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The Graduate School in Language and Culture in Europe started on 1 January 2000, for the purpose of providing the then Department of Language and Culture with a centre for research and postgraduate study.

The Graduate School is a forum for interdisciplinary linguistic and literary research informed by a cultural perspective. It takes its point of departure in the linguistic expression in all its diversity, ranging from the colloquial to the solemn, the spontaneous to the formal, the everyday to the artistic.

The linguistic forms, products and processes studied at the Graduate School thus include anything from ordinary conversations to literary texts, from pre-modern love poetry to press releases and the use of digital media, from classroom talk to the aesthetics of the sublime. The crucial factor is that linguistic forms are seen as constitutive elements of a cultural context, informed by linguistic, social and cultural traditions.

The Graduate School is a place where linguists and literary scholars collaborate and exchange ideas. Yet research with a clear linguistic or literary profile is not seen as incompatible with the programme outlined above.

The linguistic research carried out within the Graduate School has two main orientations. One concerns interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. At present this research focuses on functional communication disabilities, learning and multimodal interaction. The other favoured area of linguistic research is the study of historical linguistics and communication, which explores private and public communicative practices from an historical and discourse analytical perspective.

The literary research within the Graduate School adopts an international, transnational and cultural perspective with a focus on the history of European literature in a global, postcolonial and intersectional context. Another area of interest concerns literature, media histories, and information cultures, which explores the points of intersection between literary practices and media technology.

One field under joint development is cultural memory, which presupposes collaboration between literary scholars and linguists, focusing on the mediated dimension of memory processes considered as practices and discursive configurations. This collaboration also features in the joint project linguistics and literary theory, where topical research questions are discussed from both a linguistic and literary perspective.

The Graduate School shares common ground with the undergraduate courses in Comparative Literature, English, French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. As a result it is only natural to study the themes mentioned above from a European perspective by thematising the particular linguistic, literary and cultural development of Europe, but also by examining the connections between this development and local, national and global hegemonies.

The Graduate School’s disciplinary specialisations as well as its cross-disciplinary and multidisciplinary orientation, whereby different perspectives, theories and methods are combined and contrasted in a natural way, contribute towards its unique research profile both nationally and internationally.

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Last updated: Fri May 24 14:36:29 CEST 2013