Centre for Luxembourg Studies
Director: Prof Gerald Newton
Commandeur de l'Ordre de Mérite
du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg
email : g.newton@sheffield.ac.uk
Modern Luxembourg is a nation at the heart of Europe. It is prosperous and plurilinguistic and enriched by the economic, social and cultural stimulation of open contacts with its neighbours. Contemporary Luxembourgish (Lëtzebuergesch), though influenced by French and German, has entered a process of developing as a language in its own right, and has functioned as the constitutional national language of Luxembourg since 1984. The Centre, which was set up in 1995, has three principal areas of activity: research, resources, and teaching.
Research
- The establishment of an archive of Luxembourg material for visiting scholars from all relevant disciplines.
- The Centre now holds a substantial part of the archive of Stephen Williams, first English-language Director of Radio Luxembourg (1933), and many research projects are expected to emerge in connection with this.
Resources
The Centre aims to acquire and maintain complete holdings of material on Luxembourg and Luxembourgish, allowing it to develop as an essential resource for research into these fields and thus attracting researchers from other institutions, government departments and the private sector. Xerox and microfiche copies of many earlier works are being obtained from the Luxembourg National Library and the Luxembourg State Archives. Further help is however required, to enable subscription to such journals as Nos Cahiers and the purchase of all relevant monographs and other publications as they appear.
Teaching
The Centre provides an option course for Final Year Students at the University of Sheffield, which besides offering an overview of the country and its developments also teaches Luxembourgish in both spoken and written form. In this, Dr Newton is assisted by a Visiting Lecturer from the Grand Duchy. In the years in which the course has now been taught, the annual intake has been an average of 15. In each year a prize has been awarded by the Luxembourg Embassy in London to the student with the best performance in Luxembourgish.
External standing and reputation
Prof Gerald Newton has been researching Luxembourgish and Luxembourg since 1968, when he first approached it in the broader context of Rhineland Studies. He is the leading British scholar in this field and one of the leaders world-wide. He is editor of Luxembourg and Lëtzebuergesch: Languages at the Crossroads of Europe (Oxford University Press 1996), which is the first comprehensive and definitive study of the language to be published anywhere in the English-speaking world.
Advisors to the Centre
The establishment of a Centre for Luxembourg Studies was endorsed from the beginning by Jacques Santer, former Prime Minister and European Commissioner.
The list below indicates (in alphabetical order) the names of those who have offered to act as advisors to the Centre:
- Dr Jules Christophory (Luxembourg Commissioner to the EU and former Director National Library)
- Professor Michael Clyne (Monash University, Australia)
- Professor Martin Durrell (University of Manchester)
- Mme Germaine Goetzinger (Director, Luxembourg Literary Archive)
- Dr Jean-Paul Hoffmann (Grand-Ducal Institute, Luxembourg)
- Mlle Josiane Kartheiser (École des langues, Luxembourg)
- Mr Serge Moes (Director, Luxembourg Tourist Bureau, London)
- Professor John Widdowson (Cultural Tradition and Language, Sheffield)
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