To boldly go…

The inaugural lecture of the CTTR is by Prof Jan Borm, an über-academic: German, Chair of English Literature at a French university, giving us a tour d'horizon of Arctic studies in German, English, French, Russian, Danish, East Siberian, Czech and Inuit cultures, taking in Foucault, Rousseau and everything in between, delivered with panache.

OK, I have an academic crush. And after the warm white wine, I'm going to break into my quarantined office to (as Faustus puts it) 'burn my books'.

Author to look up: Jean Malaurie. One of his four volumes of autobiography about his 32 Arctic journeys, Hummocks, is available in English and sounds fascinating.

A Transcultural and Transnational Invitation

Anyone in the Black Country next Wednesday is warmly invited to the launch of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research, of which I am a lowly member.

The launch will be from 4.30-7.30 in MC001, with an inaugural lecture on Arctic Studies by the renowned scholar Jan Borm. Warm white wine will no doubt be served.


The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research (CTTR) provides a research environment for interdisciplinary investigation into the history and continuing pertinence of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and other inter-cultural configurations of consciousness and identity, including the ways in which these are manifested in micro-cosmopolitan contexts (e.g. the national, regional, or local).

The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research:

• brings together the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ in recognition of the mutuality of spatial/geographical and aesthetic/cultural modes of identity;
• emphasises the importance of longitudinal study from the eighteenth-century to the present;
• is consciously multi- and inter-disciplinary, drawing its researchers from Literary Studies, Modern Languages, American Studies, European Studies, Linguistics, History, Politics, and other disciplines;
• has an established international collaborative dimension, with active international Honorary Research Fellows and International Advisors representing a world-wide community of scholars;
• provides opportunities for early career and post-doctoral research, post-graduate study, and public outreach.

The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research hosts three sub-groups representing its principal focus areas:

Europe: Trend and Transformation (ETAT)

Global Culture and Identity (GCI)

Transnational Pedagogies (TP)