PROLang launch event: Ebbs and Flows - The case of Romanian studies in the UK

Prof Emeritus Dennis Deletant OBE

Emeritus Professor of Romanian Studies at University College, London

Dennis Deletant is Emeritus Professor of Romanian Studies at University College, London, where he taught in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, between 1969 and 2011. 

Dennis was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1995 and was awarded the Order of Merit with the rank of commander for services to Romanian democracy in 2000. He was awarded ‘The Star of Romania’, Romania’s highest civilian honour, by President Klaus Iohannis in 2016 for his activity in the promotion of Romanian history, language, and culture.

Dennis holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Cluj, Sibiu and Targu Mures.

Dennis was Rosenzweig Family Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was Professor of Romanian Studies at the University of Amsterdam from 2003 to 2010. He served as Visiting Ion Rațiu Professor of Romanian Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, Washington DC from August 2011 to July 2020.  Dennis is currently a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington DC.

He is the author of several monographs and volumes of studies on the recent history of Romania. His most recent study in English, Romania under Communism: Paradox and Degeneration, was published in 2019 (Oxford; New York: Routledge). Other recent tiles include Romania, 1916-1941. A Political History (Routledge, 2022) and an autobiographical memoir, In Search of Romania (London: Hurst Publishers), appeared in May 2022.

Prof Martin Maiden FBA

Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages and a Fellow of Trinity College at University of Oxford

Martin Maiden is Statutory Professor of the Romance Languages and a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford, since 1996. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, since 2003, and a member of Academia Europea, since 2018.

Martin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from University of Bucharest in 2013 and was appointed to the rank of ‘Commander’ in Ordinul Național “Serviciul Credincios” in 2014.

Martin Maiden’s areas of interest are: history and structure of all the Romance languages (especially Romanian with other Romance varieties of eastern Europe and Italian with other Italo-Romance dialects), historical linguistics (especially historical morphology and phonology), morphological theory and dialectology.

Martin Maiden’s latest publications include The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology (OUP 2021) (jointly authored with G. Pană Dindelegan, A. Dragomirescu, O. Uță Bărbulescu, R. Zafiu) and The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (CUP 2022) (edited with A. Ledgeway)

Prof Adam Ledgeway FBA

Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at University of Cambridge

Adam Ledgeway is Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at University of Cambridge, Downing College, since 2013.

Adam is a Fellow of the British Academy, since 2017, and a Member of the Academia Europaea, since 2021.

In 2016, Adam Ledgeway was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest.

Adam Ledgeway's research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, linguistic change, and language contact. His research is channelled towards bringing together traditional Romance philological scholarship with the insights of recent linguistic theory.

Adam Ledgeway’s latest publications include The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (CUP 2022) (edited with M. Maiden) and The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax (CUP 2017) (edited with Ian Roberts)

Dr Kim Schulte FHEA

Vice Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Jaume I University in Castellón

Kim Schulte studied Romance Languages and Linguistics at Cambridge, Salamanca, and Bucharest.

He taught at the universities of Cambridge, Exeter, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona before taking up his current position as Reader at Jaume I University in Castellón (Spain), where he is a Vice Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and teaches linguistics and translation.

He has published on aspects of the syntax, morphology, phonology, and lexis of Romanian, mostly from a comparative historical perspective, and he has also conducted a research project on language contact, interference, and convergence between Romanian, Spanish and Catalan as a consequence of large-scale migration of Romanians to eastern Spain. Kim has taught several introductory Romanian courses at Jaume I University in Castellón, and he has also been involved with the Romanian programme at SSEES, for which he is currently the external examiner.     

Kim has been in charge of the Romanian Language and Linguistics section in The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies since 2008.  Other relevant publications include ‘Daco- and Ibero- Romance in contact: on the origin of structural similarities between related languages’ in Revue roumaine de linguistique (2013), and ‘Loanwords in Romanian’ in Loanwords in the World's Languages: A comparative handbook, edited by Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor (2009)

Ramona Gonczol FHEA

Associate Professor (Teaching) in Romanian language at UCL SSEES

Ramona Gonczol started teaching Romanian language at UCL SSEES in 2000 and is now an Associate Professor (Teaching) in Romanian language. She is also is the Academic Coordinator for SSEES Language Short Courses, since 2008. Her team received a Commendation for their teaching provision from Chartered Institute of Linguists in 2020.

She gained a BA and an MA in Romanian and English at University of the West, Timisoara, Romania, after which she gained a MA in Adult Learning at UCL (2011) and has later gained a PG Diploma in Digital Education with the University of Edinburgh (2015). 

Her research interests lie in the field of language contact, digital education, language acquisition and digital immersion, cultural identities and attitudes and perceptions towards foreign languages.

Ramona is the co-author of Colloquial Romanian, 4th edition (2012), Routledge, together with Prof Dennis Deletant and the sole author of Romanian an Essential Grammar, 2nd edition (2007, 2020).

In 2018 Ramona was appointed to the rank of Knight in the Romanian Order for Cultural Merits in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad.

Shaun Foley

Wolfson Quirk Scholar in the Humanities at UCL

Shaun Foley completed his BA in Bulgarian and Romanian Studies at UCL SSEES. He completed an MLitt in Scottish Heritage at University of the Highlands and Islands, and is now a UCL Wolfson Quirk Scholar in the Humanities.

His research focuses on the intersection between language and identity among the Bulgarian and Ukrainian minorities in Romania. The main research questions are how do minorities preserve their own identities in the face of national language or assimilation policies that are often seen as restrictive or oppressive and how these minorities respond to these policies by looking at key areas, such as language use, education provision, self-perception and cultural preservation and production?

His research interests also include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language pedagogy, representations of LGBTQ+ in Eastern Europe and of the ‘other’ as well as literary translation.

He is also an award-winning translator.