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Monthly Spotlight, April 2025
22 April 2025
In this edition of our monthly spotlight, we feature Dr Uilleam Blacker and President of the UCL European Society Léna Curtet.
In our Monthly Spotlight, we feature an academic and a student from the UCL community with an interest in Europe. If you are interested in being featured in a future edition, or would like to recommend someone, please contact us here.
Léna Curtet
Léna is in her second year of a Bachelor's degree in European Social and Political Studies and serves as President of the UCL European Society. Raised in Calais, she is particularly interested in the ways both micro- and macro-level fluctuations drive social change.
In her profile, Léna writes:
Growing up in Calais, for me Europe meant the Flemish architecture of the marketplace, the Welsh rarebit served at the pub, Picard dialects shared with Belgium. But since Brexit, for many in Calais, Europe has become made of wires instead of shared values.
Uilleam Blacker
Dr Uilleam Blacker is one of Britain’s leading literary translators from Ukrainian as well as an author and writer. He is Associate Professor of Ukrainian and East European Culture at UCL.
Uilleam writes:
I do wish, however, that Europe could think of itself more broadly, as a space with cultural, political and social unity that stretches beyond just the EU. That’s important for us in the UK, after we sabotaged our own political Europeanness, but it’s also important, in different ways, to those on the eastern fringes