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Our staff

Staff categories

Find staff in Birkbeck's Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics.

Heads of department

Academic staff

Associate lecturers

Emeritus staff

  • Jean Braybrook, Honorary Life Member of the College
  • Penelope Gardner-Chloros: Professor Emerita of Sociolinguistics and Language Contact. Penelope specialised in Code-switching and is the author of the 2009 volume ‘Code-switching’ (CUP), as well as another monograph on language in Strasbourg, a co-edited volume on Vernacular Literacy and over 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals and books. Since her retirement, she has been working on a biography of El Greco. An ‘Essential Knowledge’ volume for MIT Press on Bilingualism is also in preparation. She lives in Oxford and in Greece.
  • Professor Robin Howells: Robin Howells specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture (classicism and, principally, Enlightenment). He also uses paradigms from Bakhtin (carnivalesque, dialogism, polemical stupidity) to examine aspects of literature generally. His main research interests are Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the writing and visual arts of the late eighteenth century. 
  • Professor John Kraniauskas: Professor Emeritus in Latin American Studies: John Kraniauskas is a specialist in Latin American literary and cultural studies, cultural theory and political philosophy with particular interests in relations between state and cultural forms. John was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.  
  • Professor Patrick Pollard: Patrick Pollard is professor of French, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, Gide, the classical tradition, and gender. His research interests include the history of ideas (with an emphasis on nineteenth- to twentieth-century France), history of literature, history of homosexuality and the classical tradition in France, specifically the history of the translation of Greek and Latin authors into French, the modern reuse of ancient myths, and gender and sexuality. He has been a member of the Association des Amis d’André Gide since its inception, and is currently Honorary Treasurer of the Emile Zola Society, London. 
  • Mme Madeleine Renouard: Emerita Reader in French: Madeleine Renouard's most recent co-edited book Barbara Wright Translation As Art was published in 2013 by Dalkey Archive Press. She is currently editing the poet Lorand Gaspar's hospital diaries and notes. Madeleine was for many years Editor of La Chouette journal.
  • Dr Martin Shipway
  • Professor Ian Short: Emeritus Professor of French: Ian Short's research interests include medieval studies, in particular French vernacular literature, Anglo-Norman, and the epic. 
  • Dr John Walker: Emeritus Reader in German Intellectual History. Dr Walker's research has been chiefly in the field of nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy. His current research interest is in the relevance of German and German-Jewish philosophy to intercultural and interfaith dialogue, in which he has a personal as well as an academic interest. His book Wilhelm von Humboldt and Transcultural Communication in a Multicultural World will appear in October 2022 with Boydell and Brewer (Rochester, NY). He continues to be involved with a number of research projects in this field and welcomes enquiries from like-minded scholars.
  • Professor David Wells: 

Senior practitioner fellow

  • Dr Beverley Costa: After training as an individual counsellor and psychotherapist, Dr Beverley Costa set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) to meet a gap she observed, in services for multilingual clients. In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters within Mothertongue and in 2010 she formed the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum. In 2013, she established “Colleagues Across Borders”: a project in which professionals offer peer support, pro bono and via remote platforms, to refugee psychosocial workers and interpreters based mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. She founded The Pásalo Project in 2017 to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. With Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele, she won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award. Beverley has delivered training and supervision to statutory and voluntary sector health and social care organisations for the past two decades. She received funding from the National Lottery and the Arts Council to produce two anthologies of interpreters’ stories and a play about a couple in a cross-language relationship, for the Soho Theatre, London. She co-founded the performance group of interpreters, Around the Well, in 2018. In 2020, she received funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to create an e-learning resource on multilingualism and mental health. Her book Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world was published in 2020 by PCCS Books. 

Administrative team

Study skills and Learning support advisor 

Research Fellows and Visiting Professors

  • Dr Marcos Centeno, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Daniela Cerimonia, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Sally Cook, Associate Research Fellowship
  • Dr Beverley Costa, Senior Practitioner Fellowship
  • Professor John Flowerdew, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Lynne Flowerdew, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Carles Fuster, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Simon Jarrett, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Professor Adam Jaworski, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Bronwen Martin, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Sharona Moskowitz, Associate Research Fellowship
  • Professor Martha Pennington, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Louise Rolland, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Maria Sanz Ferrer, Honorary Research Fellowship
  • Dr Kit Yee Wong, Associate Research Fellowship
  • Dr Jian Xu, Associate Research Fellowship