The Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University offers PhD programmes in a wide range of topics. Students undertaking a PhD often spend a considerable part of their research period working from libraries abroad and / or archives, while remaining under supervision from their mentor at Aberystwyth.
French: historical linguistics; early modern literature and ideas; modern literature; cinema; Anglo-Norman; Romance linguistics; history of travel and travel literature; 20th- and 21st-century French thought, especially existentialism and feminism; (auto-)biography and life-writing; and theoretical approaches to reading.
German: 20th- and 21st-century German prose; autobiographies and life writing; women’s writing; German-Jewish literature; history and culture; Holocaust texts and translation; German-speaking refugees from National Socialism and especially the Kindertransport; postdramatic theatre and translation; German grammar and language anxiety; new tragic in European theatre and performance.
Spanish: stylistic comparison of 19th-century Spanish novels; North African comparative colonial literature; cosmopolitanism; geopolitics; landscape; science in Latin American literature and film; gender, identity and nation; cultural legacies of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict; avant-garde; 20th-century Hispanic poetry; women’s cultural practice; and language learning and foreign language anxiety.
Our postgraduates have been researching such topics as:
Translating René Le Pays's Amitiez, amours, amourettes: rendering travelogues in the language of their destination
The early 20th-century German women writers Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum
The translation of audio-visual Holocaust testimony
Regional Refugee Committee supporting refugees from National Socialism
Kindertransport autobiographies and fiction
A comparative analysis of Second Generation Kindertransport in the US and the UK.
Modules September start - 2026
Please note: The modules listed below are those currently intended for delivery during the next academic year and may be subject to change. They are included here to give an indication of how the course is structured.
