Who we are

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design. Her research concerns government and official engagements with art and design; art, design and cultural diplomacy; the development and professionalisation of design practice; art, design and dress for propaganda and protest; and histories of exhibitions and world's fairs. Until July 2023 she is Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow and Principal Investigator on the project '"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953'.  She co-leads Centre for Design History's research strand on Graphic Design Histories (with Professor Jeremy Aynsley and Mandeep Sidhu).

My research interests have evolved and will continue to do so over the years. My PhD at the University of Sussex was about everyday memory in people living with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and how it changes over time. The aim was to inform the development of strategies that would support memory in people living with AD. I then undertook a Dementia Research Fellowship at Brighton & Sussex Medical School, where I carried out a number of research projects involved with older adults living with dementia. One study was an international, collaborative study of dementia attitudes, beliefs and experiences of people in Pakistan. In other research I focused on the lifestyle risk factors of AD, including loneliness and poor sleep. The latter sparked my fascination of the interplay between sleep and every aspect of waking life (e.g. cognitive ability, mood, health and behaviour), leading to a desire to continue this work in the future.

I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, whose practice often engages with the public realm.

My recent practice and research has explored material poetics, memory, heritage and regeneration. In my PhD, 'Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton', I proposed that a 'poetics of re-generation' could allow a renegotiation of the instrumentalised term regeneration, expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices.

Therefore from a practice perspective, I'm interested in how artistic interventions and critical spatial practices that highlight and reveal poetics of place could contribute to more ethical and effective models of regeneration (including a more ethical engagement with pasts of a place, spectral traces and relation to the new).

I'm currently working on Acts of Transfer, a practice-based research project, funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, in collaboration with Dr Lizzie Lloyd (UWE), into the spaces and subjectivities of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice.

Through my PhD I became involved with the work of the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his poetics of Relation. I'm currently working on research that seeks to understand how we can take Glissant's ideas into spatial and social practice in art and architecture.

I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade - which connect the historical and present - for example salt, which formed the basis of my PhD work. I'm interested in the relevance and significance of everyday practices, rituals and engagement with material culture to how places are made and continue to be remade and maintained.

Some of my recent artistic projects have explored textiles as a medium, and as part of collaborative research project Making Suburban Faith I worked with Professor Claire Dwyer and researcher Nazneen Ahmed at UCL to produce a collaborative textile art project, which has been written up in a number of papers and chapters, as well as an artists book (see outputs).

Other current art practice and research focuses on Yiddish political cultures in the Jewish East End from the 1880s to the 1930s. This research which has been funded by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories was presented in an online exhibition in December 2020 and was the focus of an event in June 2021 with Tim Ingold, Ben Gidley and Rachel Garfield.  

Drawing on a background in literary history and cultural studies, Cathy Bergin's primary research interests are in the politics of 'race' and colonialism in  African-American and Caribbean writing, focussing on cultural formations and Communist politics in the 20th Century. She is particularly interested in the concept of 'rage' as the expression of black historical consciousness and agency. Her recent work has concentrated on transnational solidarity and reparative history in the context of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. 

Cathy has worked at the University of Brighton  since 2005 and organises the long-standing Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics research seminar series.

Sue is interested in the diversity of perspectives on the theory and practice of archives, bridging discourses of archive studies and other humanities disciplines, promoting greater cross fertilisation for mutual enrichment and new insights. Her engagement takes place at the intersection of stewardship, research and creative activities, involving a range of approaches to the notional and physical archive.  In both analogue and digital forms, this work in essence reflects on the place and nature of archives in contemporary culture.  Specialising in visual arts archives, her current particular research interests include archival materiality, and practices of archival selection.

Sue’s art and design history research focuses on the collections with which she works: twentieth century British art and design and their contexts, with a particular focus on the mid-century.  Current research includes work on the archives of émigré designers; she has recently published on the design advocacy of the art historian Kenneth Clark, a founding member of the Council of Industrial Design whose archive is held at the Design Archives.  She has worked closely on the archives of the architect Joseph Emberton and the designer HA Rothholz, and is currently working on that of designer FHK Henrion. 

Tom Bunyard’s primary research interests are focussed on the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, and on Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. In 2011, he completed a PhD on this topic at Goldsmiths, University of London. The thesis traced the genealogy of Debord’s theory, interpreted it through its primary theoretical and philosophical influences, and foregrounded the central importance of time, history and praxis to Debord’s thought. Tom has recently completed a monograph on this topic. Titled Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory, the book reconstructs and evaluates the conceptual framework that underlies Debord’s claims. In doing so, it places particular emphasis on the Hegelian and existential dimensions of Debord’s work, and focusses on his concerns with historical agency.

This study of the Debord’s work has led to an interest in the temporality of modern society, and related notions of social pathology. Tom is currently pursuing this by looking at new readings of Hegel’s philosophy, and at contemporary ‘value-form’ interpretations of Marx’s mature work. More broadly, his interests include: Marx and Marxism; Hegelian philosophy; existentialism; aesthetics and the avant-garde; continental philosophy; cultural and critical theory; philosophy of history.

I am interested in projects informed by an anthropological sensibility centred upon what it is to be human. In particular I am interested in projects that query various forms of sensory embodiment, movement (including mobility and migration), the politics of power as they inform the aforementioned, and the politics of knowledge production about the body, movement, and being.

I am open to collaborative projects (groups, grants, team-based fieldwork)

I am open to mentoring early career researchers (postdoctoral studies)

I am open to supervising postgraduate research students on a variety of topics but especially on the following:

• Sport for Development and Peace
• Embodiment, Being and Becoming through physical activity
• The Anthropology of Sport
• The Politics of Spectacle and Performance
• Latin America and the Global South

Currently, I recently brought four years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across three continents to a close. This project problematizes some of the core tenets of development and sport as practiced in the Sport for Development sector. I am also working on more esoteric questions regarding being and becoming as manifest in the interlocutions of mind, body, and environment through the act of running. Previous work focused politics of transnational migration, the politics of being Cuban embodied in baseball, and the Anthropology of Sport.

There are two main strands to my research activity, though these mostly come together in the work I’ve carried out. My commitment to Inclusive Education characterises most of my reported work, though its sites vary widely from early years settings to the prison estate; similarly, I have attracted support from larger agencies (such as ESRC) to LA, NGO and Charity bodies. Most importantly, however, a unifying focus of all my work without exception has been the exploration of voice in the lives and moral careers of individuals in a variety of social policy contexts. As a way of reporting my work in Inclusive Education, I have developed a distinct research position in Qualitative Research Methodologies, and in particular the use of narratives and fictions in critical Life Story enquiry.

Professor Graham Dawson is the University of Brighton's professor in Historical Cultural Studies, with seminal publications on the cultural memory of war and conflict. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing on cultural studies, history, literature, cultural geography and psychoanalysis. It investigates the inter-relations between memory, narrative, lived experience and identity, with a particular interest in the personal memories and subjectivities produced in oral histories/life stories and the cultural and political ramifications of their relation to public and national representations of the past and the future. 

Dawson's main focus is on the politics of memory and ‘post-conflict’ culture in the Irish peace process, and legacies of the Northern Irish Troubles in Ireland and Britain. His current interests lie in the cultural politics and temporal dynamics of ‘the past’ within conflict transformation, involving questions of memory and silence; subjectivity, identity and emotion; representation and acknowledgement; imaginative geography and historical justice. He is Co-I for a major AHRC-funded oral history project, Conflict, Migration and Memory: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain. His next monograph, Afterlives of the Troubles: Life Stories, Culture and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, will be published by Manchester University Press. He has a particular interest in, and commitment to, grassroots and community-based memorywork and has developed a close relationship with the Dúchas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council in West Belfast, through research that utilises its interview collection, participation in collaborative community history projects, and the design and co-supervision of PhD research on Dúchas's use of oral history as a practice of conflict transformation. 

Professor Dawson is a member of the university's Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, and coordinates its research grouping on 'The Northern Ireland Troubles: memories, afterlives and transformations of conflict', which is a member of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the British Association for Irish Studies, the Oral History Society and the Memory Studies Association. 

Nigel H Foxcroft's interdisciplinary areas of research focus on modern Anglo-American and Russian literature. He is an international authority on the English late modernist writer, Malcolm Lowry, especially on his psychogeographic perception of the interconnectedness of East-West cultures and civilizations.

His monograph, The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry: Souls and Shamans (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019) is an interdisciplinary investigation of his multifaceted insight through an analysis of his works and correspondence. It provides a historical lens spotlighting literature’s role in augmenting awareness of the roots of contemporary issues of universal significance. Its URL is:<https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498516570/The-Kaleidoscopic-Vision-of-Malcolm-Lowry-Souls-and-Shamans>.

Reviews of The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry

"Malcolm Lowry, born in England and longtime resident of Mexico and Canada, is one of the greatest yet also one of the least understood and least appreciated of twentieth-century English writers. Nigel Foxcroft's scrupulous study unravels Lowry's heterogeneous erudition and what he calls his 'kaleidoscopic vision of the world'. Foxcroft provides the biographical, historical, cultural and above all the literary contexts of a magpie writer who drew upon American, Norwegian, German and Russian literatures, European silent cinema, contemporary anthropology and philosophy and mystical and esoteric sources to create the remarkable writing, global in scope, of 'an international modernist visionary'. This rich and illuminating account will help readers appreciate more fully the singularity and the achievement of this extraordinary writer."

— Dr Alistair Davies, University of Sussex

"I have just finished reading The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry and am deeply impressed by Nigel H. Foxcroft’s truly informative and powerful discussion. I am overwhelmed by his wide range of reading and extensive research, from anthropology and ancient religion to European, Russian, and American writings, and even to Indian and Chinese thoughts. I am also attracted by Lowry's religious dimensions, somehow comparable to those of shamans. I am so encouraged to tackle Lowry's works again. I think that this monograph is an important corrective to the Euro-centred understanding of modernism, to be read not only by Lowry specialists but also by everyone interested in modernism in general.Another point that interested me is that In Ballast to the White Sea - the latest work to be published and a key text bridging the early and mature Lowry - seems to occupy the near centre in Foxcroft’s discussion of the Lowrian canon. The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry is quite unique in that respect."

— Dr Kazuo Yokouchi, Professor of English Literature and Vice-Dean of the School of Humanities, Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan

“The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry is an engaging and enjoyable book that provides a wealth of insights into this important writer. […] this is […] a work that uncovers so much and in a generous manner that will open up the works for generations of readers.”

— Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, in Notes and Queries, 2021-02-23, Oxford Journals, ISSN: 0029-3970

"The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry is an excellent and important publication. While I have long been aware of the spiritual and cultural influences in Lowry’s writings, Nigel H. Foxcroft has thoroughly examined those influences and their impacts. Therefore, he has highlighted and connected many new thoughts and ‘visions’ for all those interested in Lowry. Moreover, he does so in a style that is clear and concise. He has made me once again be amazed at Lowry’s ‘kaleidoscopic’ interests and knowledge, and his ability to weave those interests into such unique and riveting novels and short stories. Foxcroft has made me want to re-read all of Lowry’s works again as I now have some fresh insights! I am also amazed at the research that he has conducted, and the rigorous ways in which he has drawn that research together – a major undertaking."

— Sheryl Salloum, an independent scholar, Vancouver

"I have finished The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry. I really enjoyed it!  The writing is clear and direct, which is a big plus. What I really enjoyed is that Nigel H. Foxcroft has tried to take ALL Lowry’s works, including the letters, and put them into a common, coherent framework. Most commentators just concentrate on ‘Volcano’ or one of the other novels. Foxcroft’s work gives a better idea than any of the others of the depth of Lowry’s reading and the inter-connectedness of his thoughts. I particularly enjoyed Foxcroft’s comments on Donnelly, Charles Fort, J. W. Dunne, and Ouspensky. Now I’m going to have to re-read the Lowry works again." 

— Dr Glenn Woodsworth, an independent scholar, Vancouver

Nigel's research aspires to contribute to developing a framework for probing the international dimensions of modernism. It aims to lay a foundation for analyzing the influence of cultures and civilizations on modernist authors and avant-garde artists.

He brings a wide-range of practices to his literary research and scholarship, including the influence of cultural, historical, and psychogeographic forces. His wider interests include modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and contemporary fiction; the Golden Age of Russian literature and culture (and beyond); and the history of Anglo-Hungarian cultural contacts. As well as English, he has considerable experience in teaching Hungarian and Russian.

E-mail: N.H.Foxcroft@brighton.ac.uk

Featured Works and Projects

Malcolm Lowry: Shamanism and Psychogeography

An Interdisciplinary Study of the Shamanic, Psychogeographic, and Cross-Cultural Consciousness of Malcolm Lowry

Russian Literature

Nigel Foxcroft’s research into Russian literature makes use of literary interests in psychoanalysis and innovative close-reading methods.

Blog: Sabbatical Field Trip to Mexico for the Day of the Dead, 2010

Trip to incorporate an analysis of Aztec and Zapotec world-views through a detailed study of the origins of the Mexican Day of the Dead Festival.

Research Activities and Esteem

Refereeing and Editorships

• Reviewer for Edinburgh University Press and the University of Ottawa Press since 2014.
• Academic referee for the Leverhulme Trust for a grant application for an international research project in 2007-08.
• Academic consultant for Russian, Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC), Cambridge in 1999-2001.
• Member of the editorial board of Rusistika, 2008 onwards.

Keynote Speeches 

2020 ‘The Aztec and Zapotec Roots of the Mexican Day of the Dead in The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry’ (keynote), XV Coloquio Internacional Malcolm Lowry (online), Fundación Malcolm Lowry, Mexico, 31st Oct -2nd Nov:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXQSxauMUP0 (2nd Nov).

2019 ‘Malcolm Lowry and the Interconnectedness of East-West Cultures and Civilizations’ (keynote lecture), XIV Malcolm Lowry International Colloquium 2019, Biblioteca Municipal Camões, Lisbon, Portugal, 30th October.

2012 ‘Malcolm Lowry and the Mexican Day of the Dead: Anthropological, Cosmic, and Shamanic Perspectives’ (keynote speech), The Mexican Day of the Dead: Interdisciplinary Perspectives: A One-Day Symposium, Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, University of Kent, 2nd November.

2010 ‘Shamanic Influences on Malcolm Lowry: East-West Connections’, keynote lecture, 4th International Malcolm Lowry Colloquium: A Tribute to Raúl Ortiz y Ortiz, Malcolm Lowry Foundation/ Museo de la Casona Spencer, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 2nd November (http://malcolmlowry.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=foxcroft).

Conference Sessions Chaired

2014 'Humanities: Literature & Literary Studies', NACAH2014 IAFOR Conference, Marriott - Downtown, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 18th-21st Sept.

2013 ‘Ethnicity, Difference, Identity’, ECAH2013 IAFOR Conference, Thistle, Brighton, 18th-21st July.

Awards

2014 Santander staff travel grant (£1700) for research visit to Mexico (Oct-Nov).

Interviews

2014 Interview in Jorge Sifuentes Cañas, ‘Foxcroft presenta ante público morelense sus investigaciones’, La Jornada Morelos, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 7th Nov 2014, 14 (http://malcolmlowry.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=foxcroft). 

Recent Conference Papers:

2022 'Marxist Influences on Earle Birney and Malcolm Lowry,' HSS Research Away Day, Ironworks Studios, Brighton, 28th Apr

2021 'Malcolm Lowry and the Mexican Day of the Dead,' Day of the Dead 2021, Cellar Magnifique, Woking, 30th Oct

2020 ‘The Aztec and Zapotec Roots of the Mexican Day of the Dead in The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry’ (keynote), XV Coloquio Internacional Malcolm Lowry (online), Fundación Malcolm Lowry, Mexico, 31st Oct -2nd Nov:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXQSxauMUP0 (2nd Nov).

2020 'Mexican Perspectives in The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry', Day of the Dead Digital Festival: Literature section, Mexican Embassy, London, 26th Oct – 5th Nov, https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=sPIGEhdwGgc&fbclid=IwAR1wPgFCTDNH7TM6WD3uVhxQ_3x-CaXbIKy-xMqP1bwYWh5BqkTaXgBQf6E&app=desktop (29th Oct).

2019   ‘Malcolm Lowry and the Interconnectedness of East-West Cultures and Civilizations’ (keynote lecture), XIV Malcolm Lowry International Colloquium 2019, Biblioteca Municipal Camões, Lisbon, Portugal, 30th October.

2017 ‘Malcolm Lowry: The Russian Dimension’, ‘Under the Volcano’, 70 Years On International Conference, Liverpool John Moores University and Bluecoat, Liverpool, 28th-29th July.

2016 ‘Surrealist Influences: The Inter-Connectedness of Malcolm Lowry’s Modernism’, 2nd Sussex Modernism Lecture Series, Centre for Modernist Studies @ University of Sussex & Towner, Eastbourne, 25th May.

2015 ‘Visions of History: Chance and Certainty in A. S. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Boris Godunov’, ICCEES IX World Congress 2015, Kanda University of International Studies, Makuhari, Japan,3rd-8th Aug.

2014 ‘The Influence of Mexican and Russian Civilizations on Malcolm Lowry’s Shamanic Perceptions’, Updates on ‘Under the Volcano’ Round Table, International Malcolm Lowry Colloquium 2014, Malcolm Lowry Foundation/ Museo de la Casona Spencer, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 30th Oct-2nd Nov.

2014 ‘Malcolm Lowry: The Russian Connection’, NACAH2014 (The IAFOR N. American Conference on Arts and Humanities), Marriott – Downtown, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 18th-21st Sept, & chair of lit session.

2014 ‘Dynamic Conflict in Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and The Bronze Horseman’, New UK Research in C19 Russian Literature Symposium, Darwin College, Cambridge, 1st Feb.

2013 ‘The Power of Non-Verbal Communication in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe’, ECAH2013 IAFOR Conference, Thistle, Brighton, 18th-21st July & chair of session on ‘Ethnicity, Difference, Identity’.

2013 ‘Psychogeographic Impact on Malcolm Lowry's Consciousness: From the Zapotec and Aztec Civilizations to Taoism’, LibrAsia2013 IAFOR Conference, Ramada, Osaka, Japan, 4th-7th Apr.

2012 ‘Malcolm Lowry and the Mexican Day of the Dead: Anthropological, Cosmic, and Shamanic Perspectives’ (keynote speech), The Mexican Day of the Dead: Interdisciplinary Perspectives: A One-Day Symposium, Canterbury Cathedral Lodge, University of Kent, 2nd Nov.

2012 ‘Aztecs and Zapotecs: The Day of the Dead and the Cosmic Phantoms of Malcolm Lowry’, Malcolm Lowry, Encore International Conference, Centre Culturel Int de Cerisy-la-Salle, France, 27th Jun–4th Jul.

2010 ‘Shamanic Influences on Malcolm Lowry: East-West Connections’, keynote lecture, 4th International Malcolm Lowry Colloquium: A Tribute to Raúl Ortiz y Ortiz, Malcolm Lowry Foundation/ Museo de la Casona Spencer, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 2nd Nov (<http://malcolmlowry.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=foxcroft>).

2010 ‘Malcolm Lowry and the Day of the Dead – An Escape to Aztec Civilization?, Faculty of Arts Research Festival, June.

2010 ‘The Shamanic Psyche of Malcolm Lowry: An Intercontinental Odyssey’, English Lit Research Seminar Series, University of Brighton, Mar.

2009 ‘Souls and Shamans: The Cosmopolitan Psychology of Malcolm Lowry’, 2009 Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference, University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, July.

2007 ‘A Shamanic Visionary: The Intercontinental Inspiration of Malcolm Lowry’s Magic’, Malcolm Lowry: Fifty Years On International Symposium, Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, June.

My research interests cover the geographies of sport and leisure. My doctoral research explored British cultures of adventure and the heroic masculinities associated with mountaineering. My more recent work is interested in the use, governance and regulation of public space for leisure and recreation, addressing issues such as access, property rights, citizenship and self-governance. Theoretically, my work cuts across human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, social history, sport studies and leisure theory. I employ a variety of theoretical tools to understand the spatial aspects of sport and leisure cultures - the spatial theories of Mikhail Bakhtin; Victor Turner's writings on liminality; gift theory; theories of affect; and, post-subcultural theories - and have contributed to the application of these approaches to empirical research in sport and leisure studies.

My current research interests include the social regulation of leisure in public space; countercultural sport; connecting people and communities through food and farming; and, the cultural heritage of waterscapes.

Methodologically, I specialise in qualitative and collaborative empirical methods and with Professor Neil Ravenscroft (University of Brighton) and Dr Niamh Moore (Edinburgh University) have developed the concept of ‘collaborative story spirals’ to describe a method of contextualised and situated biographical and narrative research; an approach that has been utilised in European heritage projects.

My research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, European Union (Interreg Programme), and Political Studies Association.

Donna's research interests are in the fields of health and justice  nursing - both in the UK and internationally. A particular aspect includes the history of prison nursing within the wider context of nursing history. Donna's research interests also encompass community health and community nursing with an emphasis on reducing/addressing health inequalities within marginalised and vulnerable groups.

For her PhD research Donna is exploring prison nursing identity from a historical perspective using oral history as jer methodology. In 1984, Nurses were introduced into Her Majesty's Prison Service in England and Wales; there has been no research into how nurses adapted to this environment. The aim of Donna's research is to illuminate the experiences of prison nurses between 1984 and the present day.  

An understanding of the historical context from which prison nursing emerged is necessary to appreciate the current situation within prison nursing and the impact of early prison nurses’ experiences on the shaping of prison nursing professional identity. Using an oral history approach allows ‘lesser heard’ voices space to tell their story from their perspective. 

This work is important because prison nurses’ work in the United Kingdom remains unseen and suffers from poor recruitment and retention. Custody occurs to offenders as an outcome of legal justice; care, and the provision of healthcare, occurs as the outcome of social justice. The tension for prison nursing, therefore, lies in the requirement to provide socially just care within a legally just system. The ‘hiddenness’ of the multiple challenges that exist must be articulated and made ‘visible’ if the future of a professional prison healthcare service is to be positive and forward-thinking. 

The title of her thesis is: The evolution of prison nursing in England and Wales and the impact of early prison nurses’ experience on the shaping of professional identity. 

Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson's research is in the field of early modern English literature and its afterlives, especially Shakespeare in performance and cultural contexts, performance and gender, literary commemoration, heritage  and memory, and early modern women’s writing. She is widely published on Shakespeare in cultural memory; Shakespeare and the First World War; Shakespeare and adaptation, appropriations of Shakespeare and counter-cultural expression; early modern mothers’ legacies and the idea of posthumous writing. Her most recent major project uncovered the full history of the SHakespeare Hut, a First World War building for New Zealand ANZACS on leave in London that contained a purpose-built theatre and was created to mark Shakespeare's tercentary in 1916. She is currently holder of an AHRC RDE Fellowship, as PI for a major research project, in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, focusing on Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna and her home, Hall's Croft, and the mediation of early modern women in heritage presentation and cultural memory.

Dr Andrew Hammond is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Brighton. In both research and teaching, he has specialised in Cold War literature, post-1945 British fiction, postcolonial literature and literary representations of Europe. He is the author of over thirty academic articles and nine book-length studies, including The Novel and Europe: Imagining the Continent in Post-1945 Fiction (edited, 2016), British Fiction and the Cold War (2013), Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (edited, 2012) and British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts (2010).

Dr Beatrice Hitchman's research sits at the intersection of critical and creative writing. Her creative outputs to date focus on gender, queer writing and historical fiction, and her critical work focuses on concepts of 'voice', endings and writing the remote past. 

Her first novel, Petite Mort (Serpent's Tail, 2013) was nominated for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Prize, the Polari Prize, the HWA Debut Novel Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and serialised as a ten-part Radio 4 drama. Her second novel, All of You Every Single One, considers ideas of queer family (Serpent's Tail, 2021) will be published in the USA in 2022.

Christian's specialist focus of research to date has concerned the life and work of the black radical Trinidadian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James (1901-1989) who made a profound contribution as a historian to revolutionising scholarly understanding on Atlantic slavery and abolition, and as an activist to the making and shaping of modern multi-cultural, ‘post-colonial’ Britain.   He has broader research interests in Caribbean history including the Haitian Revolution, the black experience of the British Empire, the black presence of imperial Britain, and the impact of the Russian Revolution on the African diaspora.

Craig Jordan-Baker is interested in the literary representation of landscape, place and nature and is currently co-editing (with Dr Philippa Holloway) Writing Landscape and Setting in the Anthropocene - Britain and Beyond (Palgrave). He writes about these subjects in both his academic and literary work. His first novel, The Nacullians (Epoque press) was published in 2020 and has been described by the Irish Times as 'a multi-layered treatise on memory and the stories we tell ourselves'. His second book, If the River is Hidden (Epoque press) is a collaborative hybrid-text written with poet and academic Dr Cherry Smyth and concerns their walk along Northern Ireland’s longest river, the Bann.

I am a Reader in Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Humanities and Social Science and Co-Director of the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics (Director 2019-21). I am an anthropologist and interdisciplinary researcher working on areas of migration, violence, and migrant mental health in conflict and post-conflict societies in Asia: specifically, urban violence among Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking migrant communities in the megacity of Karachi, and transnational refugee migration from Afghanistan. My distinctive area lies in developing interdisciplinary theory that addresses challenges related to migration and mobility, contemporary formations of colonial, structural and political violence, and psychosocial impacts. I have published four books.‘Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan’ (2010, 2012, Routledge) analysed the trajectories of young men to extreme militancy and elite groups of mercenaries in Karachi during the conflicts of the 1990s. Second, ‘Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi’ (2017 ed., Oxford University Press; Hurst & Co.) shifted the focus from a purely academic realm towards the creation of publics and counter-publics engaged in cultural and political commentary, and collaborations for change. My first two books analysed key severe impacts of historical and contemporary violence on communities.

My monograph ‘Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England’, the result of a second major long-term fieldwork, was published with the University of Minnesota Press (2020). Taking an empirical and imaginary field spanning Afghanistan, Pakistan, and England, it developed anthropological takes on mobility and immobility in relation to the transnational kinship obligations and everyday lives of Pashtun migrants. It showed how the burdens of four decades of war and exile fall unforgivingly on Afghan families and their remitting sons—whose enduring struggles, after many years, still enrich an inner archive of dreams, fears, rememberings, and anxieties. In a more refined focus on migration and mental health, my book ‘Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights’ (University of Toronto Press), synthesised connections between anthropology and the “psych” disciplines— leading to ANRS funded research into irregular Pakistani migration, mobilities, infectious disease (hepatitis, HIV), and mental health in a Paris hospital, and an International Fellowship at the Institut Convergences Migrations in Paris (2020-23). I have also held visiting Scholarships at the National University of Singapore (2017) and Harvard Medical School (2020). I am currently working on a project about older people’s mental health and memories of state repression during COVID in three postcolonial societies on the South China Sea. Alongside, when I have time I am writing a short monograph entitled "The Breath of Empire", in which I am thinking about transgenerational trauma in female kinship relations in the context of colonial Chinese immigration to Britain.

I serve on the University Board of Governors, and I am a Trustee and Council member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. I am also a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a Chartered psychologist (British Psychological Society).

Dr Uschi Klein's current research focuses on photography as a form of cultural resistance in communist Romania (1947-1989). Her research is contextualised within the broader understanding of decolonising the Western photography canon to broaden the knowledge by including marginalised and under-represented perspectives. Uschi's recent publications include an open-access article in the journal Miejsce, a chapter in the volume The Camera as Actor (Routledge 2020) and articles in academic journals, such as Visual Studies (2021) and Visual Communication (2020).

Within the broad context of space, place and culture I am fascinated by the embodied and performative dynamics of human experience and behaviour.  Underpinned by a longstanding interest and intellectual engagement with the ‘architecture’ of space, my focus encompasses the material, virtual and simulated spaces associated with everyday life. For example, the sea and the coast, cruise ships, popular film, photography, art, tourism and leisure.  I am interested in how people engage with, imagine and adapt to such landscapes and spaces.  

My continuing interest in cruise ships as bounded and transient spaces for work and leisure, framed by maritime heritage (film, dress, rituals of the sea, architecture), dates back to my past experience of living and working at sea. The intellectual and practical experience of cruise ships directly influenced my PhD research exploring the constructed discourses of cruise travel through an analysis of popular film (Ship of Fools, Carry on Cruising, Titanic).   In so doing it acknowledged the multisensory nature of film and how the liminal realm of film space is experienced in and through the imagination, memory and emotion.

My interests in maritime heritage and histories of the sea / coastal cultures also encompasses how the visual and material world create new narratives of meaning that help to shape individual and collective identities alongside particular experiences and encounters with the ocean and liminal environments where land and water meet. I continue to be interested in the power of discourse generally, and specifically the critical discourse highlighting the consequential socio-cultural impacts of cruise ships and their associated activities on coastal regions and destinations.

Core areas of activity, including the areas for PhD supervision are:

The visual and visuality

Embodiment and the senses

Architecture and materiality

The coast / sea / seascapes

Heritage / Maritime heritage

Cruise ships and cruise liners

Dr Deborah Madden is a principal lecturer, based in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research background is in intellectual and cultural history. Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy, she has published academic monographs, chapters and articles on the relationship between dissenting religion, medicine, education, politics and culture in the eighteenth century. In addition to this, she has written extensively on Protestant prophetic narratives between 1780 and 1950, showing the ways in which radical millenarian groups have reinterpreted the bible's narrative structure, archetypes and language to envision and literally rebuild 'sacred spaces', 'moral geographies' and 'elect' communities across Britain's Empire and extra-imperial sites. 

Her forthcoming book, Victorian Lives Between Empires: Colonial Cultures of Ambivalence and Harm, is due to be published in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series in 2024/5. This examines a range of colonial archival sources and different genres of Victorian life-writings, evidencing them as being especially powerful sites of memory. It offers a reflexive discussion, grounded in feminist historiographies, on the methodological shift in the use of personal, life-writing sources to engage in broader contemporary cultural politics of the ‘colonial present’ within British cultural memory, primarily in the debates focused on the ‘archival turn’ and ‘decolonising’ the imperial archive. The book also provides a broader historiographical and critical reflection on issues surrounding the so-called 'affective turn' and various methodological uses of personal sources, life writings, autobiographies and biographies as historical evidence.

Other research projects:

Phase 1: Exploring Everyday Cultures of Grief and Anticipatory Grief is a collaborative piece of practitioner-led research in partnership with the Brighton-based theatre company, Inroads Productions. The project draws on a Heritage Lottery funded project that uses medical archival sources about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, as well as oral history interviews with descendants of families affected by that pandemic. Interviews with NHS key workers explore contemporary resonances and different emotional responses to the Covid-19 crisis. Capturing diverse histories, experiences, stories and reflections on the Spanish Flu, the collaboration was able to facilitate an agile and timely response to current pandemic illness and its unequal impacts. Using medical histories and histories of emotion, the project evidenced how traces of the past, invested with feeling, could be reinterpreted to gain fresh perspectives on archival sources that might speak to a shared collective experience, both in 1918 and now. The project used several interdisciplinary methods to gain insights into the processes of inter-generational memory, as well as different forms of history-making – for example, one of the oral history interviews was used by Inroads Productions as a learning tool for creative writing and the basis of a script, which was performed and screened as part of an online theatre production called Breaking the Silence hosted by Damn Cheek in Brighton in November 2020.

Phase 2: Everyday Cultures of Grief and Anticipatory Grief. Working with clinicians and practitioners within palliative care, this project has expanded to include a more capacious analysis of historical, cultural, narrative and ecologies of grief. Madden has written several articles and conference papers on cultures of grief, has been invited to keynote lectures and to lead workshops and panel discussions in this area.

Dr Victoria Margree is a specialist in literary fiction and feminist theory.

Her monograph British Women's Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness (Palgrave, 2019) explores how the ghost story functioned as a public forum for negotiating women's changing experiences across the period of first wave feminism. It looks at stories by Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edith Nesbit, Alice Perrin, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt.

She has also published a book on the second wave feminist theorist, Shulamith Firestone (Zero Books, 2018); and co-edited an essay collection on fin de siècle popular fiction author, Richard Marsh (MUP, 2018). She is co-founder of the Short Story Network, a network for researchers of the short story of the long 19th century.

Her current projects include work on neo-Victorianism and on reproductive politics.

My core research interest is the history of the novel, the difficult practices involved in conceptualising and analysing such a multifaceted and global narrative form. Within this large problematic, I research specific genres and movements in the novel (dystopia; science fiction; modernism and contemporaneity). I have a related interested in the intersection of literary and social history in terms of how the novel addresses/readdresses its public, and how the latter erases class forms of identity. 

To work historically but with a sensitivity to formal differences and patterns, i use critical theory, in particular the work of Theodor Adorno and contemporary practitioners of marxism - Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti and Sianne Ngai. 

I work on contemporary European histories of conflict, refugeedom, political radicalism, cross-cultural contacts, and memory. I focus on Balkan and Greek history from the start of the 20th century to today.

At the University of Brighton I am co-leader for the BA degree in Critical History, while I also teach for the Globalisation: History, Politics, Culture BA, the War and Conflict BA, and for the MA in War: History and Politics. I supervise PhD researchers on a range of topics, mainly through our TECHNE scholarship programme.

My research background, outputs, and interests are deeply interdisciplinary and they encompass a wide range of academic areas that includes Media Studies, Film and Television Studies and English literature. Perhaps most indicative of this focus is my doctorate thesis and first monograph, whose exploration of the cultural significance of apocalyptic fictions of the last two centuries' ends draws upon primary sources from scientific disciplines (biology, physics) as well as literary, philosophical and sociological texts. The monograph, Find-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s-1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire won the 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book of the Year Award by the University of California Riverside

More broadly, I have researched and published on late Victorian literature, media and culture, and this area of interest is largely informed by my belief in the importance of a historical and historicst approach to the study of media, literary and cultural forms. For this reason, I have an active interest in currently trending theories and methodologies, such as Media Archaeology and Archive Studies. Further areas related to this historical period, on which I have researched, published and taught, include late Victorian popular fictions (the 'scientific romance' - most prominently represented by the early work of H.G. Wells - but also the Gothic, crime and imperialist adventure fiction). I am currently updating my expertise and interests in this period with a further focus on the development of early moving-image technologies of the time that have led to what Linda Williams describes as 'the frenzy of the visible': zoopraxiscope, kinetoscope, etc.)

My research has also focused on the ways in which popular fictions from literature, film and television reproduce or challenge dominant ideologies of imperialism, colonialism and globalisation and I have a currently active interest in the function of early cinema as a medium of propaganda during the period of 'high noon imperialism' of the turn of the twentieth century. The relations of popular fictions to ideologies of Empire has informed my outputs and is an ongoing interest, as I have publshed work on science fiction, Gothic and imperialism/globalisation.

I have also reseached, published and presented on the relations between screen media, trauma theory and memory studies - more specfiically: debates on 'media effects' and violence in the media; the politics of commemoration (what societies and cultures choose to remember and what they choose to forget); potential therapeutic uses of the media; representations of historical trauma onscreen.

I am currently working on two research projects, following from the background outlined above:

• the historical, structural and conceptual relations between media and trauma (provisional title: 'Remediating Trauma: Histories, Theories, Politics').
• historical and contemporary discourses of utopia / dystopia in relation to theories of biopolitics and biopower, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Nikolas Rose, among others.

Darren Newbury’s principal research interests lie in the relationship between photography, history, politics and cultural memory, with a particular concentration on Africa, and South Africa specifically. Significant publications include: Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009), a major monograph on photography during the apartheid period and its place in post-apartheid memorialisation; People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited (2013), a photobook based on the recently rediscovered collection of photographer Bryan Heseltine; and The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015), co-edited with Christopher Morton, a volume exploring new methodological approaches to researching and curating the photographic archive, in addition to its specifically African concerns. He has also recently co-edited a Special Issue of Visual Studies on ‘Photography and African Futures’ (2018) with Richard Vokes, which through a series of case studies examines how and why, from early colonial times onwards, states, institutions, political parties, civil society organizations and individual citizens used photography as a means for representing various kinds of imagined futures. In addition to academic publications, he has curated exhibitions at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (2011-12) and District Six Museum, Cape Town (2013-14), based on his photographic research.

He has also researched and published on the history of British documentary photography, photographic education and community photography practices. He has a long-standing interest in visual research methods and was editor of the international journal Visual Studies from 2003 to 2015.

He has recently edited a volume on Women and Photography in Africa, with Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas; and is working on a major study of the role of photography in US public diplomacy in Africa during the period of the Cold War and African decolonisation.

In 2020, he received the Royal Anthropological Institute Photography Committee Award for his distinguished contribution to the study of photography and anthropology.

Dr Ceren Özpınar is a historian specialising in art, visual culture, historiography and exhibitions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research focuses on the relationship between gender, identity and art since 1960 with a special focus on Turkey and the Middle East. Ceren's research interests lie in three key areas: Revisiting art histories; investigating transnational feminist alliances in the wider Middle Eastern geography; and an examination of curatorial strategies and discourses of large-scale exhibitions, such as retrospectives and biennials, in the Global South.

Ceren's research has been supported by the British Academy, College Art Association (CAA), the Getty Foundation, Association for Art History (AAH), and the Turkish Research Council (TUBITAK). In 2020, Ceren was awarded a Rising Star, which is one of the University of Brighton's research awards, for her project "Where Matter Meets Memory: Alternative Political Futures in Kurdish Art Today.” Ceren's project investigates creative works produced within the diasporic Kurdish communities.

Publications

Ceren's latest book, a co-edited volume titled Under The Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from The Middle East and North Africa Today, is published by Oxford University Press and The British Academy in 2020 (Read the reviews in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text and Woman's Art Journal). Her first monograph The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010), which stemmed from her doctoral thesis, was published in 2016 by Tarih Vakfi Press. She is currently completing her second monograph, which is also forthcoming with Oxford University Press and The British Academy. This book investigates the relationship between art history and women artists in Turkey, and is building on her Newton research project entitled "Re-visiting Feminist Temporalities in Art and Art History in Turkey from the 1970s onwards" (2015-17).

Ceren's latest articles appeared in the Art Journal, Art in Translation, Art & the Public Sphere, and Third Text. She wrote several essays for edited volumes and special issues on invitation, including Image & Text (ed. Schmahmann), A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (eds. Jones & Davidson), and Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985 (eds. Kennedy, Szymanek & Mallory).

Annebella Pollen is Professor of Visual and Material Culture. Her research areas include mass photography and the popular image, and histories of art, craft, design and dress, especially marginal, alternative and non-canonical forms.

My research interests are focused on XR, screen-based or mobile, storytelling designed to tell stories about the imagined, forgotten, or unremembered others.  The focus of this work is centred on the spatial memory of the city’s built environment as an intersectional backdrop to examine its contemporary and/or archival data.  

I have a transdisciplinary practice which investigates and combines areas of British colonial history, archival data, computer science, digital geographies, and digital humanities as it related to the spatial memory of the built environment.

Methodologies I use in my practice intersect across practical and theoretical frames such as computer vision, human to computer interaction, human to human looking and by extension machines that see.

My practices uses highly experimental media which consisting of the following combinations;

• Photography

• Moving Image

• Creative coding

• Augmented reality

• Virtual reality 

• Data

• Conversational chatbots

Through either screen-based, mobile or physical computing.

Committed to interdisciplinary study, Anita Rupprecht’s primary research focuses on interconnected histories and representations of British transatlantic slavery, the slave trade, abolitionism, and Empire during the Age of Revolution. She is also interested in postcolonial literatures, theory and the politics of contemporary cultural memory.

Rebecca Searle is a historian whose work focuses on the ways in which the study of the past can be used to make critical interventions in the politics of the present. She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis. She is currently contributing towards the Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project, which aims to tackle issues in healthcare for people facing homelessness. Her research interests include the history of the housing crisis; the global history of contemporary capitalism; the history of twentieth century Britain; and war and conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is the Course Leader for BA Politics and Social Change. 

I have carried out funded research into aspects of teaching and learning in midwifery, but my primary focus is on histories of maternity care.  I have published extensively on the history of midwifery and maternity in the twentieth century, including The social history of maternity care published by Routledge in 2012.  I have published on aspects of midwifery identity and professionalism from the late nineteenth century, and have made use of oral history to explore the working lives of both district and hospital midwives in the post-war period. My current work is on the development of policy and practice in maternity between 1960-2000, particularly narratives of risk and normality; the development and impact of technology; and development of media in reflecting and ‘selling’ narratives of pregnancy and birth.

I am Co-I on an AHRC funded project exploring histories of risk in childbirth with colleagues from a range of universities (Leeds, Warwick, Cambridge, OU) and disciplines (history, midwifery, classics, philosophy, sociology).  This work has so far resulted in a series of workshops; a panel presentation at the conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine; and a travelling exhibition in conjunction with the Thackray Museum in Leeds; and a website https://birthriskhistory.com/ including a ‘birth stories’ segment.  An edited book collection is under development, together with a play commissioned for the project (which will be the subject of a follow-on funding bid to the AHRC).

I am working with the Science Museum in London to develop a midwifery exhibition, and a collaborative doctoral award proposal – likely to be based on the foetus as patient.

I am also working with a colleague from Heidelberg on histories of maternity magazines focussing on the presentation of the ‘invention’ of the foetus in the post-war period.  This builds on my work on narratives of birth and risk seen in the publication ‘Mother and Baby’ magazine. 

Linked to this I am Co-I on a developing bid to EHRC with colleagues from Leicester and Kings which seeks to explore women’s practices around digital media in the child-bearing year.  This project has a strong embedded historical approach, which will contextualise and illuminate current issues and beliefs. www.le.ac.uk/digi-repro

Finally I am in the early stages of work on technologies in birth; in particular ultrasound scans.  I am interested in why a technology designed for ‘risky’ pregnancies became an embedded and accepted part of the experience of pregnancy for almost all women from the late 1980s.  I am particularly interested in not just the take up of this technology, but also how it was used, developed and resisted by different consumer and professional constituents. 

Eliza Tan is an art historian specialising in contemporary art in the context of globalisation, with a particular focus on practices which grapple with a set of concerns regarding archival silences and representation; legacies of war and occupation; heritage and marginalised histories; diasporic memory and contemporary forms of colonial erasure. She holds an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and AHRC funded PhD from Kingston University for her doctoral thesis, which explores the intersection of postwar memory, feminism and art activism in Japan in the 1990s through the artist Yoshiko Shimada’s archive and East Asian women artists' network.

In addition to the independent curatorial projects she has organised, she has worked in various capacities with institutions including the Stanley Picker Gallery, Solomon R. Guggenheim New York, Art Forum Berlin, Singapore Art Museum and National Arts Council Singapore. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Oxford Art Journal, n.paradoxa international feminist art journal, ArtAsiaPacific and documenta 12 magazines. 

I have always been interested in the way a society punishes its criminals, and there is no greater penalty than the penalty of death. While many countries still execute offenders, in the westernised world the USA stands alone. More specifically though it is the Southern states which continue to give death sentences, with Texas being responsible for around one third of all executions. As such, my own research has focused on the ‘Lone Star State’, exploring the myths and memories which underpin the Texan self-identity. In addition, I am also interested in the use of qualitative and interpretative methodologies with a focus on narrative analysis, and have recently published on the use of museums as storied spaces of narrativity.

Dr Aakanksha J. Virkar specialises in modern literature and culture between 1870-1945 and particularly the relations between literature, philosophy, music and visual culture in this period.

Her more recent research on T. S. Eliot consider Eliot's work in interdiscplinary contexts. Her work brings to light the important relation of Schopenhauer's aesthetics and metaphysics to Eliot's poetry and suggests the influence of Schopenhauer on Eliot's formulation of the 'objective correlative', a cornerstone of twentieth-century literary criticism.

A particular research focus is Beethoven's influence on Eliot as well as other modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf. Suggesting that Eliot's understanding of Beethoven is framed by the musical aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, her published work offers new readings of canonical literary texts.

Recent conference presentations include a talk on Eliot and Nietzsche as part of the centenary panel 'The Waste Land at 100' at the Modern Language Association annual conference, Washington DC January 2022.

In 2020, for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, she was an invited guest on BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week' as part of the 'Beethoven Unleashed' series. Her contribution is available here  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/37916tSXw7s3CRcj9FZjpyq/beethoven-unleashed-the-box-set  (Theme 10 'Spirit of the Age' and Theme 13 'Highlights')

Her earlier work on the Victorian poet G. M. Hopkins has also gained recognition, emphasising Hopkins' previously unacknowledged indebtedness to seventeenth-century visual culture. Her article on Hopkins and emblematics was ranked amongst the 50 Most Read articles published by ‘Literature and Theology’ (OUP) between 2007-2012. Her monograph The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2018) is published in the Routledge Nineteenth Century Series.

Reviews of The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins

“this is a lovely and lovingly realized book that participates in the ongoing so-called turn to religion in Victorian studies in its reassessment of Victorian mysticism and Hopkins’s place in the mystical tradition. Each of its chapters is quickpaced and tightly written, rapidly moving the reader across centuries’ worth of textual, religious, and visual materials… a testament to [Virkar] Yates’s success in capturing the dynamism and profundity of her subject matter”  ---- Winter Jade Werner, Victorian Studies 62.1 (2019): 154-156 (Review)

"Close reading of Hopkins’ never less than challenging verse is pursued in this book with theological rigour and learning in a manner that will ensure that it will become a central resource in scholarship on the finest of late nineteenth century English poets… a work of fine scholarship, theologically learned and poetically sensitive, and yet at the same time spiritually acute and attentive to the delicate, complex world of Hopkins and his writings. This is a book to be treasured and pondered upon."  ---- Professor David Jasper, Literature and Theology (OUP)

Dr. Julia Winckler's research sits across multiple strands:

Visual Culture, Photographic Archives

Memory, Migration, Contested Topographies, Exile Studies

Reactivating Archives through Artistic Interventions

Photography and Critical Pedagogy

She is the co-research lead, with Dr. Uschi Klein, for the Visual Culture, History and Memory strand at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/our-activities/our-academic-themes/visual-culture-history-and-memory/

She is also a member of CMNH's and the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice' steering groups. 

Julia Winckler's research investigates archival traces within the context of collective memory and migration narratives and explore how neglected archival sources have the potential to reveal forgotten histories that can alter our understanding  of the past and present. Through the use of creative and interpretive visual approaches, using photography as a tool to think about historical experience, multiple articulations of memory and meaning are expressed, with the aim of generating new academic knowledge.

The author Ben Okri has described 'the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered' (2005); and Winckler's research methodology considers archival research as a material, embodied practice. Through extensive investigation in archival collections, material is gathered and a strategy is mapped out.  For her research projects, Winckler usually travels to the sites that hold cultural and historical significance.

Through reactivation and visualisation, using photography as the key medium, past memories are reframed and resituated in the present. Combining an archaeological with a genealogical approach, traces are documented; their significance to the present assessed, as some of the historical functions are lost or no longer important. The genealogical approach necessitates an investigation that starts in the present, a retracing of the journey, that is physical and experimental, setting up encounters and dialogues.

Lost and recovered narratives have been a key theme of Winckler's work to date. Memory and migration narratives of emigration (Two Sisters), exile and loss (Traces), exploration (Retracing Heinrich Barth), displacement (Leaving Atlantis), expedition/peregrination (My Canadian Pilgrimage) and interwar home-making (Fabricating Lureland)  have been visualized and probed using the language of photography. These projects have been disseminated through public exhibitions, at conferences, exhibition catalogue publications and public engagement workshops, as well as informing Winckler's teaching practice.

Over the past twenty years, Winckler has undertaken extensive work with and within communities in Hong Kong, West Africa, Canada and the UK to enable broader access to personal cultural heritage amongst disadvantaged areas and demographics. She has sought to improve inclusivity of knowledge production and to reanimate disconnected or underdeveloped narratives and histories. Oscillating between photographic and archival research, photography is mobilized to reconstruct collective memories and give them a renewed cultural presence.

Dr Claire Wintle is a historian of exhibitions, museums and collections, with a particular interest in curatorial practice, exhibition design and the politics of representation. Her work explores the relationship between museums and processes of nationalism, imperialism and decolonisation, often with a focus on South Asia and the UK.

Claire is Principal Lecturer in Museum Studies and Art and Design History. She is Co-Director of the University's Centre for Design History where she leads research, including on the museum as a designed space that is both produced and consumed. She is the Course Leader for the MA Curating Collections and Heritage, a collaborative masters programme developed between the University of Brighton and Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove. Her teaching focuses on the ethics of contemporary museum practice, with an emphasis on widening participation in and access to cultural heritage.

Claire’s early research focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial collecting and display in and of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Her monograph is entitled Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She is currently working on two projects within a broader research agenda that examines the impact of exhibition and museum-making on imperialism and post-independence nation building during the middle years of the twentieth century.

- The first project focuses on curatorial practice in the UK between 1945 and 1980, using archival research and oral histories to consider how curators with responsibility for ‘ethnographic’ or ‘world cultures’ collections grappled with the professionalisation of their field, post-war recovery and the ‘end’ of empire. Claire is particularly interested in the lessons that can be learnt from historic examples of international networks, repatriation and exhibition making in our current ‘decolonising’ moment. With Ruth Craggs, she edited Cultures of Decolonisation, and has published widely on this theme. With her students, Kate Guy and Hajra Williams, she recently organised the major international conference Museum Exhibition Design: Histories and Futures, which also developed some of this work. The proceedings will be published by Routledge as Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process and Practice, with contributions from scholars, designers and museum professionals from Argentina, China, France, Germany, Korea, Pakistan, Switzerland, the UK and US. Claire was recently awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant for the project 'Making Museum Professionals, 1850-the present' with Dr Kate Hill at the University of Lincoln. This new network will support and develop contemporary campaigns for inclusivity and fairness in the sector by investigating the historical roots of the museum professions and the structures that supported them.

- The second project examines post-independence exhibitions of India in the UK and US (1947-1986), with an emphasis on shows generated by South Asian artists, designers and curators. Claire is especially interested in how exhibition making and cultural diplomacy probed the limits of national identity for cultural practitioners.

Claire is also in the process of initiating a new major interdisciplinary research project entitled ‘Curating Challenging Collections’. This will explore how museum practitioners today can cultivate professional resilience while working with historic collections associated with traumatic events and processes such as slavery, colonialism and sexual abuse. Working with professional associations and museums, as well as scholars and practitioners of health, cultural memory, and material culture, the project builds on Claire’s recent projects on curating decolonisation and colonial collecting to address the contemporary legacies of historic injustices in museums. The project is designed to support the wellbeing and mental health of a stretched museum workforce and contribute to improved working environments for curators, as well as support wider audience and community access to the collections themselves.

My practice based PhD uses a range of disciplines, theories of haunting, folk horror, folklore and documentary, which will lead to the production of a long form essay film (50-90mins) for film festival distribution. The research project will explore the disinformation techniques used by the Information Policy Unit (IPU) in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s. The research focuses on the coordination of fake satanic rituals throughout Northern Ireland to create terror and confusion across the province. The ‘Satanic Panic’ scare marks the inauguration of a new way of working with intelligence as a weapon to combat terrorism.

The research addresses the design of the ‘witchcraft operations’ and how the head of the unit, Colin Wallace was essentially working in a similar way to screenwriters by creating a real-time horror film in the landscape. Wallace used fear and superstition as a kind of technology to tap into and confabulate the space between local supernatural lore and organised religion. He worked with specific sites, which were steeped in centuries of myths and occult belief systems, staged black masses and leaked the reports to local newspapers. Wallace etched these horror scenarios into the landscape and his interventions still resonate in the communities some 50 years later.

This research will trace Wallace’s footsteps through the Northern Irish landscape at two different time periods; the 1970’s and the present day and culminate in an essay film and written thesis. The film will weave together archive material, landscape footage and reconstruction from news reports and Wallace’s first-hand accounts.

• PhD title: Collecting and displaying Korean contemporary craft and design at the V&A (1919-2019)
• Twentieth- and twenty first-century East Asia design and architecture
• Design education and pedagogical practices
• Design futures
• Digital design
• Modernities
• National identity
• See more: www.zara-arshad.com

My research currently focuses on the relationship between the community living and working in Castello, one of the 4 historic districts of Cagliari (Italy), and their own heritage, with a special interest on this community’s perception of the scars left in the area by WWII. This research will also explore the idea of heritage as personal and collective memory, but also the different definitions of heritage between heritage professionals and communities.

Martha Beard is a doctoral researcher based in the Centre for Memory, Narratives and Histories in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Martha`s research is interdisciplinary and takes approaches from cultural, social and political history, memory studies, archive theory and life-history to examine and evaluate the role of oral history as a peacebuilding tool in Northern Ireland. In this historical context, Martha`s research interacts with the theory, history and debates related to the practice of conflict resolution, conflict transformation and reconciliation in dealing with the past at a local, regional and transnational level. A core part of her work is practice-based and involves the critical exploration of the strategies and practices devised by the Dúchas Oral History Archive, situated in West Belfast, from c.1999, to acknowledge and deal with a conflicted history of the Troubles and to build relationships across social and political divisions in the Northern Irish peace process.

Martha has engaged with community relations work in and around West Belfast and continues to be interested in State policy and practice. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a History teacher and she maintains a strong interest in aspects of teaching and learning. 

Martha is also a fellow at Cumberland Lodge. 

Storytelling and/as memory making; poetry as practice, poetry as method; inter Caribbean migrations, (African) diasporic subject formation and (African) diasporic spaces; poetic inquiry; knowledge production.

My research explores interdisciplinary representations of silence in traumatised women’s testimony, where silence acts as a protective mechanism. Gathering lost and silenced stories of Cypriot lacemakers and building on emerging feminist theory which positions silence as a rhetoric of the deliberately unspoken, I intend to develop a community pedagogy to witness silence, including how gaps may be heard, shared, and ultimately encourage voice. Just like the deliberate creation of holes, a defining feature of the lace, these silences are often intentional; conscious gaps embedded into the fabric of a story. ‘Lefkaritika’ is a style of lacemaking unique to rural Cyprus, where my paternal family is from. It inspired the tablecloth in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and in 2009 was inscribed onto the United Nation’s ‘List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, in recognition of its international significance and immediate threat to its survival.

The title of my PhD is: 'How systematic were the British Army's war crimes in Iraq between 2003 and 2011?'. It is an examination of the scope and scale of the British Army's perpetration of torture, murder, inhumane treatment and sexual violence during the occupation of Iraq. I have previously had articles published on the British Army's perpetration of torture and sexual violence against Iraqi children, and on other war crimes committed by the British Army in Iraq, in which I used information gathered from Freedom Of Information requests, legal documentation, and reportage by the International Criminal Court.The title of my MA thesis, which I undertook at King's College London in 'Global Ethics and Human Values', was: 'Was it moral for America, Britain and France to pursue regime change in Syria from 2011 onwards?'. I argued that the Western regime change policy in Syria was immoral; I obtained a Distinction and the award for the best annual dissertation.

I am currently working on a practice-based interdisciplinary PhD called 'A fictional poetic archive'. Through a fictional prose narration, based on elements of autoethnography, I explore the current Nicaraguan crisis from the perspective of a young cuir feminist who is forced to return to her other country, the UK. This is intervwoven with letters and poetry from past-present hauntings from the times of British patriarchal colonialism on the Central American Caribbean shore. The critical writing examines the relationship between complex temporalities, memory and the imaginary from a decolonial feminist perspective. 

Interests: transnationalism, coloniality, Latin American decolonial feminism, social justice movements, literature/art/music as sites of resistance/enacted imaginaries, scriptwriting for radio and TV drama, oral histories, feminist participatory action research, reflective and creative methodologies.

Isabel Duarte is a PhD candidate at the University of Brighton. Her current research engages with the intersections of graphic design history, feminist methodologies and decolonial studies of cultural production, with a focus on Portuguese graphic design history and Portuguese social context. Her doctoral research, with the working title, ‘Beyond the canon: Feminist revision of graphic design history in twentieth-century Portugal' aims to uncover and reframe the history of women graphic designers in Portugal, through the identification of figures and groups who have been ignored by the canon, documenting their practices through a combination of oral history, social context and historical or pedagogical perspectives, and in so doing exploring the factors which have caused their work to be overlooked.

This research is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.

Isabel Duarte has a degree in Communication Design and has completed a Masters in Editorial Design on the subject of self-publishing and critical discourse on graphic design. 

My current research interest is transformative storytelling in one transnational family - contesting populist bordered notions of identity whilst navigating shifting socio-political contexts. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, combined with oral histories and narrative inquiry, I aim to create a digital oral history collection to be housed with the British Library Sound archive that documents alternative narratives, contesting prevailing nationalist narratives in the UK, France and the US. 

My research, 'Iterations of Queerness: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf's Life and Work in Post-1990 Cinema', looks to decompose and denaturalise the 'chrononormative' (Freeman 2010: xi) temporal order through examining the temporalities present in filmic adaptation of Virginia Woolf's life and work. This research will involve comparatively analysing the queer temporalities present witihin many of Woolf's novels with the temporal formations in a number of the films in my data set. In addition to troubling chrononormativity, my work will look to examine the relationship between medium, queer politics and storytelling practices. I see the audience of my work as being academics working in queer theory, film studies and Woolf studies as well as queer artists looking to work with the forms of the film and the novel.

 I adopt an interdisciplinary frame, working at the intersection of literature and film studies, queer theory, Comparative Political Thought, Continental Philosophy and Adaptation Studies. My researches operationalises a specifi rhythm-focused queer temporal approach I have named hypererotorhythmic queer analysis. This approch draws heavily on the work of Freeman, Freccero, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault and Lefebvre.

Areas I am interested in researching in future include theories of queer rhythm, the queer historical/biographical stratergies of Lytton Strachey, the queer potential of Pierre Bourdieu and the queer rhythms of the work of Woolf.

I am a PhD researcher and a professional storyteller, interested in particular in the folklore, mythology and social history of the British Isles; the intersection of stories, landscape and identity; the role of narrative in shaping culture and sense of self; and in using storytelling to understand past and present. My PhD uses storytelling practice and existing "eco-storytelling" models to look at the potential to improve community engagement and environmental awareness through increased awareness of local history, folklore, and one's own personal narratives. I am particularly keen to explore how such models can engage with urban/suburban life and space.

Other interests include the place of myth in subcultural/group identity (especially regarding popular music); the historical insights offered by medieval narratives such as the Mabinogion and Beowulf ; use of mythology and folklore in fiction; and culture and society in British prehistory.

Áine McKenny is a final year PhD Researcher based in the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories and the Centre for Design History at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include gender, history, art, conflict, exhibition histories and cultural representations of the past. Their current research project analyses the representation of women’s experiences of the Northern Irish Conflict in exhibition spaces. Outside of her research, she has substantial experience working within the arts sector in a variety of roles including operations, education, events, marketing, research and administration.

Working title: Reclaiming cabaret. A queer haunted autoethnography of real, researched and imagined stories of cabaret past and present. 

I use autoethnography, hauntology, and queer method, to recount my life in a small touring cabaret dance company in Italy, exposing the gap in recent dance history pertaining to British dancers working the cabaret nightclubs of Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. I also story people and places from the origins of the modern cabaret in fin-de-siècle Paris, bringing the past and present together in a magically real space, where real, researched and imagined lives meet, haunt and interact within my lived experience.

Nicola is currently researching for the final year of a full-time PhD with the working title of:

A REVOLUTION IN CHILDREN’S CLOTHES?

CRAFTING CHANGE: CLOTHKITS AND THE REVISIONING OF CHILDREN’S CLOTHES, THE LATE-1960s TO THE LATE-1990s

Having access to the private archives of the Clothkits founders for her research has enabled Nicola to conduct primary research that is entirely unique and original. Her research is based on archival research but also includes oral testimony in order to capture individual experiences of adults who as children wore Clothkits clothes, and adults that made and bought Clothkits for their children. Nicola has completed a book on the history of Clothkits to be published in 2023. 

Nicola has a degree in Textile Design focusing on print and has worked both as a freelance textile designer specialising in designs for children's clothes and as an illustrator. She previously completed a creative practice MA in Textiles at Brighton on the subject of unspoken issues affecting women.

During her research Nicola has curated a small Clothkits display in an unused shop window in Lewes the home of Clothkits, during lockdown. Having made an animated film for adults and children on Clothkits, this was shown as part of the display. She is a member of two academic network projects focusing on children's clothes and creativity and has given presentations on Clothkits to both. Nicola has recently organised and curated a postgraduate exhibition in conjuction with the Centre for Design History at the University entitled Design Matters. This exhibition focused on what design means and how design affects the interaction of people with objects and imagery. She has also taught and is teaching on undergraduate modules in Fashion and Dress History at the Universtiy of Brighton.

Her interests include children's clothes from the 1960s to the present day, clothes as a creative educational tool, women designers, feminism, craft, folk art, home sewing and handmade clothes. She is eager to be involved with further exhibitions on subjects related to her research.

I am a second year PhD researcher critically exploring green social prescribing as a solution to racialised inequalities in access to nature and health in England.

My research is funded by the ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership. 

The dialectics of gay liberation in Britain in the sixties and seventies 

My PhD research focuses on the history of the gay liberation movement in Britain and the visions of revolutionary social change it sought to theorise and embody. The project takes a dialectical approach to theory and history, combining marxist critical theory and an engagement with the articles, pamphlets, ephemera and photographs located in archives of the gay movement across the UK. Crucially, I am interested in how records and traces of gay life and gay experience during this period actively contribute to theories of sexuality, gender and capitalism and the short-circuiting of their interrelations. My aim is to situate and historicise these contributions according to the twists and turns of capital accumulation and class struggle in the late twentieth century with the view to rubbing against the grain of normative and progressivist narratives of gay history that dominate the present. The project is funded by the TECHNE/AHRC consortium.

I am also a founding editor of Invert Journal, an independent journal of contemporary marxist thought focused on the abolition of gender and the liberation of feminised subjects.

Kristin O’Donnell is a doctoral researcher based in the Centre for Memory, Narratives and History in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Her research engages with the intersections of history, memory, and art, with a particular focus on identity, and the politics of war commemoration. Through her doctoral research ‘The Cultural Politics of Commemoration: Participatory Art and Britain’s Great War During the Centenary Moment’ Kristin explores the relationship between commemoration, identity formation, and nationalism in creating and policing boundaries of belonging.Commited to a pedagogy of partnership, Kristin is a lecturer on the innovative Applied Humanities programme at Newman University. In addition to this Kristin has worked as an Associate Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton, and as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) Global Institute in London lecturing on a range of history and culture studies modules. Kristin has served as a member of the Women’s History Network Steering Committee, playing a key role in launching their successful online seminar series. Through her interest in cultural policy work Kristin has secured a Cumberland Lodge Doctoral Social Policy Fellowship to work at the intersection of academia, policy, and complex social challenges.

I am interested in how contemporary museum exhibitions represent histories of European colonialism and how these histories are engaged with by audiences. I assess what role museum exhibitions in Europe play in mediating how people engage with the colonial past.  Many European museums are currently experimenting with exhibiting colonialism, yet are guided by an ill-defined discourse of decolonisation. My research contributes to an understanding of what decolonising in the museum means in practice by focusing on the impact of exhibitionary practices on audiences, which has been neglected in museum studies and practice.  My research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  

My interdisciplinary practice-based research explores the multimedia potentials of storytelling to approach the articulation of shame in PTSD through synthesising psychological research with theories of narrative, literary analysis and creative practice. My PhD research consists of an online multimedia novel together with critical, theoretical and reflective thesis. It also synthesises creative practice, literary criticism and theory, embodied narrative methodology and multimedia storytelling theory with psychology and neuropsychology PTSD and shame studies.

I combine lived experience with practice-based research developed throughout my previous studies whereby my multimedia creative practice emerged from my research into PTSD and trauma, and later in my MA developed into an exploration and multimedia creative expression of the connection between PTSD and shame. My auto fictional novel, Indelible Stain, a continuation of this foundational work, articulates my personal experience of PTSD and shame with its experimental, fragmented, multimedia, multi-perspectivity form. My creative practice explores the connection between PTSD and shame, the effect of shame on PTSD and the self, as it explores shame through personal, relational and cultural situations and experiences.

AHRC Techne funded doctoral student

University of BrightonPhD project outline: “A terribly difficult decision to make”: The memory of Second World War conscientious objection in Britain since 1945

As the historian Linsey Robb recently observed, “the Second World War British conscientious objector has, to a remarkable degree, been omitted from both the popular narrative and the historiography of Britain’s war experience” (2018). The 60,000 who refused to fight do not fit with the British public memory of the ‘Good War’, in which the country pulled together to defeat an evil fascist dictatorship. According to popular memory theorists, this dominant representation of the war has resulted in the muting on the public stage of alternative memories. (Dawson and West, 1984). The main focus for my project will thus be: in what ways has conscientious objection been remembered since 1945? 

The critical literature on Second World War conscientious objection is scarce, but the historiography has recently changed in complexion. Although it is accepted that conscientious objectors (COs) were shown greater tolerance than their predecessors in the First World War, recent work has highlighted the challenges they still faced, both external, such as negative press treatment (Luckhurst, 2015) and internal – ‘caught in a web of moral obligations’ (Kelly, 2015). However, no study has explored the cultural memory of Second World War conscientious objection in Britain.My project will draw upon COs’ life histories in two forms: published autobiographies and oral history interviews held at the Imperial War Museum. Both are significant pools of source material that have not been subject to sufficient critical analysis. I will also undertake interviews with descendants of COs. From this research, I will assess the long-term and continuing impact of the decision to refuse to fight. Taking a cultural memory approach, I will also explore the interrelationship between the dominant narrative of the war and the personal memories of COs. Overall, this will be radical history project, which recognises the political implications of memory.

As a black British woman and avid researcher in black British history and doctoral researcher in postcolonial feminist fiction, which will reaffirm gaps in black British history, I am encouraged by the work lead by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and History, which directly links to my continued research.  My continued research enables me to place a spotlight and unearth histories of those currently invisble lives, as a way to reclaim and reimagine black history within Britain and specifically the south of England.  As a representative of black culture, and a reconfirmation of modernity as a black British woman, my work establishes how back history should be placed within the social remit of modern England.  This research is necessary to implement change within Britain and academia.

My research offers an analysis of a selection of Harold Pinter’s plays and poetry from 1958 until 2000, in relation to the notion of ‘mental disintegration,’ as evidenced between several characters and to explore the relationship between the themes of power and agency and his later political activism.

The study includes the social and cultural background of the 1950’s in which Pinter commenced his professional writing, through to the ‘swinging 1960’s and his slow but developing career.

Pinter’s Jewish heritage, despite his faith lapsing, played a role in his work, as he felt the pain of persecution growing up and there is evidence of differing types of persecution and mental disintegration within his work, some of which he would have suffered himself.

The study aims to closely link Pinter’s history and past with regard to the fact that he was a victim of persecution, to his professional work through the form of selected characters, who are victims of ‘mental disintegration’, perpetuated by others in the plays selected.

The research considers the relationship between the ‘mental disintegration’ and themes of power and agency which are evident within Pinter’s work.

From 1984 onwards, after a short fallow period, Pinter adopted a different style, which was overtly political, where it will be argued that Pinter’s worldwide reputation now provided the greatest platform for his political activism.

In undertaking the research, the study can draw from methodology based upon the work of Freud and Jung to engage with notions of authority and power.

My research charts Pinter’s professional journey where he is simply castigated and heavily lambasted by the critics early in his career to the point when he is one of the world’s most revered playwrights, but also seeks to find solutions from different sources as to the meaning of several texts with reference to mental disintegration and the ensuing political activism towards the end of his career. The period between the 1950s through the important 1960s and the overt shift in the 1980s demonstrate how profound these periods were not just in relation to what was happening politically in the world, but for his professional work too.

Ultimately, this study demonstrates how important the relationships are between power, mental disintegration and political activism, through the vehicle of literature.

My practice-based research utilises the essay film to interrogate 1980s images of gay male depravity through the lens of queer negativity. It considers how these representations, viewed within the framework of the medico-legal pathologisation of homosexuality, might also function as a provocation in the disruption of LGBTQ+ assimilation. 

My broader research interests include animated representations of otherness; masculinity and hysteria; LGBTQ+ history and criminality. My work has frequently employed appropriation, provocation and the juxtaposition of diverse visual components. My commitment to the dissemination of research via the moving image derives from my interest in radical montage with its potential to articulate divergent, overlapping ideas; images and sound forming new relationships and creating meaning in complex, hybrid ways. 

My research at present focuses on the evolution of masculinity in the contemporary Manhattan novel. By considering the impact of September 11, 2001 on the male identity, I aim to discern the acute changes men faced and how this is visible in the novel. 

My PhD project explores diverse memories of ‘implication’ in histories of violence in the context of memory changes in Europe since the 1980s. It uses oral histories conducted in Austria (on memories of Nazism and World War II) and Northern Ireland (on memories of the Northern Ireland conflict) as case studies to establish how those socialised in previously more dominant memory cultures compose their own and/or their family’s life stories and reflect on histories of ‘implication’ in relation to these wider cultural shifts, and how they negotiate politically charged meanings of the past between the ‘private’ and ‘public’. The project examines emotional responses to these shifts, which were often experienced as challenging to subjectivities, identities and family histories, as well as memory work taking place in the private arena of the family. By doing so, the project seeks to understand political mobilisations of such ‘private’ memories and aims to create space for the critical study of heterogeneous cultures of implication and perpetration, and their meanings for society until today.

Email: v.tautter@brighton.ac.uk

Claudia Treacher is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher working on material and visual culture. Her research areas include art and politics during the Second World War in Britain, conscientious objection, and family history. Claudia is a member of the Centre for Design History and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, and she is also Postgraduate research representative for the University Committee on Research Ethics and Integrity (UCoREI).

I am interested in the way in which modern property relations violently shape lives and relationships and how to move beyond that - as a political project not just an intellectual exercise. This includes research into how to theorise history and how to historize the present.

In my dissertation I look at property’s violence, i.e. how property materializes in and through our (gendered, sexualised and racialised) relationships with others, ourselves and our bodies, – and try to excavate (imagined) alternatives. Therefore, I look at the continuities of historical regimes of property. Here, ownership struggles in colonial capitalism are central; more specifically in my case, constellations of property and kinship in German colonial (after)lives. The role of colonial intervention in sexuality, family and inheritance structures in the context of dispossession and propertisation brings out (struggles around) articulations of race, gender and class and the properties of body and nation(/state-building). Thus, I am interested in how the past lives on and how we might (fight to) live differently in the now.

Identification of subconscious and unconscious hybridity in cultural hybrid writing:  contextualization of a third space in cultural hybrid literature particularly in my novel LTR. 

With a background in comparative literature and literary theory, I trace patterns and trends in western perceptions of south-eastern Europe. I currently research representations of Montenegro, from the nineteenth century up to the present, through both global postcolonial and decolonial as well as regional balkanist discourse criticism. I take into consideration cultural, historical, political, geopolitical and economic contexts that shape western responses to south-eastern Europe. My research interests also focus on cultural memory and how transgenerational histories and narratives create ethnic, national and cultural identities of individuals.

• Ana Živković, “Early British Discursive Constructions of Montenegro (1840-1880)”, in Antonello Biagini and Giovanna Motta, eds, Empires and Nations from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), pp. 185-192.  http://www.cambridgescholars.com/empires-and-nations-from-the-eighteenth-to-the-twentieth-century-2