The Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies (AIFRS) is an international scientific network connecting scholars from the Arqus universities and beyond, who conduct research and teaching on the Romance languages, primarily within the disciplines of linguistics and literary/cultural studies.
One of the main objectives is to give impulse to novel initiatives and integrate already existing or planned activities, events, and projects at the Arqus universities within the AIFRS on a larger scale.
The term “Romance languages” encompasses all Romance languages, varieties, dialects, and idioms (present or past), the Latin/Proto-Romance interface as well as all Romance based creoles. The AIFRS is multilingual by design, the AIFRS’ focus is Pan-Romance, i.e., contrastive (linguistics) and comparative (literature/culture). It tries to always include more than one Romance language in all its activities.
The AIFRS strongly engages in the Arqus action line “Multilingual and Multicultural University”, as well as in the action lines “Research”, “Quality Teaching”, and “Engaged Citizens”. The AIFRS supports scientific plurality and multi-directional approaches. Concerning the content of the activities the integration of two and more Romance languages, whenever possible, and both as object languages and metalanguages, is therefore actively endorsed.
The AIFRS is open to all scholars from the Arqus Alliance concerned with the Romance Languages. The AIFRS facilitates joint research and academic teaching at the Arqus universities and creates a matrix structure for these international collaborations. AIFRS scholars engage in a wide range of activities, e.g., from workshops and summer schools to permanent research groups, developing and planning their joint academic projects in an open, encouraging, and inspiring scientific environment.
