Welcome

This blog was created as part of the Erasmus Mundus Crossways in Cultural Narratives Masters programme, which is the only one of the EU approved and funded Erasmus Mundus Masters programmes to specialise in traditional humanities with a modern languages background. The Crossways Consortium comprises 6 top-class European universities.

For further information, please check the programme's official website and the universities' websites on the Useful Links section on the left. If you wish to have a specific question answered, please click on Email here and submit your query.

Mundus students, here you will find regular posts regarding the universities of the consortium, tips, activities, events, pictures, etc. Apart from checking it regularly to keep yourself up to date, a good way to use the blog is through the search device. We already have a significant amount of information on some universities of the consortium, so if you want to find information on a specific city, type its name in the search field (top left). You will then see all posts related to that specific city (because each post title contains the city's name in it). You can also type "General" in order to find information concerning everybody.

Saturday, 20 December 2008

General: MHRA

As all of you might know, the style guide to be used in our dissertation report and final dissertation is MHRA. 

I have just found a very useful online MHRA Tutorial, which seems much easier to follow than the guide itself. While the official guide should be our main source of reference, this seems like a helpful tool. Check it out!

Cardiff University's MHRA Referencing Tutorial (the FAQ section is particularly useful)
MHRA Official Website (pdf version of the guide available for download)

Thursday, 18 December 2008

Tübingen: Call for papers

      by Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies

       This page can also be accessed http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=165592


Call for Papers

Gender Forum: Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender
Guest editors Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (English Department)
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gropper (Department for Scandinavian Studies)
University of Tübingen

For a special issue of gender forum, submissions addressing questions of gender and eccentricity are invited. 


The marginal, the liminal, the subordinate, the peripheral, the fringe: contemporary theories and practices of literary and cultural studies know many terms by which areas which appear outside a given or assumed centre – of social or political power, of normativity, of definition – may be named, discussed, given a voice. But these terms tend to be curiously static, describing fixed positions which appear, despite the turbulent and conflicted nature of these allocations, pre-given sites rather than options of choice, spaces for experimentation or techniques of interrogation. 

The editors of the proposed special issue of Gender Forum believe that one possible and as yet untested way of thinking about those not in the centre without allocating them a fixed location on the margin, a given identity, a clear location in a gird of social and cultural interactions would be an approach which focuses on the eccentric and its cognates, the singular, the odd, the “off”. We see eccentricity as a textual technique in the realm of literature and as a specific form of performativity in the field of human behaviours: a technique which is geared towards the establishment of positions outside a centre – a centre identified by the technique or performance itself. Its aims may be manifold: the revalidation of a marginal location as an individual choice, the interrogation of the centre from a position that is neither located elsewhere nor anticipated by the choices offered in a centre-periphery binarity, a questioning of the very dynamic of the centre and its outside. In every case, it will be a technique of self-positioning which seeks out, strains towards an option beyond the mutually constitutive locations of centre and periphery, centre and margin, power and subordination. 

As yet, the phenomena of the eccentric have been hardly investigated or researched and are only very sketchily theorized. Off Centre: Eccentricity and Gender seeks to remedy this by assembling a varied and multifaceted collection of contributions focusing on any area of literary and cultural production and / or contributing towards the development of theoretical tools for thinking the eccentric. Gender as one of the dominant techniques for the establishment, enforcing and policing of any set of ‘centric’ systems of value and signification is here a particularly suitable field of investigation as we seek to know if the interactions of the centre and its discontents may be thought as a field of eccentric techniques and performances. 

Possible areas of investigation: 
Theories of eccentricity
Gender performativity and eccentricity
The dynamics of the eccentric and its normalization
The commodification or containment of eccentricity
The odd, the singular, the specific as tools of theory and literary practice Eccentricity and resistance

Submission of 1 to 2-page proposals: 1 February 2009 Submission of finished papers: 1 July 2009 

Direct submissions to: ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de and stefanie.gropper@uni-tuebingen.de 
gender forum 
Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier (Editor) 
Universität zu Köln 
Englisches Seminar 
Albertus-Magnus-Platz 
D-50923 Köln 

Tel. ++49-(0)221-470-3030 
Fax ++49-(0)221-470-6931 
Email: ingrid.hotz-davies@uni-tuebingen.de
Visit the website at http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/

Perpignan: French visa (fee exemption)

I hope it is not too late, but I just found out scholarship holders are exempt from visa fees for France:

"No charge: the following citizens pay no application fees:

-  foreign members of a EU/EEA citizen’s family (amended decree of 11 March 1994);

-  foreign spouse of a French citizen (decree 98-839 of 18 September 1998);

-  to facilitate the movement of young people:

  • minors under 6 years of age ((European Union regulations);
  • primary and secondary school students abroad on school exchange programmes or taking part in a school journey or study programme (European Union regulations);
  • students and students in post-graduate studies taking part in a studies-related journey or study programme (European Union regulations);
  • French government scholars;
  • Recipients of scholarships and grants from foreign governments and foreign foundations and beneficiaries of Community programmes;
  • Citizens of CIS countries who are under 25 years of age;
  • Beneficiaries of the French-Canadian Youth Exchanges Agreement of 3 October 2003 (decree 2004-200 of 2 March 2004);"

Many people (including consulate authorities) are not aware of this rule, so make sure you point this out at your visa appointment.

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

St Andrews from the cathedral's roof



GM: Day three - St Andrews on St Andrews Day

We were lucky enough to be in St Andrews on St Andrews Day, which means that all city sights were free of charge and there were lots of attractions in the afternoon. A lovely town.


Left to right/top to bottom: Michael, Julie, Lisda, Lorenza, Poonam, Anna, Marina, Ana, Krisha



View from the roof of the cathedral

Sheffield: Arts Tower

The following video, showing the Arts Tower (comprising Humanities and Arts departments, soon to be vacated) in Sheffield, was shown on the second day of the General Meeting.



Producers: Lorenza Tiberi and Roberta Gregoli