Dr. Robert Crawshaw
Vita
Having obtained a BA in French with Italian from Exeter University many years ago, I worked as an editorial trainee for Oxford University Press before pursuing postgraduate study in comparative literature and linguistics at the Universities of Paris and Cambridge leading to an appointment as a tutor at Exeter, my first full-time post in Britsh Higher Education.
The bulk of my academic career has been spent at Lancaster University where as lecturer and researcher, I focused initially on French language, literature and society and then, progressively, on the culture and economics of Europe as a whole. Following a period as Director of European Relations for the Management School at Lancaster, and subsequently during the early 1990s as academic advisor to the European Commission, I wrote a number of reports on European education policy and in 2001-02 convened the European Language Council's Task Force on Citizenship and Language.
Between 1998 and 2004, I directed a number of research projects in the field of intercultural communication and, in 2006-07, the Annual Research Programme of the University's Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS). Since then, I have been heavily involved in the major AHRC Project Moving Manchester/Mediating Marginalities which I initated in 2005 and in the work of Lancaster University's Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research.
Between 2001 and 2007, I was Associate Editor of the International Journal for Languages and Intercultural Communication and since 2007 have been associate Chair of the EU-funded Lanqua Project's working group on Language and Intercultural Communication in European Higher Education. Having taken over as Head of the Department of European Languages and Cultures at Lancaster, I am currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press on the pragmatics of intercultural communication, based on the output of the ESRC-funded PIC Project of which I was the Director.
At the same time I am struggling to contribute to the book Postcolonial Manchester derived from the Moving Manchester project which is due to be published by Manchester University Press later this year. I am a keen (but increasingly handicapped) sailor, skier, cyclist and mountaineer and have an enduring interest in theatre, cinema, reading, music, history, art and European culture generally, together with a lifelong love of the Alps and the English Lake District.
Research Areas
The current focus of my research is on intercultural studies with particular emphasis on narrative, history, migration and cross-cultural communication. Government-funded research projects with which I have been involved over the last few years, as initiator/director or as member of the research team, include the HEFCE-funded Interculture Project (1998-2002) www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture/, the ESRC project Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication (2003-6) www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/pic/ and the AHRC-funded Moving Manchester/ Mediating Marginalities (2005-09) www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/movingmanchester/. I am currently combining work on a publication for Cambridge University Press on Pragmatics and Cross-Cultural Communication with editing a special volume of the journal Regional Studies arising out of the 2006-07 Annual Research Programme of Lancaster University's Institute for Advanced Studies of which I was the Director www.lancs.ac.uk/ias/annualprogramme/regionalism/index.htm.
Function within the Center
Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz (January-July 2011)
Research poject “The Pragmatics of Intercultural Communication”
Abstract
Selected Publications
"Wanting to be wanted" : a comparative study of incidence and severity in indirect complaint on the part of French and English language teaching assistants', Journal of French Language Studies, January 2010, pp. 75-87 (with Jonathan Culpeper and Julia Harrison).
'Articulation, imagined space and virtual mobility in literary narratives of migration', Mobilities, 3.3, November, 2008, pp.455-469 (with Corinne Fowler).
'Migration and imagined space in Joe Pemberton's Forever and Ever Amen' in K.Korhonen (ed.) History and Theory Protocols, Vol. 7, 2008 http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/en/120117025.
'Lieux de mémoire, Monuments et Monumentalisme : la Portée symbolique de l'Architecture et de l'Archive dans l'Austerlitz de W.G.Sebald', in F. Mckintosh & J.Prugnaud (Eds.) Les Monuments du passé, Lille: CEGES, 2008, pp.169-183.
'Politics and Pragmatics in the Cross-cultural Management of "'Rapport"', Language and Intercultural Communication, Vol. 7 : 3, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007, pp.217-239 (with Julia Harrison).
'Literature, metahistory, ethnography, cultural heritage and the Balkans: Ismail Kadare's The File on H.', in R.Byram and U. Kockel (eds.) Moving, Mixing and Memory in Contemporary Europe, Berlin: Lit. Verlag, 2006, pp.54-75.
'Le paradoxe de Prométhée': the case of L'Ordre du Discourse', in C. Forsdick and A. Stafford (eds.) The modern French essay: sociology, genre, writing, London: Peter Lang, 2005, pp.219-232.
The Intercultural Narrative, Language and Intercultural Communication, Vol.4: 1&2, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004.
'Attesting the self: narration and identity change during periods of residence abroad', Language and Intercultural Communication, Vol. 1 : 2, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2001, pp. 101-119.
Exploring French Text Analysis: Interpretations of National Identity, London: Routledge, 2000.
Contact
e-mail r.crawshaw[at]lancs.ac.uk