PhDs in European Languages and Cultures

Doctorate-level (PhD) study is your opportunity to make an original, positive contribution to learning in European languages and cultures.

Find a supervisor

Over the course of your PhD, you will be supervised by at least two members of academic staff with expertise in your area of research.

Please note that the staff listed here are eligible to supervise PhD research but may not currently be taking on new students. To check availability, or seek further advice on the best supervisory fit for your thesis, please contact our Departmental Postgraduate Research Director.

The Departmental Postgraduate Research Director will also be able to advise you about supervision expertise beyond your main subject area or discipline, including in other Schools at the University of Edinburgh. This is particularly useful if your research is interdisciplinary.

Subject areas are based on languages; many staff have expertise outside the language area in which they are based. Links will take you to staff profiles on Edinburgh Research Explorer where you can further explore the specialisms summarised through research outputs and activities.

Subject area	Researcher	Specialisms
French and Francophone Studies	Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce	Intermediality and comparative literary and cultural studies, with an emphasis on Japan and the francophone world
	Dr Claire Boyle	20th century and contemporary French literature and cinema; autobiography studies; queer theory; French feminism
	Dr Sam Coombes	20th and 21st century political thought; postcolonialism; immigrant and diasporic communities in Britain and France; existentialist philosophy (Sartre notably)
	Dr Séverine Genieys-Kirk	The history of feminism and women writers across Europe in the 16th to 19th centuries; translation in the long 18th and 19th centuries; Baroque and Romantic; adaptations of early modern works and lives
	Dr Emmanuelle Lacore-Martin	French Renaissance literature; links between early modern literature and medicine; literary theory and contemporary French literature, in particular the writings of Annie Ernaux
	Dr Katie Pleming	Cinematic representation, ethics, and politics; postcolonial intermediality in work by contemporary French and francophone female filmmakers
	Professor Marion Schmid	Intermediality; adaptation studies; film and the other arts; the French New Wave and post-New Wave; Marcel Proust; Chantal Akerman
	Dr Fionnuala Sinclair	Medieval French and Occitan literature and culture; inter-relations between literature and history; gender in the Middle Ages
	Dr Sarah Tribout-Joseph	Contemporary and comparative literature and life writing; space and urban narratives; medical humanities; education; literature and film
German Studies	Dr Eleoma Bodammer	Scottish-German cultural relations; German literature in the 18th and 19th centuries; disability; literary translation
	Professor Laura Bradley	Bertolt Brecht; German and Austrian theatre and performance; censorship; spectatorship; representations of crime; the GDR
	Professor Peter Davies	Holocaust writing and translation; Translation and Interpreting Studies; German-language literature and culture, 1880-1945
	Dr Leanne Dawson	LGBTQI+ representation on page, stage, and screen; Queer spaces, including film festivals and archives; working-class representation in film, television, online; accessibility, equality, diversity, and inclusion in film and the arts
	Dr Frauke Matthes	20th and 21st century German literature; gender and masculinity studies; transcultural literature and culture; postcolonial studies; travel/migration writing; comparative literature
	Professor Sabine Rolle	Theory and practice of scholarly editing; medieval literature; reception of the Middle Ages
	Dr Karolina Watroba	Modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism - its global reception and continuing relevance
	Dr Jenny Watson	Literature and memory; German and/or Dutch-language literature; landscape; WWII; state socialism
Italian Studies	Professor Davide Messina	Modern and contemporary Italian studies; comparative literature and arts; philosophy and semiotics
	Dr Emanuela Patti	Modern and contemporary Italian literary and cultural studies, particularly intermediality, digital culture, and the transnational transformation of texts, media, and cultural memory
	Professor Federica Pedriali	Literary and cultural theory; continental philosophy; biopolitics; migration and diaspora studies; environmental humanities; decolonial thought; performance studies; cultural policy
Russian Studies	Dr Alexandra Smith	Russian and comparative literature; Russian culture (film, theatre and performance, visual arts); literary theory; emigre writing; film and theatre adaptations of literary works; Russian and East European intellectual history
Scandinavian Studies	Dr Alan Macniven	The Viking Age; place-names; modern developments in Scandinavian (particularly Swedish) literature, language and culture
Scandinavian Studies	Dr Guy Puzey	Language, politics and identity (especially language policy, linguistic landscapes, and semiotic landscapes); socio-onomastics; critical toponomastics; translation of Norwegian; modern and contemporary Nordic social, cultural and historical topics
Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies	Dr Barbara Castillo Büttinghausen	Southern Cone literature and culture of the 20th and 21st centuries; travel chronicles by contemporary Latin American female writers
	Dr Charlotte Gleghorn	Latin American film studies, with a particular emphasis on the political work of cinema and its relationship to cultural memory; women’s cinema from Latin America; Indigenous and Afrodescendant filmmaking and media
	Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs	Latin American film and visual culture, especially in relation to the politics of archives, print and material culture; diaspora studies
	Professor Alexis Grohmann	20th and 21st century Spanish literature (including feature writing and newspaper collaborations by writers); the work of Javier Marías, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and other contemporary writers
	Dr Inês Lima	Ecocriticism; intertextuality; gender studies, queer theory; postcolonial studies; migration and mobility; literary theory; comparative literature; visual cultures
	Dr Iona Macintyre	History, literatures and culture of 19th century Spanish America (especially Argentina) and Brazil; history of the book and popular print forms; gender studies; transatlantic relations
	Dr Fiona Mackintosh	Spanish American women's writing; 20th and 21st century Argentinian novels and poetry; transatlantic literary exchange; comparative literature
	Dr Inma Sánchez García	Intermediality; adaptation studies; comparative literature; Shakespearean adaptation; European and transnational cinema; queer approaches to film, literature and the arts
	Dr José Saval	Popular culture; socio-political aspects of contemporary Spanish literature; 20th century peninsular Spanish theatre; Manuel Vázquez Montalbán; Eduardo Mendoza
	Dr Carlos Soler Montes	Sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and second language pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on language variation, second language acquisition, language contact and social bilingualism

Contact our Departmental Postgraduate Research Director

PhD programmes

We offer the following PhD programmes:

Comparative Literature PhD	European Theatre PhD
French PhD	German PhD
Intermediality PhD	Italian PhD
Medieval Studies PhD	Russian PhD
Scandinavian Studies PhD	Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies PhD

Working with colleagues elsewhere in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and across the wider University, we are able to support research which crosses boundaries between disciplines and/or languages.

Entrance requirements, fees, funding and more...

You can find out about application deadlines, entrance requirements, start dates, fees and scholarship opportunities for all our PhD programmes on the University of Edinburgh’s Degree Finder. Degree Finder links straight through to EUCLID, the online system for applying to postgraduate programmes at the University of Edinburgh.

Find out more on the University of Edinburgh Degree Finder

Before making a formal application to any PhD in European Languages and Cultures, you are strongly advised to read our guidelines on writing a PhD proposal.

Take me to the guidelines

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Email us about PhD programmes

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QS World Rankings by Subject 2026

The University of Edinburgh is ranked 3rd in the UK for Modern Languages.

We are ranked fourth in the UK in the broader subject area of the Arts & Humanities.

Globally, we’re in the World Top 15: Modern Languages (12) and Arts and Humanities (9).

The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings are based on research citations and the results of major global surveys of employers and academics.

They are International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) approved.