Professor Penelope Gardner-Chloros

Penelope Gardner-Chloros has an MA in English Language and Literature from Oxford, an MA in Linguistics from Birkbeck, University of London, and a Doctorat from the University of Strasbourg. She later moved from studying Linguistics to History of Art and took a Diploma at the Courtauld Institute and an MA at the University of Warwick.

Her early career was as a conference interpreter, working for the EU in Brussels and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. She then moved over to academia with a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship, followed by a post at Birkbeck, which she held for 30 years, being appointed Professor (now Emerita) in 2012. During this time she published 2 monographs, Language Selection and Switching in Strasbourg (OUP) and Code-switching (CUP), several edited or co-edited volumes, and over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books. Her research interests were in Language Contact and Change, Bilingualism, Minority Languages, Code-switching, and Pronouns of Address (tu/vous systems). From 2010 to 2014, she headed an ESRC Franco-British Grant which compared the evolution of young people’s language in the two countries (Multilingual London English and Multilingual Paris French).

She is currently finishing a volume on Bilingualism for MIT Press. She has extended her interest in bilingualism beyond the linguistic field proper, and has written about various bilingual artists, including Vincent van Gogh, Lucien Pissarro and El Greco. As a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson, she began work on a biography of El Greco. A novice biographer, she enjoyed the support and stimulation of the Life-Writing Centre, with which she is still actively involved. An online lecture given for the Centre can be found here:

https://oclw.web.ox.ac.uk/article/el-greco-the-bivalent-artist