The URV has participated in a delegation organized by the Confucius Institute of Barcelona to China and will be developing mobility agreements for students and staff with a number of Russian institutions

The last two months have been busy on the International front for the URV. We have participated in a delegation organized by the Confucius Institute of Barcelona to China, for a week in March, which included visits to the Beijing University of Foreign Languages, and Hanbin, the headquarters of the Confucius Institute organization. The delegation then moved to Guandong province, where we visited the Guandong University of Foreign Languages, and Jinan University. From these institutional visits we are hoping to eventually receive students into the Spanish languages course of our Hispanic Studies Centre, and other degree courses. The possibility of jointly supervised doctorates was also discussed.

At the end of the month, the Rectora and I went to Moscow where the URV was a co-signatory to an agreement cementing an alliance between the URV, the Universities of Valencia, Oviedo, and Carlos III de Madrid, and, on the Russian side, the Russian Presidential Academy for National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), the Russian Foreign Trade Academy, the Moscow State Mining University, which specializes in materials sciences, all located in Moscow. Another partner in this alliance is the University of Tomsk in Siberia.

We will be developing mobility agreements for students and staff with all these institutions, and to begin with, have been offered, for this year, free places on the RANEPA International Summer School, which is held in a holiday resort in Kazan, and the RFTA summer school held in Moscow. You can find out more about these, in addition to summer activities in Hiroshima (Japan), on the International Center website. Russia is a country with which the URV has so far not developed many contacts, so we look forward to developing teaching and research links with all these institutions.