The College congratulates Supernumerary Fellow Dr Charlotte Ryland who has been appointed as a Leader for the Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN), where she will be leading a project to support language-learning.
Languages in the UK is a discipline in crisis, with engagement plummeting and a public discourse that undervalues the discipline’s importance for 21st-century Britain. This OPEN Leaders project, led by Dr Charlotte Ryland, develops capacity, awareness and infrastructure for policy engagement across the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages (MML). It also supports faculties to collaborate with each other in policy engagement, often for the first time.
Charlotte is working with a team of 12 Early Career Researchers (ECRs) from MML, with colleagues in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), Classics and Education, and with members of the Cross-Government Languages Group. The Lead ECR on the project is Sarah Schwarz, a DPhil student at Queen’s.
The project, which in its first phase runs until the end of July 2024, will map experience and expertise across the faculties; explore how expertise can be most effectively shared with policymakers; establish a structure for training ECRs in policy engagement; and draft a policy engagement policy for MML.
This project was seeded by a very successful policy workshop run by OPEN in March 2023.
Charlotte is Founding Director of The Queen’s College Translation Exchange, a project that seeks to raise the profile of language learning and multilingualism across the UK, and to increase the uptake of languages throughout education. Its flagship programme is the Anthea Bell Prize for Young Translators, which engaged over 16,000 young people aged 11-18 in 2024, from right across the UK. Charlotte is also Director of the Stephen Spender Trust, a charity that promotes multilingualism and language learning.
