Associate members
Dr Hélène Abiraad
Hélène Abiraad’s research is an exploration of urban activists’ narratives and experiences of space and place, the past, and urban activism in contemporary Beirut. It explores the physical, temporal and emotional relationships of Beiruti activists to a contested past and to a contested city. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Brighton in December 2020, and continues to work closely with the research Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories.
Dr Gisele Lecker de Almeida
Gisele Lecker de Almeida is a historian working on theoretical and methodological debates in the fields of history and disputed memories. Her research emphasises historical representations constructed by social and political discourses and their implications for democracy, public opinion and social cohesion. Her regional focus centres on Latin America.
Dr Antonina Anisimovich
Antonina Anisimovich works at the intersection of film, media, and memory studies. The thesis for her PhD in media from Edge Hill University was titled ‘Coming to terms with the past: new Bulgarian cinema and the post-communist transition’, exploring conflicting interpretations of the communist past and evaluating the potential of post-communist nostalgia as a critique of the present. Her postdoctoral research project collects oral histories of local residents in Hastings and Saint Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex to evaluate the role of cinema-going past and present in the community of a small seaside town.
Harriet Bergman
A researcher at Antwerp University, Harriet Bergman focuses on the political emotions of climate breakdown, and more specifically what the climate movement can learn from other social movements in terms of strategy, narratives and emotion-management. Her research interests are anti-racist and feminist philosophy, social movement theory, climate change, philosophy of emotions, and political philosophy around direct action, (un)civil disobedience and violence.
Professor Geoffrey Bird
Geoffrey Bird leads the War Heritage Research Initiative at Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada. His PhD in anthropology at the University of Brighton focused on tourism, remembrance and landscapes of war, examining how sites are managed and interpreted as well as the meaning and insight gained by visitors. He has thirty years’ experience in heritage-related roles including battlefield tour guide, field researcher in Europe, Canada, and Vietnam, and documentary film-maker. His collaboration with CMNH's Heritage in the 21st Century research area explores themes of memorialisation, heritage, landscapes of war, and meaning.
Dr Oscar Broughton
Oscar Broughton is a historian who specialises in Modern History and has specific interests in the History of Knowledge, Global Intellectual History, Environmental History, Food Histories, and the Global History of Socialism. He has particular regional interests in Europe and Latin America, especially, Britain, Brazil, and Germany. In 2022 he completed his PhD at the Free University of Berlin on the history of Guild Socialism.
Dr Ian Cantoni
Ian Cantoni is a historian who draws on interdisciplinary methodologies from the fields of history, memory studies, and anthropology to consider the contemporary resonances of twentieth century conflict in French culture. His PhD thesis at the University of Brighton was a site-specific study of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, a major site of memory in the French historical landscape.
Dr Sam Carroll
Sam Carroll is a freelance oral historian, project manager, learning facilitator, and community heritage consultant with twenty years’ experience across a diverse range of projects in both community heritage and academic research. She has a PhD in life history research from the University of Sussex. Since 2013 she has been the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories' administrator, events manager, a member of the steering group, and specialist community historian, leading collaboration with community arts and heritage projects and bringing independent consultation on research in medical histories.
Dr Frances Casey
Frances Casey's research interests are in investigating the dynamic relations between home and front during wartime, particularly in how boundaries have been constructed, maintained, broken down and reshaped. Her PhD, started at Brighton in 2015, was an exploration of how British war effort needlework, in the form of knitting and sewing garments for men in service, contributed to social, political, economic and emotional relations during the First World War. She is interested in the complex agency of the craft process of needlework as a rhetorical discourse which articulates, comments upon and intervenes in social practice, particularly during wartime.
Dr Karen Charman
Dr Karen Charman is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the founder of the Public Pedagogies Institute and editor of the Journal of Public Pedagogies. Dr Charman’s research interests are in the intersections of public pedagogy, curriculum, memory, psychoanalysis and public history.
Dr Zacharoula Christopoulou
Zacharoula Christopoulou is a cultural historian interested in how collective memories are produced through recurring acts of remembrance and through a variety of sources, including British decolonisation and the ‘end of empire’, especially the counter insurgency campaign in Cyprus during the 1955-59 emergency. Her doctoral thesis at University College London examined patterns of thought that emerged from World War I veterans' testimonies from Britain, Greece and Germany, which revisited the apocalyptic and the uncanny, and their interrelation with official discourse.
Dr Ken Clarry
Ken Clarry is a practising artist and researcher whose work focuses on aesthetics, theory and the politics of power. His PhD, awarded by the University of Brighton in 2020, was a practice-based investigation of how representations of power and violence evolve in wars and conflicts as spectral phenomena, and how artists and theorists strive to make sense of them.
Professor Graham Dawson
Graham Dawson works in interdisciplinary cultural studies on popular memory of war and conflict, with a focus on the memories, legacies and afterlives of the Northern Irish Troubles in Ireland and Britain. Drawing on memory studies, history, literature, cultural geography and psychoanalysis, his research investigates lived experience, subjectivity and memory as represented in oral histories and life stories; the temporal dynamics of ‘post-conflict’ culture; community-based memorywork; and the cultural politics of conflict transformation and historical justice. Graham was formerly Professor of Historical Cultural Studies at the University of Brighton, co-founder and Director of the Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories.
Dr Kim Dearing
Kim Dearing has a PhD in Social Policy from Cardiff University. Her thesis was titled, ‘The (un)intended consequences of employment policy for people with learning disabilities’ and her research was ethnographic. While exploring the complex and persistent barriers to employment inclusion, her study also unpacked the nuanced, multifaceted reality of everyday life for learning-disabled people struggling to access paid work. Her thesis considers the ethical and moral dimensions of value and worth, particularly through the lens of critical disability studies. Her background is rooted in the third sector.
Dr Siri Driessen
Dr Siri Driessen focuses on the afterlives and memory discourses of war and conflict, with a specific interest in experiences of place, travel and tourism. Her work combines insights from war and memory studies, cultural studies and heritage, cultural geography, and ethnography including a project on veteran journeys to Bosnia-Herzegovina, investigating the meaning that such journeys have for everyone involved. She was awarded her PhD from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Paul Dudman
Paul Dudman has 20 years’ experience of working as the Archivist for the University of East London. This has including the ongoing management and development of the UEL Refugee Archives. He has led many initiatives around civic engagement, community archiving, and participatory cultural heritage, drawing on a wide array of different innovative forms and narrative approaches, to document the histories of refugees and asylum seekers. This has, among other things, resulted in the Living Refugee Archive and Displaced Voices: A journal of Archives, Migration and Cultural Heritage. His research interests are focused on refugee history and the role of archives in documenting and preserving the personal narratives and life histories of migration. He is also a co-convenor of the IASFM (International Association for the Study of Forced Migration) Working Group on the History of Forced Migration and Refugees.
Dr Andrea García González
Andrea García González is a feminist anthropologist and peace and gender studies researcher. Her research undertakes a critical feminist and anthropological approach to the study of peace-building processes. She is particularly interested in delving into social dynamics of violence and peace and the intersection with emotions, silences and bodily memory. She has conducted ethnographic research in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country. Her research has developed a critique of, and offers an alternative to, conceptions of post-ceasefire processes in terms of orthodox peace-building discourse, as ‘post-conflict’, seeking ‘reconciliation’, and centred on recognition of the experiences of the ‘victims of terrorism’.
Dr Struan Gray
Struan Gray’s PhD thesis at the University of Brighton was titled, ‘A haunted transition: dealing with ghosts in post-dictatorship Chilean film’. His research focuses on Latin American film, film-makers and memory politics. He is a longstanding member of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, organising its Complex Temporalities reading group for several years and, following his studies, took a post lecturing in film at Falmouth University.
Dr Ryan Hepburn
Ryan Hepburn has a PhD in historical and cultural musicology from Newcastle University. His thesis analyses a collection of recent works by American composers written in response to the Holocaust, AIDS crisis and 9/11, exploring the ways in which music can prompt a re-thinking of certain accepted perceptions and definitions of cultural postmodernism while acting as a form of witness narrative or trauma testimony. In addition to researching music and trauma, Ryan Hepburn is an active musician and a member of the full-time academic music staff at Brighton College.
Dr Tim Huzar
Tim Huzar works at the intersection of cultural studies and critical theory, and completed his PhD on ‘Themes of Visibility in Rancière, Butler and Cavarero’ at University of Brighton in 2017. His research focuses on the relationship between politics and violence, with special interest in the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade and feminist philosophy. He teaches at Bader International Study Centre (BISC) of Queen's University, Canada, based at Herstmonceux, East Sussex, and contributes to CMNH's research on Black temporalities, Black bodies, and cultural histories and represenations of 'race'.
Dr Uschi Klein
Uschi Klein is interested in vernacular photography and narratives from marginalised voices. Her doctoral research (University of Brighton, 2017) explored the everyday photographic practices of autistic male adults and she has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in this area. Her ongoing research centres on cultural memory and resistance within the context of vernacular photography during Romania’s communist era (1947-1989), with a particular interest in individual and collective narratives, histories and practices, and using oral history interviews to develop a better understanding of everyday life during that time.
Dr Zeina Maasri
Dr Zeina Maasri is a Senior Lecturer in Global Visual Culture at the University of Bristol. She works across the fields of art and design history, with specialism in the visual and cultural politics of the postcolonial Arab world and broader interest in historical conditions of modernity and (post)coloniality in the Global South.
Dr Belinda MacGill
Bindi MacGill lectures in Arts Education at the University of South Australia. Her research interests draw on the fields of contemporary art, indigenous education, postcolonial theory, visual methodologies, arts pedagogy and critical race theory. The broad research theme that connects her to the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories is her focus on decolonisation through arts-based practices and creative methodologies, including Creative and Body Based (CBL) strategies that involve dialogic meaning making and creative practice to address ‘response-ability’ within educational settings.
Dr Paddy Maguire
Paddy Maguire is a social and political historian who taught at the University of Brighton from 1978–2018, becoming Head of Humanities in 1996, and co-founding the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories in 2008. He was active in the History Workshop movement, Labour History and the Workers Educational Association. He has published on working class writing, literature and politics, the co-operative movement, social class and Labour politics, and design and the British economy, and is now researching the changing structure, culture, location and representation of the English working class 1960-2010.
Dr Bridget Millmore
Bridget Millmore is a material cultural historian with an interest in the biography of objects. Her PhD at the University of Brighton focussed on the history of emotions from below in eighteenth-century Britain. It examined the love tokens made by the poor from low value coins: objects that provide insights into the emotional lives of those traditionally marginalised from historical accounts. Her postdoctoral research interests lie in the material culture associated with British colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, focusing on the iconic figure of the kneeling slave.
Amrutha Mohan
A research scholar at the Department of English, University of Kerala, India, Amrutha Mohan's PhD thesis focuses on the representation of memory and trauma in graphic narratives. The project explores how graphic narratives shape and are shaped by the slippery, evasive and tangled concepts like memory and trauma. Her broader research interests include cultural memory studies, comics studies, affect and trauma studies, spatiality studies and life writings.
Dr Lucy Kate Newby
Lucy Kate Newby’s research concerns the theory and practice of oral history in relation to cultural memory discourses, with a particular focus on youth experience of the Northern Ireland Troubles. As a former doctoral researcher at the University of Brighton, she has been a highly active member of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories since 2015.
Dr Rodrigo Ordine
Rodrigo Ordine is Associate Professor at the Institute of Humanities and Letters, at the Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (University for the International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony [UNILAB]), Redencao, Brazil. His research interests concern memory in relation to slave narratives and Brazilian, Angolan and Nigerian imaginative literature.
Dr Cathy Palmer
Cathy Palmer is a member of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories' steering group, and leads the 'Heritage in the twenty-first century' research area. As a social anthropologist she is experienced in ethnographic methods such as observation, interviewing, and photo‐elicitation. Her research interests lie in the broad area of culture, space and place, focusing on tourism, heritage sites, memorialisation and embodiment. She is particularly interested in commemorative landscapes of war; in ‘dark tourism’ where memorialisation of conflict and death may become framed as 'heritage'; and in visitor experience of conflict heritage.
Dr Xosé Pereira Boán
Xosé Pereira Boán‘s research interests lie in narratives of memory within visual culture. Assistant Professor in Modern Languages and Literatures at Oswego, State University of New York, he earned a PhD in Spanish at Tulane University with a dissertation that examined the convergence of liminality and representations of memory in contemporary Peninsular visual culture, focusing on film and graphic narratives. His monograph Cultural Synapses: Memory in Graphic Narratives of Spain focuses on the graphic novel through a diachronic perspective from the 1970s to the present.
Dr Ivan Pope
Ivan Pope is an artist and a writer with an interest in immersion in the textual landscapes of memory. His doctoral research engaged with the extended landscape of Auschwitz-Birkenau to explore post-psychogeographical creative techniques. His ongoing research interests revolve around wider landscapes of the Holocaust, landscape as archive, and the use of art as a method for continuing to speak of the most difficult things.
Dr Melina Sadikovic
A long-standing member of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories during her PhD studies, Melina Sadikovic's theis title was ‘Narrating the war experience: the politics of memory and commemoration within the framed peace process in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Her work merges cultural studies, memory studies, post-conflict studies, and contemporary European History to focus on post-war and post-communist transition in South-eastern and Eastern Europe.
Dr Sumita Sarkar
Sumita Sarkar is a sociologist engaged in gender and urban studies including research into community rehabilitation and resettlement. She took a PhD from Tata institute of Social sciences (TISS), Mumbai and Post-doctoral Fellowship with Asia Research Center, London School of Economics (LSE). Her work investigates the displacement of the female tea plantation workforce in North Bengal, India, analysing exploitative gendered policies during colonial recruitment processes and the effect of indentured labour on vulnerable tribal communities.
Dr Patricia Hope Scanlan
Patricia Hope Scanlan is a feminist practitioner, poet and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Trees are Moving to China and Taking the Sun as a Leaf (2008), Reeling in Slow Motion (2002) and Nature is the Hardest Thing of All or Not Made in China (2020). She relaunched Artery Editions in 2019, an experimental publishing house bringing together international writers and artists to work catalystically and collaboratively.
Jasmin Seijbel
Jasmin Seijbel is a lecturer and PhD-researcher at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication. Her doctoral research is on football fandom and Holocaust education. She explores football-related antisemitic discourse(s) in on- and offline spaces as well as educational projects that try to combat antisemitism in football. She works at the intersection of media, memory, and sport studies, with a particular interest in hate and (verbal) violence, (mis)representations of the past, and masculinity/ies.
John Siblon
John Siblon is a history teacher in London. His research interests are centred around the workings of ‘race’, memory, identity, and the places and spaces in which people search for meaning in the past. He has published work on commemoration, remembrance, and public spaces where African, Asian, and Caribbean peoples have been represented (or not) in sites of memory. His PhD thesis examines representations of Africans and Caribbeans in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
Dr Kasia Tomasiewicz
Kasia Tomasiewicz is an independent postdoctoral researcher, having been awarded her PhD from the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museums for her thesis titled ‘Memory in the museum: representing the Second World War in the Imperial War Museum, London 1960–2020.’ She is a longstanding active member of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories and continues its collaborative relation with the Imperial War Museum through research on the World War II Galleries.
Dr Avril Tynan
Avril Tynan is a postdoctoral researcher in comparative literature at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland, and a member of the Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory. Drawing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature and culture, and Holocaust studies, her PhD analysed narrative absence in the works of Franco-Spanish author and Buchenwald survivor Jorge Semprun. Her postdoctoral research interests focus on the interpretation of absence and silence in post-war narrative to understand how cultural memory has been formed, transmitted and transformed since the end of World War II.
Dr Diana Wilkins
Diana Wilkins is an independent art historian and researcher specialising in women’s history, Jewish history and Modernism. Her social history projects include developing a series of webinars for a CMNH project exploring the 1921 census and working with a community group to produce a book highlighting local women's history based on the Reeves Photography Archive in Lewes, Sussex. In addition, Diana was the research coordinator for Shalom Sussex, a project which examined the experience of the Jewish community during the First World War. She also has a strong interest in Modernism and the Bloomsbury Group, having been a curatorial intern at Charleston Farmhouse. Diana has a MA in Art History & Museum Curating from the University of Sussex, where her thesis focused on the attribution and afterlife of artworks produced by art schools in colonial-era India.
Dr Ian Williams
Ian Williams is a comics artist, writer and medical doctor living in Brighton. He studied fine art after medical school, then became involved in medical humanities. He founded and co-edits the GraphicMedicine.org website and wrote his Masters dissertation on illness narrative in comics and graphic novels. He drew a weekly comic strip for The Guardian, has published two graphic novels as well as research papers on health, creativity and comics, and speaks at medical humanities, comic art and literary events. He is interested in trauma, memory, narrative and drawing.
Lise Zurné
Lise Zurné's PhD at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, investigated historical re-enactments of twentieth-century violence. She explores how re-enactors in Europe and Indonesia represent and negotiate sensitive pasts, including decolonization, gender in war and the representation of suffering. She is particularly interested in methodological issues and how these impact knowledge production, such as gender in relationships with informants, multimodal anthropology and sensory ethnography.