The Department of European Languages offers a range of opportunities for research in three major European Languages - French, German and Spanish. The expertise of the teaching staff covers a variety of fields within each language, ranging from drama to cinema, to sociolinguistics, as well as philological language and literary studies.

Overview

The Department at Aberystwyth takes seriously its two major commitments – teaching and research. Knowledge is advancing at a faster rate than most textbooks are, and the Department believes that it is essential that students learn from experts at the forefront of academic research. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework (2014) assessment the university was placed in the top 50 institutions for research power and intensity. It submitted 77% of eligible staff and 95% of the university's research was of an internationally recognised standard.

The Department has secured an impressive amount of external funding for research projects, and the range of the research interests include:

French: historical linguistics, early modern literature and ideas, modern literature, cinema, Anglo-Norman, historical linguistics, Romance linguistics.

German: sociolinguistics, especially language attitudes, relationship between standard and non-standard varieties, language awareness, language in education, 20th century literature and ideas.

Spanish: stylistic comparison of 19th century Spanish novels, North African comparative colonial literature; cosmopolitanism, geopolitics, landscape, science in Latin American literature and film.