UCML is delighted to announce two successful award entries for the first round of its Postgraduate Bursary scheme. This new bursary supports postgraduate students in developing public engagement activities in the period immediately following submission of their PhD thesis. It aims to provide support for postgraduate students as they build their research and impact profile at the start of their careers, and it seeks to promote the production of exciting materials that showcase the value and social relevance of Modern Languages research.
In the initial round of this scheme, two awards have been made to kick-start the scheme. It is anticipated that a single award will be made in future rounds as the scheme develops and grows.
The successful entries in this round are Emily Marzin’s (Open University) project ‘Experience of a Foreign Language Assistantship in Mexico’ and Elena Sottilotta’s (University of Cambridge) project ‘Hopeful Folktales: Nurturing Diversity, Gender Equity and Social Justice through Tales of Old Times’. These two exciting projects show outstanding engagement potential that will support the different facets of UCML’s mission promoting the study of languages, cultures and societies.
Emily Marzin’s project sets out to develop a Digital Handbook for Francophone Language Assistantships and is intended to engage institutions, agencies, educators and Foreign Language Assistants involved in Francophone language assistantships. It will provide a template for handbooks for assistantship programmes in other languages. It will be hosted in the Open University’s Open Learn Create platform, freely accessible worldwide and published under a Creative Content licence which enables tot to be reused and adapted globally for other languages and contexts.
Elena Sottilotta’s project is looking to disseminate her research on women’s folktales in Sicily, Sardinia and Ireland through a clearly articulated set of outputs facing different audiences – workshops, seminars, a blog and a radio show. The project aims to foster reflection on interculturalism, gender equity and social justice through the dissemination of forgotten folktales that were transcribed in the second half of the nineteenth century in European peripheral contexts. The project will work with a diverse range of learner groups in the UK and Italy.
The awardees will be invited to report on their project results via upcoming UCML events and publications.
The postgraduate bursary scheme has two application deadlines per year. The next application deadline will be 6th April, 2023. Students who have recently submitted or are due to submit a PhD thesis at a UK HEI are eligible. Funding will ideally be taken up within 6 months of submission of the thesis. Full details of the scheme can be found here.