Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University

Yaron Matras

was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester until 2020, where he founded and led the Multilingual Manchester project. He now holds honorary affiliations with the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, the University of Hamburg and the University of Haifa. His research interests include multilingualism and language policy, linguistic typology and the documentation of minority languages and regional dialects, with a focus on Romani, German dialects, and languages of the Near East and Western Asia. His books include Romani: A linguistic introduction (CUP, 2002), Language contact (CUP, 2009, 2nd ed. 2020), 'I met lucky people': The story of the Romani Gypsies (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2014), A grammar of Domari (Mouton, 2012), Romani in Britain: The afterlife of a language (EUP, 2010) and Speech and the city: Multilingualism, decoloniality and the civic university (CUP, 2024).

Ruxandra Trandafoiu

is Professor of Politics, Communications and Diaspora at Edge Hill University, UK. She researches the role of digital media in the political engagement and activism of Eastern European diasporas. Ruxandra is the author of Diaspora Online: Identity Politics and Romanian Migrants and The Politics of Migration and Diaspora in Eastern Europe: Media, Public Discourse and Policy, as well as several edited collections and numerous articles exploring the relationship between media, mobility and migrant rights. Her most recent book is Migration, Dislocation and Movement on Screen.

Ula (Urszula) Chowaniec, Ph.D.

is a literary scholar in Polish language and literature, specialising in Jewish women’s history. She lives in Stockholm, teaching Polish language at Lund University and Jewish Women’s Literature at the Paideia Folkhögskola. She is a Professor at the Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Cracow University in Poland.

She is an author of a monograph Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) and a monograph on the novels of Irena Krzywicka, a Jewish feminist in the 1930s W poszukiwaniu Kobiety: O wczesnych powieściach Ireny Krzywickiej (In Search for a Woman: Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka, Kraków 2007). Currently, she is working on the monograph on the poetry of Irena Klepfisz as her research concentrates on Jewish history and Jewish identity in women writing and contemporary lesbian women’s writing (https://jewishwomenswriting.weebly.com). Academic website, including the professional profile: https://cudzoziemki.weebly.com

Ramona Gonczol

is Associate Professor in Romanian language studies at SSEES, UCL. She convenes the PROLang group and is an academic coordinator for the Language Short Courses programme at SSEES. She is the (co)author of Romanian and Essential Grammar (2nd edition, 2020) and Colloquial Romanian(4th edition,2014). Her research interests lie in the area of language acquisition, heritage speakers, cultural identities, language policy, multilingualism and ethnographic pedagogy. Ramona is a fellow of the HEA and the recipient for the Order for Cultural Merits in Promoting Romanian Culture and Language Abroad (2018).