Dr Ville Vuolanto joined us in May 2023 as a Visiting Professor at MCYS and History, Politics and Philosophy, to work with colleagues in the centre, in particular with Dr April Pudsey on their project on Children of Oxyrhynchos.

Dr Vuolanto is an ancient historian with a specialism in youth and childhood in late antique and early Christian communities and is Chair of TRIVIUM (the Centre for Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Tampere) and on the committee of PERLA, the interdisciplinary Finnish Centre Childhood, Youth and Family Research.

While with us at MCYS Dr Vuolanto worked closely with Dr Pudsey on research and writing for their monograph Children of Oxyrhynchos. Growing Up in an Ancient City. This monograph reconstructs, for the first time, the lives, concerns, and cultures of children and young people in an ancient classical city (1st- 6th centuries CE). Together, Dr Vuolanto and Dr Pudsey have researched thousands of ancient Greek documents on papyrus, and the material cultures of childhood from this city in Egypt of the Roman period; the project adopts methodologies drawn from the historical disciplines and the Social Sciences in piecing together a picture of agency, play, cultures, trauma, enslavement, and inter-relations, resulting in a reimagining of the life of an ancient city around its young people. They have published six peer-reviewed research papers from this work, and their monograph will be published with Palgrave McMillan in 2024/5.

In 2023, MCYS welcomed two new visiting research fellows, Professor Evelyn Ziegler (University of Duisburg-Essen), and doctoral student Nele Van Den Driessche (Ghent University). Both shared their expertise on topics within the field of sociolinguistics.

In May 2023, a PhD student from Ghent University (Belgium), Nele Van Den Driessche, visited MCYS for a research stay. Nele’s research focuses on recent language change within Spanish teenage talk. She is particularly interested in how the lexicon and syntax of Spanish teenage talk has changed in the 21st century. Nele’s project intersects especially with research by MCYS sociolinguists John Bellamy and Rob Drummond who both work on youth language.

In summer 2023, one of the leading professors of sociolinguistics in Germany, Prof Evelyn Ziegler (University of Duisburg-Essen), came to MCYS for a research visit. Akey specialism of Prof Ziegler’s work is the meaning and value of local urban spoken dialects for its speakers, including the way that young people identify with historical cultural heritage through language usage in post-industrial cityscapes.

As a sociolinguist based at Manchester Met, John Bellamy has been fostering a close working relationship between MCYS and the University of Duisburg-Essen to develop fertile cross-comparative linguistic studies of the respective post-industrial regions. During the research visit by Prof Ziegler, MCYS developed new directions for our international collaboration based on linguistic and semiotic representation of urban industrial heritage. Prof Ziegler undertakes leading research on the way young people engage with language, local identity and cultural heritage. The professorial stay also facilitated plans for our ongoing international research, together with Prof Natalie Braber at Nottingham Trent University, on a comparative analysis of the language of former coal mining communities in the UK and in Germany, with a focus on the inter-generational transmission of mining words (‘pit talk’) and the implications for the intangible cultural-linguistic heritage of these regions.