What we do

Our thematic research areas in the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories

Reparative histories: empire, ‘race’ and anticolonialism

This research area in the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories develops radical approaches to the history, cultural memory and representation of European and American racisms, British imperialism and colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the African diaspora, approached through the prisms of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and reparative history.

The area also foregrounds transnational perspectives from the Global South to explore the radical histories and cultural politics of decolonisation and transnational solidarity. Among numerous current projects our research explores the role of memories and histories in relation to political and cultural questions of reparative justice; traces Brighton’s forgotten slave owners and beneficiaries of colonial wealth, and the town’s nineteenth-century antislavery activism; and excavates forgotten global histories of solidarity with anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles and their significance  for radical political imaginaries during the long Sixties.

For further information on The Centre for  Memory, Narrative and Histories' work on race and representation please contact Dr Anita Rupprecht or Dr Cathy Bergin or visit our blog site on the research area of race and representation.  

'Soulevement des Negres à la Jamaïque en 1759'. Detail from an artist's imagined scene published in François, David, Histoire d'Angleterre (Paris, 1800). 

Visual culture, history and memory

The Visual culture, history and memory research area is concerned with global visual culture and its relationship with politics, history, and cultural memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It brings together researchers exploring the latest methodological approaches to the study of photography, film, and the visual arts to exchange knowledge and foster critical understanding of the social role and political relevance of images in everyday life. It addresses marginalised geographies, silenced communities, and forgotten histories in local and global frameworks. 

Some common themes explored include memory cultures and politics; decolonizing the photographic archive; popular images, overlooked traditions, and alternative forms of art in relation to politics and life experience; histories of diaspora communities and identities; memories of conflict, trauma, and resistance; interconnected histories and representations of British transatlantic slavery and Empire; spatial memories of the material environment. 

For further information on The Centre for  Memory, Narrative and Histories' work on race and representation please contact Dr Julia Winckler or Dr Uschi Klein or visit our blog site on the research area of visual culture, history and memory.  

Press photograph of Holland House Library following an air raid in 1940, with a defiant 'keep calm and carry on reading' implication. (London Times October 1940). Photograph by Harrison for Fox Photos Ltd; Hulton Archive.

Medical histories, memories and narratives

The Medical Histories, Memories and Narratives research area brings together current and emerging research across the University of Brighton in the humanities, social and health sciences and Brighton Sussex Medical School.

Our inter/transdisciplinary research offers innovative perspectives in histories of medicine and health, as well as clinical practice and medical ethics. Practice-based elements also include the creative arts and medical heritage where our community partnerships and funded projects are well established and particularly strong.

Our concerns with Empire, colonial medicine and healthcare is allied with broader critical scholarship in the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories on anti and postcolonial studies, reparative histories, decolonising medical knowledge and imperial sites of memory. As part of the broader field of medical humanities, our research is concerned with the experience or phenomenology of illness, disease, treatment and recovery. In projects like ‘Everyday Cultures of Grief’, we use oral history to investigate a range of discursive contexts between patient and practitioner, and our work develops critical perspectives on narrative approaches and other methodologies within healthcare settings.

We work with both international and local partners including:

• The Public Pedagogies Institute at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
• SELMA Centre at the University of Turku, Finland 
• Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE).
• Inroads Productions site-responsive theatre 
• Strike a Light Arts & Heritage CIC
• British Polio Fellowship 
• The Mass-Observation Archive 
• The Keep, Brighton 
• West Sussex Records Office 
• Brighton Sussex University Hospitals (BSUH)The Royal Pavilion, Brighton 

For further information on our research into medical memories history and narratives, please contact the centre at MemoryNarrativeHistories@brighton.ac.uk or visit our blog site on the memories and narratives associated with medical practices and experiences.

Transnational histories and memories

This research area of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories brings together scholars working with transnational themes and methods.

Transnationalism is an analytical concept with radical potential. It transcends national barriers, cutting through the limits of national historiographies and research cultures, opening up new ways through which we can study important social and cultural phenomena. We have two aims: to seek links in our members’ work that will help lead to different forms of collaboration; and to be part of the wider scholar debate on transnational themes, research skills and methods. 

Some common themes explored by our members include: transnational memory cultures and politics; transnational histories of identities, family, kinship and communities; histories of diaspora, refugeedom and migration; witnessing and narrating transnational experiences, and creative practices within transnational communities; transnational histories and memories of contestation, conflict, trauma and resistance; and transnational intellectual history

For further information please contact Eugene Michail or visit our blogsite pages on Transnational histories and memories.

Monument to refugees in Achna, Cyprus. circa 1990. Photography, Dimitri Svetvikas.

The Northern Ireland Troubles: memories, afterlives and transformations of conflict

This research area addresses questions of history, memory, representation and cultural politics concerned with the conflict in and over Northern Ireland and its 'post-conflict' afterlife, from partition to the peace process and developments in twenty-first century Ireland and Britain. It investigates the complexities, contradictions and contestations entailed in efforts towards ‘dealing with the past’ and transforming the legacies of violent political conflict, in the context of the peace process to resolve the conflict in and over Northern Ireland.

The research strand has strong links with scholars and practitioners in higher education and other organisations in the North of Ireland and across Europe. These include:

• Ulster University
• International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) in Derry/ Londonderry
• Dúchas Oral History Archive at the Falls Community Council in West Belfast
• European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS)
• Uses of the Past research centre, Aarhus University, Denmark
• NGO Healing Through Remembering
• Prisons Memory Archive at the Public Record Office Northern Ireland, Belfast
• Belfast-based community theatre company, Kabosh

For further information on our research into the memories, afterlives and transformations of conflict in the Northern Ireland Troubles, contact the centre at MemoryNarrativeHistories@brighton.ac.uk or visit our blog site on the memories afterlives and transformations of conflict in the Northern Ireland Troubles.

British soldiers in Belfast street, 1969. Photograph courtesy of the Dúchas Oral History Archive, Falls Community Council.

Negotiating complex temporalities in post–conflict spaces

This Centre for  Memory, Narrative and Histories research area investigates recent interdisciplinary theoretical debates and empirical studies problematising linear conceptions of time, and explores the more complex temporalities and politics of time at work in diverse locations and spaces marked by political violence, war and conflict.

It brings together university researchers in social and cultural history, cultural studies, social anthropology, cultural geography, museology, film studies and literature to investigate the complex inter–relations between past, present and future within histories and memories of war and conflict that are produced in the time afterwards, by those living in ‘post–war’ or ‘post–conflict’ cultures and societies.

In exploring the interplay between representations of a past that in many ways is not over, but overshadows the present and complicates efforts towards the building of a peaceful future, the project focuses in particular on the sites and cultural landscapes where war and conflict took place, and where its continuing significance is contested in post–conflict geographies.

For further information, contact the centre at MemoryNarrativeHistories@brighton.ac.uk or visit our blog site covering the centre's research on the complex temporalities in post conflict spaces.

The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche, Dresden. Bernardo Belletto, 1765. Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland.

Heritage in the twenty-first century

Our interdisciplinary research interrogates how the past is recreated as heritage in relation to the social, cultural and political preoccupations of the present, and how heritage is understood, used and experienced by individuals, groups and communities, across a range of historical and geographic contexts. 

This focus encompasses the practices of heritage professionals who conserve, curate and manage the material remains of the past.

Heritage creation draws from events, practices and places, objects, landscapes and buildings, memorials, rituals and traditions, people and ideas to create narratives of meaning for contemporary consumption; narratives implicated by notions of inheritance and value woven into the word ‘heritage’.

The research investigates how the idea of heritage has come into being, what authority resides within its framing and what consequences ensue for the people, places and events increasingly drawn into the heritage sector, working with, for example:

• War Heritage Research Initiative, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Canada
• Sussex Traditions
• Uses of the Past research centre, Aarhus University, Denmark

For further information on our research into heritage in the twenty-first century, please contact Dr Cathy Palmer at C.Palmer3@brighton.ac.uk or  visit our blog site on how the past is recreated as heritage in relation to the social, cultural and political preoccupations of the present. 

The Parthenon sculptures, known as 'Lord Elgin's Marbles', brought to The British Museum, London, 1816. Photography, Xavier von Erlach, c.2000.

History and cultural memory of twentieth-century world wars

This research area investigates the social and cultural history of the First and Second World Wars and their aftermaths, and develops new approaches to the representation and politics of transgenerational war memory and commemoration.

Increasingly, research activity brings work on the history and memory of twentieth-century world wars into relation with research into other, historically prior and more recent wars and forms of violent political conflict, and their ‘postwar’, ‘post-conflict’ aftermaths.

Achievements in this research area have developed through collaborative partnerships with museums and community-based organisations and groups as well as external academic individuals and institutions, including:

• Imperial War Museums
• Brighton's Armenian and Turkish diaspora
• The AHRC's ‘Gateways to the First World War’ public engagement centre 

For further information on our research into the history and cultural memory of twentieth-century world wars, contact Dr Eugene Michail or visit our blog site on history and cultural memory of twentieth-century world wars.

Children undertaking wartime evacuation circa 1939.

Community histories in Brighton and Hove and Sussex

The Centre for  Memory, Narrative and Histories works with a wide range of local and community history organisations and projects to aid in their search for funding and to provide academic support, guidance and collaborative participation in the design and conduct of their research activities.

Recent collaboration has taken place with, among others:

• Strike a Light Arts and Heritage Organisation
• Brighton and Sussex University Hospital NHS Trust
• Inroads Productions
• Zap Arts
• Pegleg Productions
• QueenSpark Books
• Sussex Traditions
• Fabrica

For further information on our research into community history in Brighton and Hove and Sussex contact Dr Sam Carroll at MemoryNarrativeHistories@brighton.ac.uk, or visit our centre blog site for information on community histories in Brighton and Hove and Sussex.

Milk delivery, Plumpton, East Sussex, circa 1940.

Our impact and knowledge exchange

Since its founding in 2008, The Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton has developed historical research that challenges social inequalities, oppressions and injustices, interrogates received meanings of the past, and produces alternative accounts that help to generate fresh thinking about possible futures. 

We focus on producing usable understandings that can play a transformative role. Our projects are designed in relation to the social needs and interests of a wide range of social groups, organisations and practitioners, and our working practices promote collaborative knowledge production, social engagement and the public impact of our research.

Our research output from the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories

Details of research publications and other outputs fostered by the centre and achieved by its members, along with funded projects delivered by the centre, can be accessed on the Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories' database of research.

• Visit the Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories' overview page on our research database.

• Visit the record of our research publications

• Visit the record of our funded research projects