Cecilia Gialdini

In October 2025 I will be starting as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast. My project “Can Language Heal Society? Language Rights in Peacebuilding and Decolonisation” will look at the intersections of linguistic justice and transitional justice by investigating institutional and grassroots initiatives featuring languages promoting justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Colombia, and Norway. The goal is to unveil how language rights are being incorporated into peacebuilding and decolonisation processes, highlighting their potential to understand and redress historical injustices.

This amazing success has come after a long (SO long) streak of rejections, months of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, as is the case for many early-career researchers right after the PhD.
I look forward to this new challenge, and I am so thankful to The Leverhulme Trust for seeing value in my project and giving me the opportunity to pursue it.