Goodbye Toulouse

Last week I left Toulouse, bringing my year abroad to a close. My parents came to pick me up, loaded all my belongings into the car (which seem to have multiplied tenfold since I arrived nine months ago) and off we went. Simple? Far from it. Leaving Toulouse was just like many of my experiences …

American Studies in Another Culture and Climate: Experiences from the Year Abroad

When applying for courses at the University of Nottingham, I saw that the Cultures, Languages and Area Studies departments offered many students the chance to do a year abroad. Having decided to undertake a Joint Honours degree in Politics and American Studies, and having achieved the necessary academic requirements, I was lucky enough to be …

Learning languages at Nottingham

                                                      Emma with friends in Cádiz, Spain I started my UoN career as an undergraduate studying French and Beginners’ Spanish. Starting a language ab initio was daunting at first …

Onesies, adjective endings and the Bremer Stadtmusikanten: my summer at a German university

Emily O’Malley, Year 2 German (Beginners) and History, was one of the four Nottingham students who were granted a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to attend a summer course at a German university last year. (The internal deadline for this year’s application round is 12 November – please get in touch with …

Windows on Russia and Eastern Europe

Written by graduates of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, the forthcoming book Windows on Russia and Eastern Europe sheds light on how the Communist-controlled lands of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe evolved from Stalinism to Gorbachev’s perestroika to the robber baron days of the 1990s and finally to today’s uneasy mix of …

The Year Abroad experience

I was recently reading an interview with the French philosopher Michel Foucault in which he talked about a period spent working in Sweden at the University of Uppsala in the 1950s. Foucault clearly remembered this experience of exposure to another language and another culture as being highly significant in terms of his personal and intellectual …