One of two projects from Charles University that has succeeded this year in the prestigious European grant competition ERC Starting Grant is going to be investigated by the literary scholar Petra Johana Poncarová from the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Her project „NUDGERS: New Users of Minoritised Languages as Writers and Cultural Agent“ will bring 1,5 million EURO to the Faculty of Arts. It is the second ERC grant allocated to the faculty this year.
In the last decades, the numbers of new users who learnt Celtic languages of their own initiative, without having a familial links, has been growing. The project NUDGERS traces the phenomenon to its roots in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century.
„This period has been much less researched, but it offers many fascinating stories of new users who learnt these languages under completely different social and technological conditions. It is also a dramatic period of European history, including the First World War and the emergence of new national states, including independent Ireland,“ explains the investigator of the new project Petra Johana Poncarová.
Using the corpus of six Celtic languages – Breton, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh – the project aims to provide a better understanding of how these new users influenced the development of these minoritised languages and cultures. „By studying the historical examples of new users will help us to provide better support for current new users of minoritised languages. The knowledge that they are part of a phenomenon with hundred-year-old tradition and which has involved a number of influential figures can give them confidence and a sense of belonging – and it can also provide encouragement for traditional users and communities whose languages faced prejudice and low cultural prestige for centuries,“ adds Petra Johana Poncarová. The project is related to other current research directions – from migration literature to the phenomenon of authors working in learnt languages.
„I have for a long time been fascinated by the motivation of these new users of Celtic languages,“ points out Petra Johana Poncarová. „What was their background? How did they acquire these languages? Were they trying to blend in into their adopted culture, or did they intentionally stay on the outside? How did they use these languages creatively? What was the response to their work on part of other writers and cultural and political organisations? To what extend did they influence the languages and cultures by their creative work? How are they remembered after more than a hundred years?“
Project outcomes will include, apart from academic publications, a website dedicated to news users of Celtic languages, available to the public and the research community, and tailored materials for cultural organisations in the individual Celtic countries. Current culturally active new users and figures from more recent history will be involved through the project podcast, blog, and other outreach activities.
Petra Johana Poncarová focuses on Scottish Gaelic. In terms of Irish, the project will develop the activities of the Centre for Irish Studies at the Faculty of Arts. In the second year of the project, the team will welcome researchers specialising in Breton, Cornish, Manx, and Welsh. The award of the ERC Starting Grant is an extraordinary success for Petra Johana Poncarová, also given her early career stage.
Eva Lehečková, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, points out: „It is only six years since Petra Johana Poncarová finished her PhD, and in those years, she has managed to carry out an impressive amount of research work. She is already an internationally respected expert on modern Scottish literature, especially in Scottish Gaelic, and she is only at the beginning of her academic career. Her topic moreover coincides with one of the key interests and priorities of our faculty – the research of multilingualism, support of linguistic diversity and endangered languages and cultural communities. I personally look forward to the project’s discoveries, and dr Poncarova’s success confirms to me that the gradual development of faculty support for promising ERC applicants has been heading in the right direction.“
Štěpánka Gray Marková from the Project and Grants Office at the Faculty of Arts adds: “We are genuinely delighted by Petra’s success – all the more so because we were able to support her throughout the process, from the very beginning. For our team, this also confirms the value of the comprehensive and individually tailored support for ERC applicants that I began to systematically develop at the Faculty of Arts three years ago. I believe that in such a demanding competition as the ERC, support of this kind not only provides an important foundation for working on ambitious projects, but it also has a positive impact on researchers’ motivation to embark on these projects in the first place.”
Mgr. Petra Johana Poncarová, Ph.D.
Petra Johana Poncarová focuses on modern Scottish literature, especially in Scottish Gaelic. In 2023-2025, she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. At the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, she is a member of the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and is involved in the project CoRe: Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building. Her monograph Derick Thomson and the Gaelic Revival was published by Edinburgh University Press. The selection of Thomson’s Gaelic prose, An Staran, which she edited, received several awards in Scotland. She has made the first direct translations from Scottish Gaelic into Czech and published a number of texts in Gaelic, including her own poetry for which she received a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust and the Gaelic Books Council.
Contact for media:
Petra Johana Poncarová, PhD.
Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, CU FA
E-mail: PetraJohana.Poncarova@ff.cuni.cz
Ina Palacká
Spokesperson, CU FA
E-mail: Ina.palacka@ff.cuni.cz
Phone: +420 777 739 951
