidad Pablo de Olavide) will share insights from their work on the project.

Elena will consider the (re)writing of history in Alfonso’s scriptorium and how we can study it today in our digital scriptorium. Her talk will combine reflections on how writing history fit into Alfonso’s imperial ambitions and introduce some of the tools that Elena and her team are developing to better understand the text.

Maite will present her research into the transmission routes of Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews from its composition in Greek in the late fist century AD to its use in the General estoria. Antiquities of the Jews is an extensive history of the Jewish people, from the Creation of the world to the outbreak of the revolt against Rome. Its importance lies in the way it expands upon and contextualises Biblical episodes, providing them with a historical framework and enriching the sacred narrative through the incorporation of exegetical traditions and cultural explanations. However, its arrival in thirteenth-century Castile must have followed a complex process of transmission, translation, copying and exegesis. Maite asks which textual tradition of Flavius Josephus might have been available to the Alfonsine compilers, through which channels did it reach their scriptorium, and how do texts attributed to Josephus in the General estoria compare to the original text.

Key details:

• Centre for Translating Cultures Research Seminar with Dr Gregoria Manzin (Australia)
• Location Queen’s Building, MR2
• Option to join via MS Teams - email LCVS@exeter.ac.uk if you would like the link
• Date: Wednesday 4 November
• Time: 15:30-16:30

Speaker: Dr Gregoria Manzin, Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne (Australia).

Title: Topographies of Trauma: Women Writing Trauma and Survival in the Balkan Conflicts

Abstract:

The Yugoslavian civil wars (1991-1999) shattered the illusion of a peaceful post-nationalist era in Europe. Many European states were slow to react, unsure whether to view these conflicts as internal civil wars or acts of aggression. Opposing narratives contributed to this stalemate. The ancient motive of “another Balkan war” for many sealed the conflicts as inevitable because of ancient ethnic disputes in the region. For others, these wars became a cause célèbre, particularly after images of the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict flooded our news programs.

Literary texts on the Yugoslavian wars remain crucial today because these narratives preserve forms of lived experience that historical archives and political accounts often cannot capture. Many of these texts bring to the fore the perspectives of witnesses and survivors whose stories demand urgent attention. They reveal how individuals grapple with displacement, fractured identities, and the long afterlife of violence. They also expose the ethical tensions of witnessing, the work of memory, and the struggle to articulate trauma – dimensions essential for understanding how societies remember conflict and rebuild post-conflict realities.

Bio: 

Dr Gregoria Manzin is coordinator of Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne/Naarm (Australia). Gregoria’s research focuses on contemporary literature with a specific interest in women’s writing. Her work centres on narratives that deal with borders, memory, and trauma. Gregoria is the author of Torn Identities: Life Stories at the Border of Italian Literature (2013) and numerous book chapters and scholarly articles on contemporary Italian literature. She is also co-editor of Mentoring through the Centuries: On the Dynamics of Personal and Professional Growth (2022).

Key details:

• Centre for Translating Cultures Research Seminar with Krista A. Milne 
• Location Queen’s Building, MR2
• Option to join via MS Teams - email LCVS@exeter.ac.uk if you would like the link
• Date: Wednesday 25 November
• Time: 13:00-14:00

Speaker: Krista A. Milne (Senior Lecturer), Leiden University

Medieval Duolingo Downloads: Patterns in the Production of French Literature and Language Learning Guides in Medieval Britain

Which area of Britain has the highest frequency of Duolingo downloads relative to other app downloads? Which groups are most likely to download Duolingo, and how have the numbers of Duolingo downloads changed over time? This talk does not answer any of these questions. It does, however, explore the medieval versions of these questions.

In particular, this talk presents collaborative research aimed at examining where French language learning guides were produced in medieval Britain, which periods saw the highest rates of production of these French language learning guides, and which groups were more likely to read these guides in medieval Britain. By comparing a dataset of medieval manuscripts containing French literature to a dataset gathered by the Learning Anglo-French ERC Consolidator project team (led by Prof. Thomas Hinton), this talk shows that an increase in the production of French language learning guides in medieval Britain happened alongside a growing interest in French literary production—a finding that reflects protracted interest in, and knowledge of, French in late medieval Britain.  

October 22nd, Digital Humanities, Seminar Room 2: Professor João Florêncio (Linköping University, Sweden)

Porn, Pedophilia, and Paganism: The Transnational Far-Right European Imaginary of Gaie France Magazine (1986–1994) 

Professor João Florêncio (Linköping University, Sweden) will describe how, on July 11th, 1992, eighteen years after the Carnation Revolution ended the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the Portuguese public broadcaster ran a news story about the launch of the first ever gay magazine to reach Portuguese newsstands, one that was written in Portuguese despite still bearing the title of its parent publication, Gaie France. Five years earlier, on July 13th, 1987, however, a petition had been signed at the Université d’Été Homosexuelle de Marseille denouncing Gaie France’s fascist politics.  

In this talk, I offer a critical picture of Gaie France’s peculiar place in the landscape of late 20^th-century homosexual media in Europe. I show how the magazine advocated a complext ideology that mixed paganism, pederasty, and far-right ideology, trying to spearhead a radical conservative European homosexual movement while having to deal with the view of homosexuality as degeneracy shared by the main ideologues of the European far-right. Rejected by political actors both in the organised homosexual movement and in the Nouvelle Right, Gaie France forged a peculiar ideological path that can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of both the European homosexual movement and of Europe itself at the turn of the new millennium.   

Bio: 

João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media & Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden, where he also coordinates NordSex: Nordic Research Network on Sexuality, Media and Culture. A queer cultural scholar of embodiment and sexuality, his research focuses on the interfacing between the body, media technologies, and sex in modern and contemporary cultures. His work has been supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal), the AHRC (UK), the Chaire de Recherche TRADIS (Canada), and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden). He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig (Routledge, 2020), and—with artist Liz Rosenfeld—of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025), among several peer-reviewed journal articles, op-eds, magazine articles, and exhibition catalogue essays.  

This talk will be chaired by Professor Jana Funke (Professor of Modern Literature and Sexuality Studies, University of Exeter), with Professor David Jones (AHVC) acting as discussant.

Wednesday October 22nd, Digital Humanities Seminar Room 2, 3.30pm-5.30pm. All welcome.

Dr Molly Harrabin (University of Warwick/University of St Andrews) will speak about ‘Bodies That Don’t Matter: Non-Normativity in Weimar Cinema’, chaired by Professor Ulrike Zitzlsperger (LCVS).

Bodies That Don’t Matter: Non-Normativity in Weimar Cinema

 In this presentation, I will present the beginnings of a postdoctoral project that examines how Weimar cinema (1918-1933) medicalized, marginalized, and utilized ‘non-normative’ bodies to uphold normative standards. In the aftermath of the First World War, the body became a highly charged cultural symbol through which anxieties about national identity, trauma, and modernity were negotiated. During this period, visual and philosophical discourse idealized a modern, healthy, and productive body: able-bodied, gender-conforming, youthful, sexually normative, and racially homogeneous (Cowan, 2008; Killen, 2017). Bodies that deviated from this emerging ideal were often pathologized and constructed as decadent, degenerate, or “un-German”, reinforcing exclusionary narratives of national belonging.

Existing scholarship on the healthy body in Weimar culture primarily focus on sport and dance, emphasizing movement, physical discipline, and vitality as responses to the underlying crises of the Weimar Republic (Elswit, 2014; Jensen, 2010; Ruprecht, 2019). Meanwhile, medical humanities and history of medicine projects typically focus on pathology, eugenics, and ill health (Weindling, 1989; Hales, 2024). By tracing the ways in which ‘non-normative’ bodies in Weimar film reinforced dominant ideals of health, productivity, and social cohesion, the project takes a different approach, foregrounding health and productivity as cultural constructs. Structured around four thematic case studies (childbirth, disability and age, gender, race) and drawing an interdisciplinary methodological approach, the research will not only illuminate the complex ways in which Weimar cinema engaged with the complexity of norms and bodily difference in the past but will also engage with and inform debates on health, medical equality, and bodily autonomy that still resonate today.

Bio: Molly Harrabin is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick and a postdoctoral researcher for the German Screen Studies Network at the University of St. Andrews. She recently successfully defended her doctoral thesis, ‘Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Cinema’, which challenges clichés about the representation of gender and sexuality in Weimar cinema, looking beyond the iconic virgin/vamp dichotomy and canonical films and filmmakers to reveal the contradictions and ambivalences that defined the era. Molly founded the Weimar Film Network in 2021, co-organizes the Weimar 100 project, which celebrates the centenaries of Weimar cinema, and recently joined the editorial team of WeimarCinema.org. Molly’s work has been published in Studies in European Cinema and an edited collection in German examining the female film pioneers of the early German film industry. She has forthcoming work examining codified queerness in Pandora’s Box (1929), the life and career of Black actress Madge Jackson in Weimar Germany, and the anti-war messaging of Westfront 1918 (1930). She is also co-editing a volume on the Netflix 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and co-organising two international conferences dedicated to queer Weimar history and culture and new directions in Weimar Film Studies respectively.

All are welcome to attend this session in (Queen’s Building, MR2-3), from 3.30pm-5pm! The PGR Mini-Symposium is a recurring event, a forum for PhD students to give short presentations based on their dissertation research, with the support of their supervisors and the wider academic community. On Dec 3rd, we welcome TWO speakers: Anna Paola Manna (2nd Yr PhD, supervised by Professor Adam Watt) and Clementine Pursey (2nd Yr PhD, supervised by Professor Tom Hinton). Each will give a 15-20 minute talk based on their research project. Please see their titles and abstracts below. 

• Anna Paola Manna (chaired by Maria Scott), "The Unconscious in Taine’s and Ribot’s Treatises: How the Positivist Body Shaped the Psychoanalytic Mind" 

  The thesis I’m writing examines the influence of the first French psychological treatises on some novels of the fin-de-siècle. In its the first part, I analyse how the conceptual categories shaped by the first psychology scholars intersected with literary ones, creating a common ground that benefited both fields. The present contribution investigates one of these broad and novel categories.

  It aims to analyse the discourse around the unconscious arising from Hippolyte Taine’s De l’intelligence (1870) and Théodule Ribot’s triptych on les maladies (1881–1885). Taine’s and Ribot’s attempt to establish a psychologie positive was significant in accepting the existence of unconscious activities within the nervous system. Their study of bodily reflexes was used to support theories about the structure of the mind, providing scholars and physicians with a promising addition to the language describing the self. They developed a notion of the unconscious which recalls the one emerging from psychoanalysis. While there is a tendency to divide the world of cognitive sciences into before and after Freud, examining the first French psychological treatises reveals surprising nuances within this perspective. This work helps contextualize the roots of a concept that was highly influential in the literary imaginary, while suggesting a narrowing of the perceived gap between positive science and psychoanalysis.

• Clementine Pursey (chaired by Tom Hinton), "Teaching Medieval Maidens Manners with Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz
• "Walter de Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century Anglo-French language treatise the Tretiz is an invaluable source for high medieval pedagogical traditions. However, previous scholarship has mostly focused on the text’s linguistic value, overlooking the implications of the “micronarratives” that make up the wider text. Written for a mother and her children and later circulating among clergy, scholars and the laity, the Tretiz is distinguished from similar texts addressing an exclusively male audience. Within the creative and humorous rhymed verses are stock female characters whose behaviour Bibbesworth eagerly criticises. Naïve young girls should “eschuez flatour ki seet flater” lest their financial and physical assets fall into peril. Overly flirtatious women are “fole” and will contract venereal diseases. Girls who please their lovers by lisping their words are improper. These moral teachings are a reminder of expected female behaviour and the importance of perpetuating courtesy across generations. The rewards of adhering to these conventions, as well as the consequences of deviation, insert patriarchal hegemony into the traditional oral transmission of the mother-child dyad. The presence of these behavioural models in a text with the primary purpose of language acquisition suggests a new reading of the Tretiz as an early Insular courtesy text for women.  

Q &A with Zeba Talkhani and Mithu Sanyal on Feb 18th with Prof. Helen Vassallo and Prof. Ina Linge

Zeba Talkani is a production editor at Bloomsbury Academic and the author of My Past Is A Foreign Country: A Muslim Feminist Finds Herself.

Dr Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning novelist, academic, literary critic, columnist and broadcaster and the author of the novels Identitti (2021) and Antichristie (2024).

Everyone is welcome for a fascinating discussion of feminism, life-writing, and self-discovery in contemporary literature and publishing with feminist thinker Mithu Sanyal and feminist writer Zeba Talkhani, author of the moving memoir My Past Is A Foreign Country.

Digital Humanities Seminar Room 1, 3.30pm-5pm

Speaker: Katy Humberstone 

Topic:  Contemporary heritage in the context of the historical Cornish-Mexican diaspora of Hidalgo

Chair: Prof. Francesco Goglia

Time and place: Queen's Building, LT6:2, March 4th, 3.30pm-5pm

Katy Humberstone is a former doctoral student in Languages, Cultures, and Visual Studies here at the University of Exeter, kindly funded by the SWWDTP2 (South West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership). Her research focuses on contemporary heritage in the Cornish-Mexican diaspora of Hidalgo, to which Cornish miners historically migrated. Her Research Supervisory team included Professor Francesco Goglia (Languages, Cultures, and Visual Studies, University of Exeter) and Professor Clare Mar-Molinero, Modern Languages, University of Southampton.

Katy writes: 

"Ah, but my Devonshire!" - Dialect Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Devonshire Peasant

René Tissens (University of Salamanca), chaired by Dr Eliana Maestri with Dr Zoe Boughton (discussant)

Centre for Translating Cultures, Wednesday June 10th at 3.30pm, Queens LT 6:1. All Welcome!

Modern diachronic research (Beal 2020, Ruano-García 2021, Schintu 2023) has benefited from third-wave sociolinguistic frameworks where the theories of enregisterment (Agha 2003) and indexicality (Silverstein 2003) are collated to understand perceptions of language and sociocultural meaning-making in the past. By means of stylistic strategies such as respellings indicative of non-standard phonology, authors evoked ideologically-loaded personas that contained salient linguistic features embedded in the readers’ imagination. This paper juxtaposes nineteenth-century metacommentary contained in Devon-focused monographs with contemporary dialect representations in literature to locate those linguistic features that were indexical of the imagined Devonshire peasant.

Bio: Dr René Tissens is a substitute lecturer and researcher in the Department of English Philology at the University of Salamanca. He defended his PhD thesis in English Linguistics (2024) with a dissertation on the enregisterment of the Devonshire dialect during the Late Modern English period. He has published several peer-reviewed journal articles as well as delivered seminars where he expands on this topic. He has been a member of the research group DING (Dialectología Inglesa y Diacronía Inglesa / English Dialectology and the History of the English Language) since 2021.

Research seminar

Wednesday, February 26, Room C417, Amory Building, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Dr Carlotta Moro (University of Exeter) and Dr Catherine Evans (University of Exeter)

Title: Pregnant with Thought: Women Writing Philosophy in Early Modern England and Italy

How did early modern women, often excluded from formal learning, engage with, write, and shape philosophical thought in Europe? The Cultures of Philosophy project seeks to address this by looking beyond ‘legitimate’ forms of philosophy, such as the treatise, dialogue and essay, to include marginalia, miscellany, paratext, dedications, historical fiction, hagiography, and incidental ‘salon’ verse. 

Two of the project’s research fellows will present their initial findings on the English and Italian contexts, specifically examining how women’s writings on pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing engage with philosophical debates. Despite the prevalence of the Socratic midwife metaphor, the philosophical significance of motherhood has often been ignored, with subjective accounts from mothers seen as “unworthy of serious attention” (Lintott and Stander-Staudt, 2013). Plato’s Symposium argues that there are pregnancies of the soul and pregnancies of the body, and that those of the soul are inarguably more valuable as they lead to “wisdom and virtue”, which are “fairer and more immortal” than a child. However early modern women’s accounts of motherhood demonstrate they were successful multitaskers: capable of discussing the metaphysical, moral, and medical issues surrounding the begetting, birth, and rearing of a child whilst being engaged in all these activities.

Catherine Evans will examine the English context, discussing how Mary Rich and Mary Carey explore miscarriage and the death of their young children in their devotional works. Rich and Carey depict maternal suffering as a site of religious conversion, both chastising and consoling themselves for these losses. Carlotta Moro will focus on Camilla Bonfiglio’s overlooked Libro in lode delle donne e sulla crudeltà degli uomini (Book in Praise of Women and On the Cruelty of Men, ca. 1619-1620), which draws on a variety of literary forms – from the treatise, to the sonnet, to the poem in terza rima – to critique patriarchal rule as a tyrannical abuse of power arising from cruelty, and, conversely, to extol women’s capacity for love and generosity, most profoundly expressed through the experience of motherhood.

This work is supported by the European Research Council-selected Starting Grant, ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.

Research seminar

Thursday 6th February, Queen's LT4.1, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Dr. Tom Stennett (University of Exeter)

Discussant: Dr Alexandra Reza (University of Bristol)

Title: Writers in armed struggle in Angola and Mozambique

In 1959, Frantz Fanon theorized combat literature as works that incited an entire people to fight for national liberation. The armed Mozambican Marxist nationalist front, FRELIMO, appropriated Fanon’s discussion of combat literature in its proposal of poesia de combate (combat poetry), which its Angolan sister organization, the MPLA, would in turn appropriate. This presentation analyses the aesthetics of armed struggle that appears in the combat poetry published by FRELIMO during and after the armed liberation struggles against Portuguese colonialism. I read Mozambican combat poems and theorizations of combat poetry authored by Marxist FRELIMO intellectuals alongside the analyses of revolutionary armed struggle developed by FRELIMO’s first president Eduardo Mondlane and Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral.  Furthermore, I situate the proposal of combat poetry as a vehicle for revolutionary ideology within the context of debates over the functions of ideology in the African Revolution. In this way, following Alexandra Reza’s (2024) approach to analysing négritude poetry, I read combat poems as sources of political theory that can help us to understand ideological debates amongst FRELIMO intellectuals relating to questions of political violence, political economy, class, and revolutionary commitment.

Research seminar

Wednesday, January 22nd, LT6 Laver Building, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Prof Monica Good (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)

Chair: Dr Katie Brown (Modern Languages and Cultures)

Title: Maintaining and strengthening Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception

In this presentation, I will explore the significance of Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception—the ways in which Yucatec Maya people understand and situate themselves in the world. As an Indigenous scholar from Mexico working closely with Maya communities, I will discuss how Maya knowledge systems, rooted in a deep connection to the land, language, and community, shape our worldview and inform our identity. I will also reflect on the importance of Maya people expressing how we think and speak, emphasizing the role of language and cultural practices in maintaining and strengthening our identity in today’s Western-driven society. This talk will highlight why it is vital for Maya communities to continue asserting their ways of knowing and being, both as an act of cultural resilience and as a necessary response to the challenges posed by globalization and cultural assimilation.