AIFRS Events

Excursion to the Avignon International Theatre Festival (Festival d’Avignon) in France (2024)

7-12 July 2024

Organization of the joint excursion:

• Graz: Dr Verena Richter (substitute for maternity leave: Dr Cláudia García-Minguillán Torres)
• Leipzig: Dr Ángela Calderón Villarino

Participating students:

• 8 students from Graz and 6 students from Leipzig

The Avignon Theatre Festival is one of the most outstanding venues for contemporary artistic production in France, comparable to the Cannes Film Festival or the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival. Each year, the festival presents current trends in the national and international theatre landscape, which are often the subject of controversial debate. A visit to the festival in the form of an academically supervised excursion allows students to gain an insight into the contemporary theatre scene. The two groups of students from Graz and Leipzig are prepared thematically in advance by their teachers at their home universities. During the film festival, they watch performances together and discuss them with each other under the academic guidance of the participating teachers.

This activity was launched within the Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies as part of the long-term cooperation between the teaching personnel from the Romance Departments of the University of Graz and the University of Leipzig. The excursion also serves to reinforce academic and personal exchange between the two participating universities.

The joint excursion is subsidized by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the International Relations Office of the University of Graz.

Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP)

9–14 October 2023, Granada,

Virtual phase: 3–6 October 2023

Participating universities: Granada, Graz, Minho, Leipzig, Padova
Organization: David Porcel Bueno (Granada), Stefan Koch (Graz)

The International Seminar deals with various linguistic phenomena that characterize the Ibero-Romance languages spoken outside of Europe contrasting them with the varieties on the Iberian Peninsula. The seminar is an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme funded by the European Comission. It adopts a contrastive, typological approach to the linguistic phenomena involved and consists of the core modules held in Granada and a virtual phase before and afterwards. Students will also be tasked with guided research on the topics at hand.

More information here and (in Spanish) here.

Contact: daporbue(at)ugr.es /stefan.koch1(at)tu-dresden.de

Joint Workshop for students from Graz and Leipzig, Summer Term 2023

May 2023, Graz

Teaching personnel: Verena Richter (Graz) and Ángela Calderón (Leipzig)

The workshop is part of two parallel seminars held in Graz and Leipzig by Verena Richter (Graz) and Ángela Calderón Villarino (Leipzig). Based on the oevre by Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977, Argentina), Elena Poniatowska (*1932, Mexico), Rodrigo Rey Rosa (*1958, Guatemala) and Miguel-Anxo Murado (*1965, Galicia/Spain) the seminars aimed at throwing a light on the interrelation between literature and journalism in contemporary Hispanic literatures, exploring topics such as the interplay between fictionality and factuality, literary engagement in dictatorship(s), or literature and archives. As part of these two seminars, the students from Leipzig visited Graz in May 2023 for a two-day workshop on Rey Rosas’ auto-fictional novel El material humano (2009) in which diary entries are interwoven with journalistic investigations constantly blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional.

Contact: verena.richter(at)uni-graz.at

17–25 September 2022, Graz

Preliminary online phase: 1–14 September 2022

Organization: Katharina Gerhalter (Graz) and Stefan Koch (Graz)
Target group: advanced BA students and MA students of the Romance languages from Graz, Granada, Augsburg, Bergen, Munich, and Vilnius

Further information

The Summer School covered various aspects of the Romance languages in Africa and the New World. During a preliminary online phase (1–14 September 2022), the students received a general introduction and completed some online-tasks. During the Summer School itself, held in Graz from 17th to 25th September 2022, various classes, for example concerned with morphosyntax, lexicon and language contact, were taught by renowned experts in an interactive environment. The teaching personnel included experts from the universities of Graz, Granada, Bergen, Cádiz, Santiago de Chile, Utrecht and Augsburg. Students also worked in small groups on their own to carry out guided research tasks on specific topics of the classes, supervised by the teaching personnel.

Teaching personnel and topics:

• Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg): Portuguese and Spanish in the Bantu-speaking area of West and Central Africa. Morphosyntax (in Spanish and Portuguese)
• Roxana Sobrino Triana (Bergen): Spanish in the Caribbean – Sociolinguistics, Lexicon, and Linguistic Attitudes (in Spanish)
• Soledad Chávez Fajardo (Santiago de Chile): Spanish in Chile – Historical Sociolinguistics and Lexicology (in Spanish)
• Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht): Italo-Romance in the Americas – Emigrant varieties under scrutiny (in Italian)
• Martin Hummel (Graz) & Victor Lara Bermejo (Cádiz): Portuguese and Spanish address forms in America and Africa (in Spanish and Portuguese)
• David Porcel Bueno, Mónica Martins Guedes & Javier Salcedo (Granada): Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese face to face: morphology, phraseology and lexical influences on Spanish (in Portuguese)

20–24 September 2021, Granada

Organization: Katharina Gerhalter, Stefan Koch (Graz); David Porcel Bueno (Granada)
Target group: advanced Bachelor students (Spanish, Italian or Portuguese) and Master students of Romance Studies in Graz and Granada.

Further information

The multilingual seminar dealt with diverse aspects of cultural and linguistic contact within the Mediterranean (specifically between the Iberian and Apennine peninsulas), thus widening the student’s horizon who usually concentrate on studies of a single language (Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The topics in linguistics were contrastive and the topics in literature were comparative. By holding the courses in Italian and Spanish, improving intercomprehension skills was actively encouraged.

Teaching personnel and topics:

• David Porcel Bueno (Granada): Una historia compartida: arabismos y hebraísmos en español, italiano y portugués
• Victoriano Peña Sánchez (Granada): Discurso de bienvenida y apertura (one session)
• Anna Suadoni (Granada): I verbi di movimiento in italiano e in spagnolo: valore letterale, metaforizzazioni e grammaticalizzazioni
• Alessandra Sanna (Granada): Alcune riflessioni sulla narrativa di Grazia Deledda: ricezione e punti di contatto con la letteratura spagnola
• Katharina Gerhalter (Graz): Infinitivos topicalizados en las lenguas románicas: diferencias y paralelismos
• Stefan Koch (Graz): Contacto lingüístico en el Mezzogiorno: influencias del español en el napolitano
• Fausto de Michele (Graz): “Don Chisciotte” e la maschera del Capitano della Commedia
• Dainius Būrė (Vilnius): Genealogie letterarie tra il Seicento e il Settecento: da “Venceslas” (1647) di Jean de Rotrou a “Vincislao di Lituania” (1791) di Gaetano Fiorio

7-12 July 2024

Organization: Claudia García-Minguillán, Verena Richter (both from the University of Graz), and Ángela Calderón (from Leipzig University).
Target group: Group of 12 students of French Language and Literature and French and Francophone Cultures from the Universities of Graz and Leipzig.

Arqus students from Graz and Leipzig attended the prestigious “Festival d’Avignon” in France as part of the activities organised by the Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies (AIFRS).

From 7 to 12 July, a group of 12 students of French Language and Literature and French and Francophone Cultures from the Universities of Graz and Leipzig spent an eventful week at the Festival d’Avignon as spectators and theatre critics. It is one of the most renowned cultural events in the world, celebrated annually since 1947 in the southern Provençal city of Avignon.

As the culmination of a semester dedicated to the study of contemporary theatre, the students from Graz and Leipzig visited 2 exhibitions and attended several performances per day, ranging from the various stages in the city centre to historical scenarios such as Carrière de Boulbon, Chartreuse-Villeneuve lez Avignon, or Cour d’honneur du Palais des papes. With Spanish as the invited culture this year, the students put their Romanist training to the test by attending plays not only in French —some of them with actors from the Comédie-Française— but also in Spanish, with a special focus on Latin American culture.

The programme offered them reinterpretations of classical myths in a context of social injustice, encouraged them to parade through the streets of Avignon with a concert of Andean music to learn about the situation of indigenous American peoples, and offered them scenarios that combined reality and fiction to reflect on the critical situation of human rights in the Southern Cone. The group also had the opportunity to visit the Maison Jean Vilar, where they learned about the history of the festival and the life of its founder. They had access to the archive’s library and enjoyed a friendly conversation with its director, who offered them information about research visits and institutional support for their projects.

Beyond the festival, the students gained a better knowledge of the region (with visits to the Avignon area), practiced their French by talking to locals, took a short boat ride on the Rhone, and shared a lunch while sharing their thoughts on the plays they had just seen, an activity that strengthened the alliance between Graz and Leipzig.