Professor Emma Tyler

I was born and brought up in Peterborough in Cambridgeshire. I came to the University of Birmingham to study French at the end of the 1980s, graduating with a first class degree in 1991. Immediately afterwards, I began my doctoral research on women's writing in the Renaissance France, working under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer Birkett. I completed my PhD in 1999, the year that my first child was born.

 

During the same period, I began teaching for the French Department, becoming a full-time member of staff in 1996. Apart from a six-year hiatus during which I focused on raising my three children, I have taught at Birmingham ever since. I was promoted from Teaching Fellow to Lecturer in 2015, to Senior Lecturer in 2018 and to Professor in 2020.

 

I specialise in translator training. I hold the Institute of Linguists' Diploma in Translation (2001) and I am an Associate Member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. In August 2015, I was awarded a Senior Fellowship at the Higher Education Academy.

 

In September 2024, I became Head of the School of Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music.

I teach translation theory and practice at all levels, and specialist modules on Translation Technology, Specialised Translation and Multimodal Translation.

I have wide-ranging interests across the field of Translation Studies. My current PhD students are working in translation competence, translation industry requirements, ego-targeting in tourism translation, measurement of translator style using computational methods, the use of AI in legal translation and the use and translation of evaluative adjectives in tourism translation.

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Find out more - our PhD French Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

As an education-focused professor, research is not the primary focus of my working week. However, I do pursue my research interests from time to time.

 

In 2015, I co-edited, with my colleague Andrew Watts, a book to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. Fortunes of War: The West Midlands at the Time of Waterloo explores some of the little-known connections between our region and Waterloo, and was published by History West Midlands in the summer of 2015. The collection contains an article I wrote on Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, who was exiled to England in the period 1810-1814, and spent four years living in Worcestershire. The article is based in part on genealogical research that I carried out for the owner of the residence, while I was taking time away from my University career to look after my three children.

 

More recently, I have returned to this theme and am currently working on a larger project examining Lucien Bonaparte's relationship with England, and specifically the two periods during which he lived here, 1810-1814 and 1833-1838. The work draws upon Lucien's own memoirs, and other printed and archival sources to study this much neglected aspect of his life.