
People
Lluisa Astruc works on Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. Her research focuses on the acquisition of the first and the second language, and on wider issues around teaching and learning Modern Languages. For instance, the 4-year project "Diasporic identities and the politics of modern language teaching" (funded by AHRC OWRI grant as part of a larger project led by Kings College London) focuses on the role of modern language teachers as mediators between languages and cultures. |
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Hugues Azérad specialises in comparative literature and aesthetics (Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Bonnefoy, Glissant, Nerval, Benjamin, Adorno, Rancière), postcolonial literature, modernisms, utopia, film, French literature/poetry from 19th century to the present and links between Language learning and cultural studies. |
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Stanley Bill works largely on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, with particular interests in religion, postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural history, and Polish-Ukrainian relations. He has written on Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, postcolonial theory in the Polish context, as well as on religious problems in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. |
Steven Boldy works on modern Latin American Literature, principally from Argentina and Mexico. He focuses mainly on individual authors such as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo. |
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Abigail Brundin's research interests include the literature and culture of the Italian renaissance, with a particular focus on women writers, poetry, print culture, devotional literature, censorship and religion. |
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Bill Burgwinkle is a specialist in Medieval French and Occitan literature, gender and sexuality, and critical theory. He is currently working on the afterlife of the troubadours, charting the changing notion of belief and its relation to love in the thirteenth century. |
Bryan Cameron's research centers on modern Spanish culture with a particular focus on literary, filmic and ideological production from the eighteenth century to the present. |
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Marie-Christine Clemente specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and culture, with a particular focus on questions of memory and autobiography. |
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Sarah Colvin's research interests are in the areas of narrative theory and practice; cognitive and ethical approaches to literature; women’s writing and prisoner narratives; and writing and (political) violence. Her current research is on narratives by prisoners and the use and functions of arts in prisons, and she is a steering committee member for the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA). |
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Maite Conde’s research focuses on modern Brazilian culture. More specifically her work engages with questions concerning the relationship between cinema, literature and modernity in Brazil. This involves a sustained examination of theoretical debates regarding the productive dialogue between film and literary modernism in the early 1900s, discussions concerning cinema and modernity in Brazil’s First Republic, and the relationship between film and modern politics from the 1930s onwards. |
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Martin Crowley works on modern and contemporary French and Francophone thought and culture, looking in particular at cultural and philosophical engagements with the demands of ethics and politics. |
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Mark Darlow specialises in eighteenth-century French theatre and music (especially opéra-comique), Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the culture of the Revolutionary period. |
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Julie Dashwood's recent research had focused on modern Italian and European theatre, narrative and cultural history. She has, in particular, published extensively on Pirandello, De Roberto, Vivanti and Ristori. |
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Elizabeth Drayson work on medieval and early modern Spanish literature and cultural history, with a particular interest in the relationship between Arabic, Jewish, and Christian cultures in medieval and Golden Age Spain, as well as the interpretation of medieval literature in art and film. |
Caroline Egan studies early colonial Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on texts written in and about Amerindian languages in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her research deals with the categories of orality and literacy in the broad context of the colonial Americas. Trained in comparative literature, she is also interested in reimaginings of the colonial period in later American literary works. |
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Brad Epps' research interests interests include eighteenth to twenty-first century Spanish and Latin American literature, Catalan literature and film, Ibero-American cinema, photography, and art, Hispanophone Africa, theories of visuality, modernity, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, feminist thought, queer theory, urban cultures, immigration, and post-colonial studies, among others. |
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Rory Finnin's primary research interest is the interplay of literature and national identity in Ukraine. He also studies Soviet Russian dissident literature and Turkish nationalist literature. His broader interests include nationalism theory, human rights discourse, and problems of cultural memory. |
The general topic of Simon Franklin's research is the social and cultural history of information technologies in Russia. He am currently working on a wide-ranging study of cultures of writing and material texts in Russia from the mid 15th to the mid 19th century, using the concept of the 'graphosphere', defined as the space of the visible word. |
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Emma Gilby's research focuses on early modern France. She is particularly interested in early modern critical thinking about literature and the visual arts, and in investigating modern critical practices by considering their history. She is currently working on Descartes in the context of contemporary poetic theory. |
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Miranda Gill works mainly on nineteenth-century French literature and European thought. Her research focuses on the history of the emotions and pre-scientific moral psychology. She is particularly interested in the relationship between masculinity, the emotions, and self-control in literary and discursive texts. |
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Robert Gordon works on the literature, cinema and cultural history of modern Italy. His books include works on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, Bicycle Thieves and the legacies of the Holocaust in postwar Italy. |
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John Guthrie works on German literature, thought and culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, Anglo-German literary relations in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, German aesthetics and literary criticism, German drama and theatre, and translation and adaptation. |
Nick Hammond is Professor of early modern French literature and culture, with particular interest in popular culture (street songs), sexuality, religious thought, poetry and theatre. The writers he has worked on include Pascal and writers attached to Port-Royal, Sévigné, Lafayette, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Bossuet, D'Aubignac, Saint-Pavin, Furetière and Tallemant des Réaux. He is currently leading a project which involves transcribing and performing 17th- and 18th-century street songs (http://www.parisiansoundscapes.org). |
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Louise Haywood’s work focuses on medieval Iberian literature and culture, particularly visual culture and space. Her main interests include authority, truancy and humour; premodern notions of the body and psychology, particularly as they relate to power, love, gender and sexuality; manuscript communities; and the representation of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Her work on Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor, the fifteenth-century cancionero and teaching translation is well known. |
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Helen Hunter's research focuses on intertextual networks and the evolution of literary motifs. Her doctoral thesis compared uses of biblical imagery in the Middle High German Gregorius and its 20th century counterparts. Her current work on the Kaiserchronik traces the variants of that text across its c. 350 year transmission, its textual influences and legacy. |
Geoffrey Kantaris's research focuses on Latin American cinema with particular interest in contemporary urban film produced in Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. He has additionally worked on Latin American women's literature and on the theory of Latin American popular culture. He has strong interests in urban theory, human geography and theories of spatiality, "translocal" cultures, the politics of culture in Latin America, spatiality, "translocal" cultures, the politics of culture in Latin America, feminism and posthumanism. |
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Katharina Karcher's research focuses on protest movements, political extremism and violence in contemporary Germany. She is interested in gender theory and feminist thought, the relationship of violence and political subjectivity, and in theories of social change. Among other topics, she has published on the history of feminist ideas and practices, left-wing violence and terrorism. |
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Dominic Keown works on culture in Spain from 1833 to the present day. He is particularly interested in the interface between the official Spanish creative voice in literature, cinema and the arts and the dissident response from the Catalan-speaking areas in all their variety. He has translated many of the principal exponents of this ideological antagonism into English. |
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Jean Khalfa’s areas of research are the history of philosophy, modern literature (in particular contemporary poetry and Francophone writing), aesthetics and anthropology. |
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Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá is interested in comparative studies involving Brazilian, Portuguese and English literatures and in early modern travel writing. |
Marie Kolkenbrock is currently working on a scholarly biography of the Viennese Modernist Arthur Schnitzler. Marie’s PhD (Cambridge 2014) explored a conceptual and structural link between the belief in the higher power of destiny and stereotypes of Jewishness, madness, blackness, and femininity in prose texts by Arthur Schnitzler. Her general research interests are literature and psychoanalysis, sociology of literature, Race and Gender Studies, cultural history of science, history and theory of biography. |
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Susan Larsen's research focuses primarily on questions of gender and national identity in Russian culture from the late 18th century through the present. Current projects include work on Russian girls' culture, 1764-1917; sound in 1960s Soviet cinema; late Soviet musicals; and contemporary Russian documentary. Earlier work includes studies of Mikhail Bulgakov and 20th-century Russian theatre. |
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John Leigh works on French writing of the eighteenth century. He is particularly interested in particular writers, such as Voltaire and Beaumarchais, but also likes to pursue various themes as they develop throughout the century in their European context. He is interested also in the way many of the period's thinkers use fictional forms, such as plays and stories, to express their ideas. |
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Maria Manuel (Manucha) Lisboa's research interests lie in the area of manifestations of political, religious and social dissent in literary and visual texts in Portugal and Brazil from the nineteenth century to the present. |
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Geoffrey Maguire’s research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of politics and culture in contemporary Latin America, with a particular emphasis on 21st-century Argentine literature, film and visual art. |
Isabelle McNeill works on French and transnational cinema and film theory, with a particular interest in cultural memory, urban space, belonging and travel. Her current focus is on representations of Paris in cinema, addressing questions of urban history, tourism and architectural/cinematic perspective. |
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Annja Neumann works on literature and medicine in Modern German literature. Her research explores Medical Humanities and Digital Humanities through Literary Studies and is closely linked to the digital critical edition of Arthur Schnitzler’s middle period works. She is particularly interested in interrelations between medical topographies and poetics of doctor-writers. The conjunction between body and textuality also defines her research on 20th century poetry. |
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Rory O'Bryen’s research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century Colombian culture, and specifically on the intersections between literature and politics. |
Nikiporets-Takigawa, Dr Galina Galina’s research interests primarily concern contemporary Russian and post-socialist politics, culture and society, the Big Data mining and analytics for mapping the sociopolitical and cultural change, the post-soviet national identities and memory, political activism and networked social movements. |
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Joanna Page's research focuses on Argentine literature and cinema, Chilean cinema, and graphic fiction from Latin America. Her work engages with theories of science and culture, as well as new materialist and posthuman thought, postcolonial theory, film and new media theories, and capitalism and neoliberalism in Latin America. |
Olenka Pevny's research interests include the cultural history, visual culture and art and architectural history of medieval and early modern Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine. She studies the place of art and visual culture in narratives of national, regional, religious and gender identity and is involved in conservation and preservation initiatives of archaeological and cultural-historical sites. |
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The work of Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra focuses on twentieth-century Latin American art and visual culture, in particular looking at the relationship between art and politics, the body in contemporary art, and, more recently, art and technoscience. Her areas of expertise are Mexico, Argentina and Chile. Polgovsky Ezcurra’s approach to the study of the history and politics of art is rooted in an effort to make visible the social value of this practice, share this value with students and other audiences, and understand how art is responding to recent processes of political and technological change. Her work has an interdisciplinary orientation, engaging with the fields of politics, philosophy, history of science, and anthropology. |
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Rachel Polonsky works mainly on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and cultural and political history She is currently researching Russia's relationship with the near east. |
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Alicia Ramos Jordan works mainly on Spanish and US Latino Literature, with a particular focus on Chicano/a Literature written in Spanish and its relation to Hispanic Literature. She is interested in how the reception of Spanish literature in hybrid and multilingual U.S.-Latino/a texts alters the understanding of the classical literature. She analyzes too the problem of translation. |
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Rebecca Reich’s primary research interests are in twentieth-century Russian literature and culture. She also has interdisciplinary interests in film and popular culture; intellectual and cultural history; and the history of science, medicine, print culture, law and dissent. Her current project examines psychiatric and literary conceptions of insanity in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1980s. |
Felipe Schuery has a Master’s degree in Literature and Discourse Analysis and worked on the notion of "Image of the Author" in the Academia Brasileira de Letras. Moreover, he is interested in Children’s Literature - his first book was published in 2013: Ralf & Demi – Uma história de duas metades (Quatro Cantos); Foreign Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics and Translation. |
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Alyson Tapp's areas of research are Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: genre, narrative, subjectivity; history and theory of the novel and of the lyric; natural history, nature writing. |
Anna Toropova’s work focuses on the cinema, culture and society of the Soviet Union before 1953. She is particularly interested in the role of mass culture in the Soviet project of ‘revolutionising’ mind and body. She is currently working on the following projects: 1) a monograph on genre film and the emotional and affective education of the New Soviet Person in the Stalin era, entitled Feeling Revolution: Cinema and the Politics of Affect under Stalin, and 2) a research project on psychological studies of Soviet film and theatre viewers in the 1920s and 1930s. Her wider research interests include theories of affect and emotion, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. |