Global English (Kolding)

The Department of English, University of Southern Denmark is developing a new centre dedicated to the study of English and the impact of its diffusion throughout what has become the English-speaking world. The Centre will offer research and degree programmes, collectively profiled as 'Global English', and will be based at the University's new Kolding campus, situated in southern Jutland.

The key feature of the new programmes is pluralism: the study of English in an international rather than an intranational context, seen from cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. The University will offer possibilities for studying English beyond the confines of more traditional degree-programme alignments - the British Isles and the USA - by focusing on the emergence of English as the world's language and cultural lingua franca. English is therefore examined as an international means of communication, both in the multiplicity of its standard forms and other sociocultural manifestations. Likewise, the focus is on literatures in English, rather than the traditional canon of English literature. English languages and literatures are not alone in moulding the cultural attitudes and aspirations of the English-speaking world; historical factors such as British imperialism or latter-day Americanisation are equally significant in their contribution to the global spread of English and its attendant values.

The Global English programme has been provisionally established in terms of four interrelated frameworks:

English as global language

Literatures in English

The British Empire and its legacies

Americanisation

The possibilities for the development of a Global English programme are by no means exhausted by these frameworks. Global English is a subject area which embraces the experience of cultural fragmentation in English-speaking countries and the impact of the English language and English-speaking cultures on those countries where English is not the first language and where it is received with varying degrees of uncertainty or ambivalence. This complexity engenders a cross-disciplinary set of methods and approaches. These in turn facilitate the study of such related areas as multiculturalism, migration, travel literature, information technology - to name but a few topics now being developed by the University of Southern Denmark for its Global English programme.