Research staff and clusters

The School of Humanities at Southampton is home to active research clusters of scholars. We welcome enquiries from any prospective postgraduate student who might be interested in working with us.

Staff by research area:

Research clusters:

Global Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca Studies (GES)

The Centre for Global Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca Studies (GES) at the University of Southampton has been created to provide a forum for research into the English language in its 21st Century settings. The research group aims to focus particularly (but not exclusively) on the following areas and from a range of perspectives, linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociopolitical, critical, pedagogical, and the like:

  • the non-mother tongue Englishes both of post-colonial regions and of regions that do not have a history of colonisation by mother tongue English speakers
  • the phenomenon of English as an international Lingua Franca especially within and across East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America
  • the implications of the emergence/establishing of these Englishes for higher education in general and international English-medium universities in particular

Members of GES include both established researchers in the field and those who are relatively new to it, including a number of PhD students. We welcome new members who are interested in conducting their own empirical research in, or across, any of these or other related areas, or simply participating in informed discussion. GES aims to encourage research collaborations among members that result in external funding, as well as to stimulate further doctoral research, and to establish links with similar centres at universities both inside and outside the UK for the purpose of collaborative research and scholarly exchange.

In April 2009 CALR hosted the Second International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca.

For further information about GES contact: Professor Jennifer Jenkins:

Twentieth-century France

Southampton is fortunate in having a concentration of three historians all working on aspects of twentieth-century France: Dr Jackie Clarke (Modern Languages), Dr Scott Soo (Modern Languages) and Dr Joan Tumblety (History).

We would be pleased to hear from prospective postgraduate students with an interest in French history. Our areas of expertise and current research themes include:

  • Interwar France
  • Occupied France 1940-1944
  • History and memory
  • Gender issues
  • Migration
  • Work, consumption and domestic life
  • Sport and physical culture
  • Life histories/oral history

Southampton is also the current editorial base of the journal Modern and Contemporary France.

eLanguages project and research activity

Members: Julie Watson, Will Baker and Andrew Davey

An e-Learning research and development group in Modern Languages are involved in a number of e-Learning projects. These include:

  • Design and development of generic and discipline-specific ‘learning objects’ (LOs) for online resource sets for independent study (toolkits), blended learning or online courses
  • Development of an LO authoring tool for teachers
  • Design, development and delivery of an innovative online Masters course in English Language Teaching
  • Design and development of online tools (repositories) for storing, sharing and retrieving teaching and learning resources
  • Development and integration of a virtual world language learning environment on the University of Southampton Island region in Second Life with existing online and face to face courses

Life (Hi)Stories

The Life (Hi)Stories research cluster gathers a group of academics and community-based researchers working in different study areas and disciplines who are interested in life stories. We draw on a wide range of primary sources from oral data collection techniques, such as oral history, language biographies, and ethnography, to written narratives in the form of diaries, memoirs and auto-biographies and other modes of life writing. The aims of the group are to:

  • bring together scholars at the University of Southampton and community-based researchers and to highlight expertise in the study of life stories.
  • provide a forum for sharing work in progress, and the discussion of the methodological and interpretive challenges of analysing life story narratives.
  • further our understanding of the dynamics underlying the relationships between personal experience/memory on the one hand, and language, culture and society on the other, in both past and present contexts.
  • develop and promote an international life story archive at the University of Southampton.

If you would like to receive news of the Life (Hi)Stories seminars please contact Dr Jane Lavery, or Dr Scott Soo for any other matter.