Dr Vally Lytra

I am a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths collaborating with colleagues on the faith literacies project. I work closely with Arani Ilankuberan on the Tamil Hindu/Saiva faith community in Newham.

As a qualitative researcher, I use ethnographic methods to examine multilingualism in home, community and schools settings. My work draws on contributions from sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, literacy studies and linguistic anthropology to investigate language and social interaction in multiethnic urban contexts, multimodality, language and identities, in particular the intersection of youth, popular culture and new media, language and faith. I am also interested in language ideologies and discourses on multilingualism and the role of English as global language. I have worked with ethnic minority, immigrant and transnational communities in Greece, the UK and Switzerland.

I lecture at the English Department, University of Bern and I am currently editing a book entitled “When Greek Meets Turk: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Relationship since 1923” (Ashgate 2014).