Digital Week Eleven: Languages

For the eleventh week of TORCH Goes Digital, we focused on the theme of “Languages”. Questions related to the philosophy of language have abounded since the time of Ancient Greece, when Gorgias and Plato pondered whether words can represent experience. Together with leading researchers from the University of Oxford and beyond, the TORCH team curated a brilliant programme of blog posts, podcasts, news articles, poems, performances and more centred around language, the philosophy of languages and the future of languages. 

Popular content included The Languages of J. M. Coetzee by Oliver Ready, the discussion Translating Brecht, part of a symposium dedicated to ‘Re-Thinking Brecht’, held at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and ‘French dog!’: interpreting insults on the streets of London, a fascinating piece from the Voltaire Foundation. 

On the evening of the 27th January 2017, Creative Multilingualism took over the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to host a celebration of all things multilingual with an event entitled LinguaMania, which saw 2,500 visitors take part in over 30 different language-based activities. For this Language-themed week, we were proud to showcase the podcast series from this event. 

To celebrate the #TORCHGoesDigital! theme for this week, we also highlighted a series of blog posts on the history of names, from Atticus to Barbara, to Hector. In one fascinating blog post, Dr Bethany White described the Classics in Communities, led by Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson project explores how learning Latin at a young age can impact children’s cognitive development.

On the evening of, from 5.00pm-6.00pm, we had our ninth Big Tent, Live Events! live-streamed discussion - Creative Multilingualism with Professor Katrin Kohl (MML) and Professor Rajinder Dudrah (Birmingham City University). We thoroughly enjoyed learning about the AHRC-funded research programme Creative Multilingualism and all its facets.