Researchers from across the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics will gather at Clare College on Thursday 21 May for the LCT Graduate Symposium 2026, a day-long event showcasing current postgraduate research and interdisciplinary conversations across literature, culture and thought.
Hosted in the Elton-Bowring Room at Clare College’s Gillespie Centre, this year’s symposium brings together graduate researchers working across a wide range of languages, periods and cultural contexts. Through presentations and discussion panels, participants will explore themes including memory and resistance, voice and authorship, ideology and myth, and questions of performance and representation.
The symposium opens with a panel on Memory, Solidarity and Resistance, featuring topics ranging from Spanish mass graves and material memory to Black Rio culture under military dictatorship and Caribbean ecological futures.
Subsequent sessions will explore medieval narratives, silence and agency in French literature, posthumous authorship, and questions of ideology across literary and historical contexts. Topics span geographical and cultural perspectives, including research on Costa Rican national narratives, contemporary Mexican literature and film, Soviet educational culture, and literary approaches to revolution and political thought.
The final panel of the day focuses on performance and cultural boundaries, examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian writing, postcolonial theatre, and reinterpretations of classical texts.
The event will conclude with a keynote lecture by Alice Roullière from St John’s College, Oxford, entitled Colonial Verisimilitude: the case of Peru in French Early Modern Texts.
The LCT Graduate Symposium provides an opportunity for postgraduate researchers to share their work, foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and highlight the breadth of research taking place across MMLL and related fields.