Visiting Fellows
The Institute welcomes a number of Visiting Fellows each year, whose research is in fields relevant to the Institute. Brief profiles are given for each as well as approximate dates of stay.
Past Visiting Fellows
2023-2024
Jack Arscott is a graduate of the ILCS, where he is currently preparing to turn his PhD thesis into a monograph. To this end, he is the recipient of a Research Scholarship in Modern European Languages from the Modern Humanities Research Association for the academic year 2023-2024. The thesis revealed the existence of an enlightened patriotic idiom in the weekly left-wing journal Die Weltbühne, challenging the received wisdom that patriotism in the Weimar Republic was an exclusively right-wing phenomenon that paved the way for the extremist nationalism of the Nazi regime. Jack will be hosted by ILCS for the duration of his scholarship and has a long-standing interest in inter-war Germanophone writing, dating back to his undergraduate dissertation at the University of Leeds on the exiled writers Ernst Toller, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. His MPhil thesis at the University of Cambridge explored depictions of masculinity in crisis in the novels of the Weimar period, taking in Irmgard Keun, Erich Kästner and Hans Fallada via a detour into the work of Heinrich Mann. [October 2023-July 2024]
Dr Jeff Barda is a Senior Lecturer in French Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry (2019), the co-editor with Daniel Finch-Race of Textures: Processus et événements dans la création poétique moderne et contemporaine (2015) and with Philippe Charron of a special volume of essays entitled Pierre Alferi: une pratique monstre (2023). He has recently published articles on Christophe Tarkos, Michèle Métail, Anne-James Chaton, Franck Leibovici, Jacques-Henri Michot, Julien Prévieux, Christophe Hanna and many others; on the relationship between media and contemporary literature, and the history of the avant-gardes. He also co-edited with Eric Lynch a special issuefor L’Esprit Créateur (Poetic Practice and the Public, Spring 2022). In October 2021, Dr Barda was awarded the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize in the category 'Literature in languages other than English' for Experimentation and the Lyric in Contemporary French Poetry (2019). [October 2023-July 2024]
Dr Gabriel Bayarri Toscano is a Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at the Institute. In his research, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in physical and virtual spaces where the discourses of Latin American right-wing populism operate. His current project as an NIF is called: 'Discourse Polarisation: The Memetic Violence of the Latin American Right-Wing Populisms'. [December 2022-November 2024]
Byron Byrne-Taylor received his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at University College London in 2023, having spent time at the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University in 2019, and at Yale University in 2021 as part of the Yale-UCL Collaborative Program. His thesis was entitled: 'Resituating the Untranslatable: Modernism from Moscow to Rio to Berlin'. Recognising them simultaneously as objects of cultural mediation, works of world literature and as cultural objects determined by capital, Byron is predominantly interested in literature, philosophy, cinema and other forms of dialogue, cultural and political collaboration, translation and exchange between Brazil, Russia and Europe. He has published in Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Journal of World Literature, Translation and Literature, and an essay has been republished in World Literature and Postcolonial Studies, edited by David Damrosch and Bhavya Tiwari (2023). Byrne-Taylor arrived at these interests from a thoroughly rounded humanist education, fortified by a willingness to learn languages independently. He studied for a BA in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge, Philosophy & History at the Central European University in Budapest. As a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre, he is working with Professor Johan Siebers on a project provisionally entitled ‘The Role of Stimmung in Martin Heidegger’s Aesthetics’, which attempts to bring the theme of untranslatability into a philosophical analysis of Heidegger’s writings on art, etymologising the history of the word Stimmung across a range of German Romantic poetry and thought while resituating Heidegger’s aesthetic positions within the broader context of contemporary German and Austrian aesthetic debates. [October-December 2023]
Francesca Cricelli holds a PhD in Literary Studies and Translation from the University of São Paulo. During her research, she discovered an unpublished archive of nearly four hundred letters written by the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti to his last muse, Bruna Bianco. The archive had been inaccessible for over fifty years. During her doctoral research, Francesca organised, transcribed, and translated a selection of those letters from Italian into Portuguese. The letters are now available for public consultation at Fondazione Mondadori in Milan. Besides researching, Francesca has taught translation practices and creative writing in Brazil at Casa Guilherme de Almeida and Casa das Rosas, both institutions part of the State Government of São Paulo. She has worked as a literary translator for years, having translated into Portuguese Italian authors such as Elena Ferrante, Igiaba Scego, Claudia Durastanti, Paola Masino, Lisa Ginzburg, and Jhumpa Lahiri. During her time at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, she will be pursuing research on translingual authors, in a project entitled 'The crossroads of identity: translingualism and translation. A look into the latest works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Igiaba Scego, Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek'. Francesca has already translated a number of works by Jhumpa Lahiri and Igiaba Scego for the Brazilian publishing market. Since moving to Iceland in 2019, she has added to her research scope translingual women writers based in Iceland and, with this in mind, she will be also analysing the works of authors Helen Cova and Ewa Marcinek during her stay at ILCS. [October 2023-July 2024]
Francesca Dell’Olio holds a PhD in Humanities from the University of São Paulo, pursued under a co-tutelle agreement with the Department of Education at the University of Padua. She is a member of the New Literacies, Multiliteracies and the Teaching of Foreign Languages research group at the University of São Paulo. Dell’Olio's primary area of expertise lies in language education, with specific focus on the Italian language. Her research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including the examination of identity formation within the language education process, particularly in migrant contexts. She also conducts research on interculturality, linguistic, social and educational policies and practices, as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies. In her doctoral research, Dell’Olio delved into the intricate realm of intercultural encounters within migratory contexts, with an emphasis on forced migrations. Her analysis was grounded in a comprehensive examination of European and Brazilian policies, shedding light on the complexities and nuances of these phenomena. Her project at the ILCS, 'On Italianness and Critical Transnationalism: Towards a Decolonial Praxis in Language Education Across Borders', will explore the concept of Italianness as a transnational construct within a decolonial framework. Based on a critical reinterpretation of Italianness, it will seek to address a theorization of language education that sees languages as part of social practices that shape interactions among cultures and communities in the global context. The aim is to dismantle the lingering effects of colonialism on contemporary Italian society and promote alternative forms of knowledge and cultural expression. [October 2023-April 2024]
Mary Jane Dempsey is an early career researcher, who has recently completed her PhD in Romance Studies at Cornell University. She was a recipient of the 2021-22 Rome Prize Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies awarded by the American Academy in Rome to conduct the necessary archival work to complete her dissertation. Her research has been funded by Cornell’s Institute for European Studies, Society for the Humanities, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Brettschneider Exchange at the University of Oxford, and Trinity College’s Research Grant in Modern Italian History. Before arriving at Cornell, she completed a BA in History and International Studies at The College of New Jersey and a MSc in History of International Relations at the London School of Economics. As a Visiting Fellow at the ILCS Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, she is preparing a book proposal for her monograph, which traces histories of 20th- and 21st-century migration to unpack how gendered memories impact constructions of belonging in the Italian context. She will also continue to study migration narratives by conducting preliminary research for a second project, which will investigate cinematic representations of mobility. [October 2023-July 2024]
Beatrice Falcucci is a Researcher and Lecturer at Università dell'Aquila. Her research on Italian colonialism, colonial culture, and its legacy in the building of the Italian character has been supported by several academic institutions including the American Academy in Rome, Fondazione Einaudi in Turin, and The Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. She was awarded the Fondazione Spadolini Prize for the best doctoral thesis on Italian Modern History and the Association for the Study of Modern Italy prize for the best unpublished article in 2021. [February-June 2024]
Daniel Ferraz is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages, and Vice-Coordinator of the English Language and Literature Graduate Programme, at the University of São Paulo. His research and teaching focuses on teacher education, language education, and critical literacies. His research has received support from CNPq (Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), and from the University of São Paulo International Office. [December 2023-June 2024]
Mario Graña Taborelli is a historian working on frontiers, political cultures and legal, cultural and social history of Charcas in present-day Bolivia and the Iberian world. He obtained his PhD from CLACS/ILCS, University of London in 2022. [October 2023-July 2024]
Till Greite completed his PhD in 2022 at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and is currently a researcher in Princeton University’s Goethe-project ‘Vagantenweisheit: Goethes Schaffen im Lichte der Revolution’. His doctoral thesis ‘Die leere Zentrale. Berlin, ein Bild aus dem deutschen Nachkrieg. Eine literaturgeschichtliche Begehung’, published in 2024, focuses on literary Berlin between the 1930s and 1970s, notably on authors of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’ seen from both sides: the exiled authors and writers of the ‘inner emigration’. During his Sylvia Naish Fellowship at the ILCS, Greite will pursue his research on the Berlin-born British poet, translator and critic Michael Hamburger – a project that Greite initiated as a Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies in 2022. The project is an archive-based case study about Hamburger, who came to Britain as a refugee in 1933 and crucially mediated the dissemination of German literature in the anglophone context. Hamburger referred to this era, with its unresolved issues, paradigmatically as the ‘age of dispersion’ that, in its traumatic results, unspoken pain and lost identities, still affects Europe today. Entitled ‘The Legacy of Exile: 20th-Century Literature in the ‘Age of Dispersion’, the project centres on Hamburger’s idea of a ‘phenomenology of exile’ post-1945. The theoretical focus is complemented by research in the Michael Hamburger Archive at the British Library. He will continue this project as a Staunton Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin in spring/summer 2024. In connection with his research on German-Jewish exile Greite re-edited the principal work of the novelist, and friend of Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm Speyer’s Das Glück der Andernachs (1947), a novel about late 19th-century Berlin (2024). He has also published on the issue of writing in exile including articles on Franz Hessel, Gabriele Tergit, Witold Gombrowicz and Ingeborg Bachmann. His wider research interests are in the theoretical field of phenomenology, hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology. [January-March 2024]
Alexandra Huang is an early-career scholar working at the crossover of music and literature, with a recently awarded PhD exploring the intersection of piano playing and novel writing. Her work is informed by her literature education and practical experience as a music performer. Her research interests encompass comparative literature, musicology, opera studies, intermediality, and digital humanities. She is adept at employing artistic practice, primarily through interdisciplinary music performance, as a means of critical exploration and intervention. She is currently working on completing her first academic book, entitled Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels, which investigates a global corpus of literary novels about piano performance in various modern languages. Concurrently, she is organising a series of experimental performance events based on the book’s focalised pianistic settings, transmitting the impact of her research writing through embodied artistic action. [September 2023-June 2024]
Pablo Jaramillo's work focuses on the anthropology of natural resources and energy futures in Colombia and Latin America. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research on renewable energy projects, controversies surrounding the expansion of coal mines and the livelihoods of small-scale gold miners in Colombia's Caribbean and Andean regions. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Andes (Bogotá). He has been Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Development Studies (Paris 1 - French Institute for Development, France) and the University of Campinas (Brazil). [March-July 2024]
Brigid Lynch is the CLACS Early Career Fellow 2022-23 and a researcher in Latin American Cultural Studies, with a particular interest in contemporary visual culture from the Southern Cone. She completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2018 and, in 2019, her thesis was awarded the Annual Publication Prize of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI). Her first book Horizontalism and Historicity in Argentina: Culture Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era was published in 2021 and explores the cultural legacy of the 2001 crisis in Argentina. Her research interests centre on the intersections between popular culture, historicity, and social movements, and recent research topics include the translation and reception of the work of British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in Argentina, and transnational solidarity links between Scotland and Latin America during the Cold War. Her current research project, ‘Everyday Wonderlands: Theme Parks in Argentina and Beyond’, examines the history of state-funded theme parks in Argentina from 1951 onwards, and how during the Kirchner era of government (2003-2015), themed and immersive leisure spaces were central to shaping popular concepts of citizenship and belonging. [October 2023-July 2024]
Michele Maiolani recently obtained his PhD in Italian at the University of Cambridge, where he investigated the relationship between anthropology and literature in the novels of Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Gianni Celati. He is currently a Postdoctoral Affiliate at the MMLL Department of the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on the Italian post-war novel, publishing several articles and book chapters on authors like Primo Levi, Calvino, Sciascia, Bianciardi, Camilleri, and Fo. As a Visiting Fellow at the ILCS Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory he will carry out a project entitled 'Postcolonial Holocausts? Indigenous Cultural and Ecological Extinctions in Primo Levi’s Work'. This project aims to investigate Primo Levi's fictional short stories representing non-Western indigenous cultures from the joint perspectives of Postcolonial Studies, Holocaust Studies and Ecocriticism. [October 2023-March 2024]
Michel Mallet is Associate Professor in German at the French-speaking Université de Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada. He holds a PhD in German Studies from McGill University and is currently President of the Canadian Association of Teachers of German (CATG). He has published articles and book chapters on Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller and has co-edited a special issue of German Life and Letters entitled Herta Müller and the Currents of European History (2020) alongside Karin Bauer, Brigid Haines and Jenny Watson. His current research continues to explore Müller's work and extends to other German-speaking authors of immigration and exile, such as Klaus Mann and Saša Stanišić, who address the themes of flight and loss of homeland (Heimat) in their writing. He is co-editor (with Maria Mayr and Kristin Rebien) of Unrealized Futures: Post-Socialist Memory in German-speaking Literature and Culture (de Gruyter, forthcoming). During his Bithell Visiting Fellowship, he will conduct research for his current project entitled 'Heimat as (Dis)illusion in Herta Müller's Narratives'. He is co-organiser (with Maria Mayr, Kristin Rebien and Timo Obergöker) of the workshop 'Spatio-Temporal Entanglements of European Memory Narratives in Contemporary Literature' (November 2023), and is organising the symposium 'Niederungen at 40: Herta Müller's Aesthetics of Resistance and the Legacy of her Literary Work' (April 2024). [September 2023-April 2024]
Souzana Mizan is Professor of English Language and Literature in the Language Department of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and in the Postgraduate Program in Languages of the same institution. She holds degrees in Education and Languages – Greek from the University of Tel-Aviv (1992), a Masters' (2005), a doctorate (2011) and a post-doctorate (2016) in Linguistic and Literary Studies in English from the University of São Paulo (USP). She participates in the National Literacy Project – Cycle 3: Languages, Literacy and Decoloniality (2021-26), based at USP and led by Professor Ana Paula Duboc and Professor Daniel Ferraz. She has experience in the field of language, with an emphasis on Foreign Languages, mainly in the following topics: language education, literacies (visual, critical, digital), multimodality, critical pedagogy, digital colonialism and epistemologies of the Global South. [March-June 2024]
Maria Morelli is a Visiting Research Fellow in 2023-24 at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies, where she is working on postcolonial first-person narratives by Italian and Portuguese women authors. She is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster based at De Montfort University, Leicester, and acts as external Evaluator for the European Commission. Dr Morelli completed her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Leicester in 2017 with a thesis on Elsa Morante, Goliarda Sapienza, and Dacia Maraini. From 2018 to 2021 she was Marie Curie Research Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the University of Milan, where she taught classes on women’s theatre and feminist philosophy. She has taught Italian literature and language at the University of Kent, the University of Leicester, and at Wheaton College (USA) as a Fulbright grantee. Her research interests are in gender, sexuality, and embodiment in modern and contemporary Italian literature, on which she has published several articles and book chapters. She has co-edited the volume Women and the Public Sphere in Modern and Contemporary Italy (2017) and published the edited collection Il teatro cambia genere (2019). Her monograph, Queer(ing) Gender in Italian Women’s Writing (2021) is the winner of the Peter Lang Competition in Italian Studies and is featured in the 'Italian Modernities' book series of Peter Lang Oxford Publishing. Her research project at the ILCS applies multidisciplinary and gender perspectives to compare Italian and Portuguese texts around three key strands in women's postcolonial writing: home/homelessness and relationality; gender and racial identity; self-narratives of bodily and/or spatial exile. Taking into account the inextricability of the gender/race nexus, the project returns cultural agency to the postcolonial female writing subject, acknowledging the latter's role in actively shaping the literary and cultural norm in a way that challenges monolithic notions of gendered identity, Europe and Europeanness. [October 2023-July 2024]
Marko Pajević is a Bithell Visiting Fellow at the Institute. He took up an EU-funded Professorship in German Studies at the University of Tartu in January 2018 after holding positions at the Sorbonne, Paris IV, at Queen’s University Belfast as well as at the University of London Colleges of Royal Holloway and Queen Mary. He has published widely on poetics, including the (co-)edited volumes Mehrsprachigkeit und das Politische. Interferenzen in zeitgenössischer deutschsprachiger und baltischer Literatur (2020), German and European Poetics after the Holocaust (2012), Poésie et musicalité. Liens, croisements, mutations (2007), and Care, Control and COVID-19. Health and Biopolitics in Philosophy and Literature (2023). He has written monographs on Paul Celan, Zur Poetik Paul Celans. Gedicht und Mensch – Die Arbeit am Sinn (2000), and Franz Kafka, Kafka lesen. Acht Textanalysen (2009). At the heart of his work stands the development of a poetological anthropology, as presented most prominently in the monograph Poetisches Denken und die Frage nach dem Menschen. Grundzüge einer poetologischen Anthropologie (2012) and the essay 'Poetisch denken. Jetzt' (2022 [translated into Estonian, 2023, and English, 2023]). His interest in 'Thinking Language' became manifest in two British Academy-funded projects on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Henri Meschonnic, resulting in Special Issues of Forum for Modern Language Studies (Humboldt, 2017, 53/1) and Comparative Critical Studies (Meschonnic, 2018, 15/3), and The Meschonnic Reader. A Poetics of Society (2019) and finds a continuation in his edited volume The Abyss as a Concept for Cultural Theory. A Comparative Exploration (2024). This is part of his overarching research project for which see Academia for Poetic Thinking. [October-December 2023]
Yennesit Palacios Valencia holds a PhD in Human Rights and Development from the Pablo de Olavide University of Sevilla. She holds a Masters' Degree in Constitutional Law from the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies of Madrid (CEPC), attached to the Ministry of the Presidency of Spain; a Masters Degree in International Relations from the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía and a Masters' Degree in Human Rights, Multicultural Studies and Development from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide of Seville, Spain. She was an external consultant for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Valladolid (Spain). She teaches and researches areas related to International human rights law and Latin American studies. Her research interests focus on Conflict and Peace, Gender, Transitional Justice, International Crimes, Human Rights Protection Systems, Ethnic Studies, Migration, and Extractivism. During her stay, her research will focus on ‘Ethnic women and peace-building: Ethnicity as a reference in the Colombian transitional justice system’. [October 2023-March 2024]
Ellen Pilsworth is Lecturer in German and Translation Studies at the University of Reading. Her research project ‘Knowing the Nazis, Inside and Out: Anti-Fascist Publishing in Austria, Germany and Britain, 1927-40’ has been funded by the British Academy since 2020. From September to December 2023, Ellen will pursue this research at the ILCS's Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies supported by a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellowship. She is now turning this project into a monograph, provisionally entitled Atrocity Stories: Anti-Nazi Refugee Autobiographies for British Readers in the Years of Appeasement and War (1933-45). Her previous research and doctoral thesis (conducted at University College London) explored 18th-century German literature and culture, especially German romanticism and nationalism. She is co-editor (with Dr Dagmar Paulus, 2020) of the volume Nationalism before the Nation State: Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion and Self-Definition (1756-1871), and has published several articles in Oxford German Studies, German Life and Letters, Publications of the English Goethe Society, and The Journal of Perpetrator Research. Her latest publication is 'How the Social Structures of Nazi Germany Created a Bystander Society' (The Conversation UK, January 2024). [September-December 2023]
Raquel Saavedra Pagliero is an international human rights lawyer and researcher with a Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law and a Masters of Advanced Studies from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. Her work involves using strategic litigation to expand and protect the rights of marginalized communities and advocating at the international level for greater human rights protections. Her research interests focus on the Inter-American system of human rights and Latin American legal innovations in indigenous and collective rights which can inform broader understandings of such rights at the global level. During her stay, her research will focus on the intersection between indigenous rights, the right to self-determination, and climate action. [January-July 2024]
Yuliia Vasik, PhD in Germanic Languages (Donetsk National University, 2008), is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). She is the author and co-author of more than sixty research papers on linguistics and translation, published in the international peer-reviewed academic journals; the co-author of six textbooks on translation and interpreting, and two monographs. The focus of her research embraces discourse studies, experimental phonetics, translation and interpreting. Currently her research interests collectively aim to illuminate the intricacies of translation and language usage from multiple dimensions. Through her investigations into lexical gaps, student errors, and gender dynamics, she seeks to enhance cross-cultural communication, improve translation pedagogy, and foster a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of language and society. [October 2023-July 2024]
2022-2023
Sarah Arens is a Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool, and her research focuses on the histories, scientific and fictional texts, and visual cultures produced during and in the aftermath of Belgian and French colonialism. During her time at the ICLS, which follows on from a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Sarah will be working on a project entitled 'Removal, Retelling, Restitution: Belgian Colonial Collections and Europe's Museums', which analyses scientific ‘collection’ and exhibition practices by Belgian scientists and curators during the period of the Belgian Congo (1908–1960) and makes a strong case for including non-human and non-human-made archives and collections into contemporary decolonisation efforts. This work, in turn, forms part of her second monograph project, (preliminarily) entitled Experimental Empire: Science, Technology, and Belgian Colonialism (1897-1958). Sarah is also the editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies, the bi-annual journal of the Society of Francophone Studies, and on the editorial board of the Comparative Literature section of Modern Languages Open. [March-June 2023]
Sharon Baker graduated from the ILCS in 2018 with a PhD on Hans Sachs’s use of the stage to satirize the religious, economic and cultural politics of 16th-century Nuremberg and Germany. During her PhD research she made use of the Mary Beare Archive, now held at Senate House Library. Mary Beare was a distinguished University of London scholar who wrote and lectured extensively on Hans Sachs, Fastnachtspiele and early modern literature. Whilst working on this archive Sharon discovered Mary Beare had been investigating a collection of Humanist and Reformation texts dating from the 16th century and now held in Ipswich Grammar School Library. Mary Beare studied the individual texts, considered their acceptability to the newly Reformed Church of England established by Henry VIII and investigated printing presses in both London and Ipswich around 1555. She focused particularly on the work of Anthony Scoloker, who, according to Beare, both translated and printed one of Hans Sachs’s pro-Reformation Dialogues from 1524. During the tenure of her Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellowship, Sharon intends to advance Mary Beare’s original work by looking at the economic, religious and cultural links between Ipswich and the Continent, focusing particularly on the original owners of the books held in Ipswich Grammar School Library; their occupation and education; and why these particular texts attracted their attention at a time when some of the Reformation texts would have been banned and possession of them constituted a risk to their owners’ liberty. [August-September 2022]
Adina Balint is Professor of French Literature at the University of Winnipeg. Her research examines the self-other relations and representations related to the process of literary and artistic creation (Le processus de création dans l’œuvre de J.M.G. Le Clézio, 2016), mobility and the dynamics of power (Imaginaires et représentations littéraires de la mobilité, 2020), transculturalism and experiences of marginalization (Rencontre des imaginaires, imaginaires transculturels au Canada et dans les Amériques, [co-dir.], 2018). She is currently working on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project entitled ‘Poétique et enjeux du quotidien dans la littérature contemporaine au Québec et en France’. Her research at the Institute is part of a scholarly book on representations of everyday life in contemporary literature. [November-December 2022]
Dr Gabriel Bayarri Toscano is a Newton International Fellow at the Centre for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at the Institute. In his research, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in physical and virtual spaces where the discourses of Latin American right-wing populism operate. His current project as an NIF is called: 'Discourse Polarisation: The Memetic Violence of the Latin American Right-Wing Populisms'. [December 2022-November 2024]
Elisa Carandina currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Contemporary Hebrew Literature at the Département d’études hébraïques et juives at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris. She has recently published a book devoted to the suppressed stories of the other as a way to define the ars poetica of contemporary Israeli women poets and artists entitled La cura dell'accidentale: Forme di racconto di sé e dell'altra nella poesia ebraica e nell'arte israeliana contemporanea (2021). Her research interests include the theme of sacrifice and its rewritings, life-writing with particular focus on the representation of the self in graphic novels, and the female body in contemporary Israeli literary and artistic scene. [April-May 2023]
Ellie Crabtree. Through creative, theoretical and translational methods, Ellie’s (they/she) research explores topics including the methodological becoming of PGRs, creative-critical methodologies, the disciplinary identity of Modern Languages and the racial politics of space. They completed their PhD in Italian Studies at the University of St Andrews in 2020 with a thesis that explores the cultural landscape of contemporary Rome through the lens of trans-national creative practitioners. As part of this project, they were Rome Award-holder at the British School at Rome in 2018 when they carried out fieldwork researching community street art projects in the city. Following their PhD, they have developed their knowledge of the wider research context through working as a Researcher Developer at University Alliance. Their postdoctoral research emerges at the intersection of their academic and professional practices to investigate the research training opportunities unique to trans-national cultural studies research. [October 2022-July 2023]
Dr Simona Di Martino holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick, where she also is a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies and a Teaching Assistant. Her research focuses on late 18th- and early 19th-century Italian poems and analyses how the reception of Dante’s work allows an interpretation of these texts as ‘Gothic’. She has published various peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on this and other topics, such as the Italian family novel and the figure of the wet nurse in Italian fiction. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing she will deepen her interest in female characters and authors. Specifically, she will examine how the figure of the witch became an empowering model for young girls and how it shaped a rebellious but positive representation of girlhood in contemporary children’s and young adults’ Italian literature. Case studies are Bianca Pitzorno’s Streghetta mia and the comic magazines W.I.T.C.H created by Elisabetta Gnone. [March-July 2023]
Hilary Footitt (formerly Research Fellow at the University of Reading) works on moments of movement and encounter particularly in the context of war, conflict and post conflict situations. She was Principal Investigator for the AHRC project, 'Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict', conducted with the Imperial War Museum, London. Subsequently, she led the AHRC project, 'The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in Development Programmes', with OxfamGB, Christian Aid, Save the Children UK, Tearfund and Southern NGOs in Kyrgyzstan, Malawi and Peru. She has written widely on languages in conflict/post conflict settings, and is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series 'Languages at War'. Her current project, 'When the Armies Left: Afghan Interpreters and the Politics of Protection', examines the abundant seven year-long international material (from 2014 to 2021) on the fate of Afghan interpreters working with NATO forces, studying how the key actors (military, government departments, media, national lobby groups, professional interpreter associations, the diasporic Afghan community) perceived interpreting, and how these perceptions differed between countries with different levels of commitment to the NATO mission. The project seeks to explore the ways in which discussions on interpreter protection related to national constructions of foreignness, citizenship, immigration and asylum. [August 2022-July 2023]
Pablo Jaramillo's work focuses on the anthropology of natural resources and energy futures in Colombia and Latin America. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research on renewable energy projects, controversies surrounding the expansion of coal mines and the livelihoods of small-scale gold miners in Colombia's Caribbean and Andean regions. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester and is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Andes (Bogotá). He has been Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Development Studies (Paris 1 - French Institute for Development, France) and the University of Campinas (Brazil). [March-July 2023]
Catherine Krull is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. She is also part of the UNESCO Chair team for the Knowledges for Change Global Consortium. Her work focuses on: 1) Cuban migration/Latin American diasporic cultures; 2) diversity and reproductive politics; and 3) revolutions: daily life and measures of resistance. She has served as Special Advisor International to the President, Dean of Social Sciences, editor of Cuban Studies, as well as editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Book publications include Entangled Terrains and Identities in Cuba: Memories of Guantánamo (with Asa McKercher, 2012); Cuba in Global Context: International Relations, Internationalism and Transnationalism (2014); A Life in Balance?: Reopening the Family-Work Debate (with J Sempruch, 2011); Rereading Women and the Cuban Revolution (with Jean Stubbs, 2011); A Measure of a Revolution: Cuba, 1959-2009 (with Soraya Castro, 2010) and New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (with Dubinsky, et al, 2009). Catherine has held research fellowships at the Institute of Latin American Studies (David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University), the Institute for Advanced Study (University of London), the University of Ljubljana, the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of Florida), the Department of Sociology (Boston University), and the Centre for International Studies (London School of Economics). She is currently working on two major projects: Re-imagining Cuba and the Cuban Diaspora (with Jean Stubbs, University of London) and Cultural and Political Displacement: Gottscheer/Kocevsko (with Vladimir Preblic, University of Ljubljana and Brian McKercher, University of Victoria). [February-May 2023]
Brigid Lynch is the CLACS Early Career Fellow 2022-23 and a researcher in Latin American Cultural Studies, with a particular interest in contemporary visual culture from the Southern Cone. She completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2018 and, in 2019, her thesis was awarded the Annual Publication Prize of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI). Her first book Horizontalism and Historicity in Argentina: Culture Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era was published by Legenda in 2021 and explores the cultural legacy of the 2001 crisis in Argentina. Her research interests centre on the intersections between popular culture, historicity, and social movements, and recent research topics include the translation and reception of the work of British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in Argentina, and transnational solidarity links between Scotland and Latin America during the Cold War. Her current research project, ‘Everyday Wonderlands: Theme Parks in Argentina and Beyond’, examines the history of state-funded theme parks in Argentina from 1951 onwards, and how during the Kirchner era of government (2003-2015), themed and immersive leisure spaces were central to shaping popular concepts of citizenship and belonging. [October 2022-April 2023]
Daniel Mandur Thomaz is Lecturer in Lusophone Studies and Global Cultures in the Departments of Liberal Arts & Languages, Literatures and Culture at King’s College London. His research interests span engaged art, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and Latin American media history between the 1930s and the 1960s. His current project explores overt and covert British propaganda campaigns in Latin America with a focus on the press, broadcasting, films, cartoons and book publications between 1934 and 1968. His new book, Transatlantic Radio Dramas: Antônio Callado and the BBC Latin American Service during and after WW2, is forthcoming in 2023 with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Daniel has a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages (University of Oxford), and a BA and MA in History (University of Rio de Janeiro - UERJ). His DPhil thesis (Honourable Mention, Antonio Candido Prize for Best Thesis 2020 - LASA) analysed a body of hitherto unknown documents found at the BBC Archives in 2014, which included a series of radio drama scripts written by Brazilian journalist, novelist and playwright Antônio Callado for the BBC Latin American Service. He edited a volume with these drama scripts which was published in Brazil, Antônio Callado: Roteiros de radioteatro durante e depois da Segunda Grande Guerra (2018). His most recent research outputs can be found in journals such as Media History, The Global South and Portuguese Studies Review. [October 2022-June 2023]
Dr Áine McGillicuddy is Assistant Professor in German and Children's/Young Adult Literature Studies at Dublin City University. Since completing her doctoral thesis on politics and cultural identity in the works of bilingual Alsatian writer René Schickele (1883-1940) at Trinity College Dublin, she has focused more recently on child exile narratives spanning the Nazi era to the present day. She is co-editor of Politics and Ideology in Children's Literature (2014) and has published articles and book chapters on literary and visual portrayals of child exiles’ experiences. Áine was the recipient of a German Foreign Ministry three-month research fellowship at the International Youth Library, Munich in 2014. For over ten years, she was a committee member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature (ISSCL) and the Irish branch of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). From 2017 to 2020, she was Director of the Research Centre for Translation and Textual Studies at Dublin City University. She became the Irish representative on the Women in German Studies committee (UK and Ireland) in May 2022. During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellowship, she will conduct research for her current project entitled ‘Fact and Fiction: Child Exile Narratives for a Juvenile Readership in the 21st century’. [April 2023]
Micaela Fernanda Moreira is a researcher at the Participation and Democracy Group based in the National University of Avellaneda (Argentina) and a doctoral student at the Institute of Economic and Social Development (Argentina). She is also a recurrent lecturer at the postgraduate department of Quilmes National University since 2019, and has led courses in other universities of her home country. Her research areas are social movements, critical contexts, gender, public policies, political participation and development in Latin America. She received her Masters' degree in Development Management and Public Policy from Georgetown University and the National University of General San Martín with a dissertation entitled 'Democracy and Social organisations. Case Study on the Impact of Grassroot Organisations on Democratic Institutions'; has published articles addressing the role of social movements and critical contexts in the redefinition of political dynamics in Argentina, and has co-written on the scope and limits of participation policies. During her stay at the Institute she will be working on a project regarding the changes of the feminist and unemployed movements during Argentina's 2001 political crisis. [October 2022-July 2023]
Jacob Norris is a historian of the modern Middle East and its entanglements with global history. His current research looks at the flows of Palestinian migrants to Latin America and their impact upon revolutionary politics across the region in the 1950s and 60s. As part of this project he is researching the early life of the Salvadoran-Palestinian politician and guerilla leader Schafik Handal. Jacob's publications include two books: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development (2013) and The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub, Or How the Bethlehemties Discovered Amerka (2022). [September-December 2022]
Catie Peters (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar concerned with empire, race, gender, sexuality, intimacy, capitalism, and the environment in the hemispheric Americas. She holds a PhD in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies from Harvard University. During the 2021-22 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. In 2022, her dissertation received Honorable Mention from the Caribbean Studies Association for the best dissertation written over the last two years. Catie is writing a book that demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution impacted early 19th-century Asian conscriptions to the Caribbean. Her work shows that people of Asian and African descent have long formed alliances and managed ecological risk, in spite of colonial attempts at racial management, labour discipline, and extractivism. In June 2022 her essay '"The Greatest Attributes of Freedom": Water, Kinship, and the Village Movement in Colonial Guyana' appeared in the Journal of Caribbean History. In January 2022 her essay 'Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad' was published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She is currently finishing an article on atmospheric approaches to the Haitian Revolution for the Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race. Catie has also authored reflection and reviews in Environmental History Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and the Journal of Early American History. Catie is thrilled to be returning to the Medford area, where she lived during graduate school, and to be teaching two courses in Latinx Studies and Asian American Studies during spring 2023. [September-December 2022]
Galadriel Ravelli is a Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath, where she teaches Italian and European history, politics and culture. After studying at the University of Pisa, she completed a PhD at the University of Bath. Her PhD thesis explored the transnational trajectories of Italian neo-fascism during the Cold War, drawing on legal materials and interviews to former militants. Her current project looks at the legacy of colonialism in Italy, with a focus on remembrance of colonial deportations from Libya to Italy. [August 2022-July 2023]
Jeferson Scabio's work enquires into the mass killing and imprisonment of poor black people in Brazil through ethnography built with the social movements of favela residents in Rio de Janeiro. It draws on themes such as racism, violence, death and voice, in search of writing against state terror. He explores documents, social media, pamphlets, banners, cartoons, photographs, and memories. He navigates between courts of law, demonstrations and the work of mourning to unravel the continuous remaking of expendable lives at the margins. Scabio holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and was a visiting student at the School of Anthropology and Museum of Ethnography and at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. [March-July 2023]
Veronika Schuchter is currently a Visiting Fellow at the ILCS's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She previously researched and taught at the University of Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Nottingham Trent University. Her current research project explores the ethics and aesthetics of menopause writing in the 21st century in German, French, and English. Veronika is particularly interested in health humanities, feminist and queer theory, gender studies, contemporary women’s writing and has had articles published in Peer English, Text Matters, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and Studies in Canadian Literature. You can find her on Twitter @V_Schuchter. [October 2022-July 2023]
Richard Smith originally trained as a chemist before a career in consumer product innovation that took him all over the world, including three years living in Buenos Aires and many more working and travelling across the length and breadth of Latin America. After leaving Unilever, he was innovation lead for a regional development agency and then worked with the N8 universities on low carbon economies and sustainable agri-food. On returning to the UK after living in Argentina, Richard had studied Spanish, French and History at the Open University and then obtained an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool in 2016. He recently completed his PhD at Liverpool on the student opposition to the Pinochet regime in Chile. As well as his doctoral studies, he is part of a project digitizing a collection of political posters in Santiago, and one exploring music and memory with Chilean exiles and former Chile Solidarity Campaign activists in Liverpool. [October 2022-July 2023]
Nicola Thomas is a Sylvia Naish Fellow at the Institute and Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Nottingham, and has since taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on poetry, especially contemporary poetry in English and German, and ideas of space, time, science and nature. Her first monograph, Space, Place and Poetry in English and German 1960-1975 (2018), was a comparative study of poetry’s engagement with space across these two language areas. She is currently working on a monograph study of extra-terrestrial space in modern and contemporary poetry, which reveals how the perspective and scalar transformation afforded by the reality of space travel in the 20th century affects poetry’s understanding of planetarity. She also co-convenes the British Academy-funded interdisciplinary research network ‘Anthropocene Times’ (with Blake Ewing), and the Institute’s Languages and Environments reading group (with Kasia Mika, Joseph Ford and Dan Finch-Race). [September-December 2022]
Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust was be published in April 2021 with Berghahn Books and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth will be developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. She is a steering committee member of the German Screen Studies Network and a member of the Inclusivity and Diversity Sub-committee with Women in German Studies. [October 2022-March 2023]
2021-2022
Sharon Baker graduated from ILCS at the University of London in 2018 with a PhD on Hans Sachs’s use of the stage to satirize the religious, economic and cultural politics of 16th-century Nuremberg and Germany. During her PhD research she made use of the Mary Beare Archive, now held at Senate House Library. Mary Beare was a distinguished University of London scholar who wrote and lectured extensively on Hans Sachs, Fastnachtspiele and early modern literature. Whilst working on this archive Sharon discovered Mary Beare had been investigating a collection of Humanist and Reformation texts dating from the 16th century and now held in Ipswich Grammar School Library. Mary Beare studied the individual texts, considered their acceptability to the newly Reformed Church of England established by Henry VIII and investigated printing presses in both London and Ipswich around 1555. She focused particularly on the work of Anthony Scoloker, who, according to Beare, both translated and printed one of Hans Sachs’s pro-Reformation Dialogues from 1524. During the tenture of her Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellowship, Sharon intends to advance Mary Beare’s original work by looking at the economic, religious and cultural links between Ipswich and the Continent, focusing particularly on the original owners of the books held in Ipswich Grammar School Library; their occupation and education; and why these particular texts attracted their attention at a time when some of the Reformation texts would have been banned and possession of them constituted a risk to their owners’ liberty. [September 2021-July 2022]
Elizabeth Chant is Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research considers how nature has been understood in the Americas as an object to be consumed, with a special focus on visual culture. Liz’s PhD, ‘Demystifying Desolation: Representing Patagonian Nature, 1745-1956’, was completed at University College London in 2021. This project analysed conflicting cultural representations of Patagonia in modern-day Argentina and Chile in order to elucidate how the trope of Patagonian desolation was both perpetuated and dismissed in the facilitation of acts of annexation, colonisation, and extraction. She is currently developing a monograph based on her thesis while also advancing a new research project that will explore domestic tourism to industrial sites in former frontier territories in Argentina, Chile, and the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Society for Latin American Studies, and the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group, and a Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study. She is also a co-convenor of the Maius Workshop, which runs seminars and training programs for early career researchers in Hispanic studies, and has previously been funded by the Spanish Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [October 2021-June 2022]
Hilary Footitt (formerly Research Fellow at the University of Reading) works on moments of movement and encounter particularly in the context of war, conflict and post conflict situations. She was Principal Investigator for the AHRC project, 'Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict', conducted with the Imperial War Museum, London. Subsequently, she led the AHRC project, 'The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in Development Programmes', with OxfamGB, Christian Aid, Save the Children UK, Tearfund and Southern NGOs in Kyrgyzstan, Malawi and Peru. She has written widely on languages in conflict/post conflict settings, and is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series, 'Languages at War'. Her current project, 'When the Armies Left: Afghan Interpreters and the Politics of Protection', examines the abundant seven year-long international material (from 2014 to 2021) on the fate of Afghan interpreters working with NATO forces, studying how the key actors (military, government departments, media, national lobby groups, professional interpreter associations, the diasporic Afghan community) perceived interpreting, and how these perceptions differed between countries with different levels of commitment to the NATO mission. The project seeks to explore the ways in which discussions on interpreter protection related to national constructions of foreignness, citizenship, immigration and asylum. [September 2021-July 2022]
Kate Foster is an early career researcher specialising in text-image relations. Her PhD thesis, awarded by King’s College London in September 2020, was entitled ‘Mannequins, Androids and Cyborgs: Ambivalent Corporeality in Modern Art and Literature’. Kate’s doctoral research examined the appearance of such bodies in French literature and German, Belgian and French visual art, highlighting the way in which such imagined humanoids are deployed as vehicles through which to interrogate the nature of the human. Kate is currently preparing an article on female identity and the department store mannequin in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, and another on seriality and the Surrealist mannequin of the 1930s. She is also working on a monograph based on her PhD thesis. Her new project, entitled ‘Automation and the Artificial Human’, will continue the interdisciplinary and comparative approach which she has developed in her work to date. Kate’s chapter, ‘The Cyborg’s Undecidable Body: A Game of “Who am I?” in Gaston Leroux’s La Poupée sanglante’ appeared in the volume Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture, ed. by Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson & Antonia Wimbush (2021). [November 2021-February 2022]
Eve Hayes de Kalaf is a socio-legal scholar with an extensive academic and professional background working in Latin America and the Caribbean. She completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen and holds an MA from the Institute for the Study of the Americas and a BA (Hons) in Modern Language Studies, University of Nottingham. Eve also obtained a PGDip in Human Development with the United Nations at the Universidad Católica Santo Domingo and is honorary fellow at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Liverpool. She currently convenes the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Caribbean Studies Seminar Series here at the Institute. Eve is an elected member of the Society for Latin American Studies (2019-21, 2021-23) and treasurer of the Haiti Support Group. Her research offers some uncomfortable insights into the use and abuse of modern-day identity-based development 'solutions' that aim to provide all people, everywhere with a legal and, increasingly, digital identity. Her book 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner' is to be published this year as part of the Anthem Series in Citizenship and National Identities. The publication is the first to identify a link between the promulgation of ID practices by international organisations such as the World Bank and the United Nations with arbitrary measures that retroactively stripped hundreds of thousands of native-born (largely) Haitian-descended citizens of their Dominican citizenship. [September 2021-June 2022]
Deborah Holmes is Assistant Professor in Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg. She is currently writing a book on figurations and concepts of genius in the long 19th century, with a special focus on the theories of creativity developed by women’s movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Her DPhil from the University of Oxford was awarded for a comparative study of German and Italian émigrés in interwar Zurich, Ignazio Silone in Exile. Writing and Antifascism in Switzerland 1929-1944 (2005). As researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, she completed a study on the pedagogue, philanthropist and journalist Eugenie Schwarzwald entitled Langeweile ist Gift. Das Leben der Eugenie Schwarzwald (2012). She has held research fellowships at the Queen’s College, Oxford, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, and the University of Munich (as Theodor Heuss Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). Since 2014, she has been general editor of the MHRA yearbook Austrian Studies. As Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow, Deborah will be affiliated with the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture, and her time will be divided between comparative research on fin de siècle feminist periodicals in Austria-Hungary and Britain, and the planning of a series of events to take place at the IBC in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of Bachmann’s death. [January-June 2022]
Artemis Ignatidou is an interdisciplinary researcher borrowing methodologies from musicology, music & art history, philosophy, and performance practice to write European cultural history in the 19th and 20th centuries. She holds a PhD in History and is also a piano tutor (DipABRSM) and occasionally a performer. As a Visiting Fellow at the Bloch Centre, Artemis will be testing Martin Buber’s philosophy of art against his philosophical influences, his personal relationship to interdisciplinary artistic practice, and his political objectives. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you are interested in interdisciplinary collaborations at the methodological intersection of music, cultural history, and philosophy/intellectual theory. [October 2021-June 2022]
Rupert Knox was awarded his PhD by the University of Sheffield in 2019. His interdisciplinary research examined how human rights discourse and social media practices featured in recent social movements challenging partial democracy and impunity in Mexico. Until the end of 2021, he was research assistant on Dr Montoya’s project, Juridification of Resource Conflicts at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the ILCS. His current research includes examining the implementation of a new regional environmental human rights mechanism. Prior to his doctorate he worked with Amnesty International for eighteen years, with more than a decade’s experience leading the organisation’s research and advocacy on a range of human rights issues in Mexico. He also has a BA (joint Hons) in Spanish and Latin American Studies and Philosophy [January-July 2022]
Brigid Lynch is an Early Career Researcher in Latin American Cultural Studies. She completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2018, where her doctoral research explored the cultural legacy of the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina. In 2019 her thesis was awarded the Annual Publication Prize of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) and will be published as a monograph by Legenda in 2021, entitled Horizontalism and Historicity in Argentina: Cultural Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era. Her research interests centre upon the intersections between popular culture, historicity, and social movements, with a recent focus on transnational links of solidarity between Scotland and Latin America during the Cold War. As a Visiting Fellow at CLACS, Brigid will be developing a new research project that examines the history of the theme park in Argentina and how, during the Kirchner era of government (2003-2015), themed and immersive leisure spaces were central to shaping popular concepts of citizenship and belonging. [October 2021-March 2022]
Carlotta Paltrinieri is Lecturer of Early Modern Italian Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She received her PhD in Italian Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2018, with a specialisation in early modern literature and art history. Before joining RHUL, she was Assistant Director of the Medici Archive Project, and Senior Researcher in the programme ‘Towards a National Collection’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has held research fellowships at the University of Cork (Euronews Project, 2019-2020) and the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History (Roma Communis Patria, 2020-2021). Her research interests lie at the intersection of intellectual and social history, and literature. Her most recent publications focus on the sociological analysis of Italian art academies, and on a study of the rhetoric of early modern newsletters. As a Visiting Fellow, she will explore the development of the language of Italian early modern newsletters as a lingua franca [October 2021-March 2022]
Galadriel Ravelli is a Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Bath, where she teaches Italian and European history, politics and culture. After studying at the University of Pisa, she completed a PhD at the University of Bath. Her PhD thesis explored the transnational trajectories of Italian neo-fascism during the Cold War, drawing on legal materials and interviews to former militants. Her current project looks at the legacy of colonialism in Italy, with a focus on remembrance of colonial deportations from Libya to Italy. [November 2021-March 2022]
Kathryn Sederberg is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Kalamazoo College (USA). She received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2014 with a dissertation entitled ‘Germany’s Rubble Texts: Writing History in the Present, 1943-1951’. Her main research areas include 20th-century German culture, autobiography and memoir, war and gender, and National Socialism and its legacies. She has published on diaries and literature from the Second World War and the post-war period, including an article on hybrid ‘Brieftagebücher’ (letter-diaries) at the war’s end, and on time and history in crisis diaries. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow, she will continue her study of refugee diaries: ‘Journaling Displacement: Jewish Refugee Accounts 1933-1945’. With a focus on the experience of non-prominent German and Austrian Jewish refugees, this project analyses the role of the diary as a site (space, practice) where the writing subject is shaped by processes of acculturation and explores new concepts of self, home, and belonging. [June 2022]
Josh Torabi is a comparatist working on aesthetic intersections between literature, music and philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on English, French, German and, more recently, Iranian modernist texts. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from University College London in 2020. Torabi was an Exchange Scholar at Yale University in autumn 2017, spent two months as a Scholar of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation in 2018-19, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations at QMUL. His first monograph, Music and Myth in Modern Literature (Routledge, 2021), explores the connection between music and myth as conceived by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and represented in three major 20th-century works of prose fiction: Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Other publications include ‘Music, Myth and Modernity: from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus’ (JCLA, 2019); ‘The Aesthetics of Music and Myth: Joyce, Mann, Nietzsche’ (Sprachkunst, 2020); ‘Joyce and the Universal Artwork: Musico-Literary Relations from Portrait to Finnegans Wake’ in Hanaway-Oakley and Williams (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and the Arts (forthcoming 2022). During his tenure of the Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellowship he will work on his second monograph, In Search of the Universal: A Comparative Study of Wagner, Nietzsche and Joyce’s Aesthetics. [September 2021-June 2022]
Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust was be published in April 2021 with Berghahn Books and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth will be developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. She is a steering committee member of the German Screen Studies Network and a member of the Inclusivity and Diversity subcommittee with Women in German Studies. [September 2021-June 2022]
Oscar Webber received his PhD in History from the University of Leeds in 2018 and taught British and Caribbean history at the LSE between 2019 and 2021. His doctoral research examined British responses to disaster in the Caribbean and he is currently writing his first monograph based on that research entitled Negotiating Relief and Freedom: Responses to disaster in the British Caribbean, 1812-1907. The book will be published in 2022 by Manchester University Press as part of their ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series. It will shed new light on the ways in which British colonialism shaped experiences of disaster in the Caribbean and gave rise to epiphenomenal crises and hampered resilience building efforts. It will also explore how British poor relief policy intersected with colonial ideas of race to create punitive ‘relief’ efforts that provide us with a new window onto the continuities between slavery and the post-emancipation era. More broadly Oscar’s research concerns the environmental history of the British Empire and its role in enhancing present day disaster vulnerability in formally colonised nations. During his Early Career Fellowship at CLACS, Oscar will be researching the Belizean Hurricane of 1931 and investigating an accusation that early warnings of the storm were covered up by the colonial authorities as well as looking at the hurricane’s wider impact on the nascent Belizean labour movement. [January-June 2022]
2020-2021
Guido Bartolini is an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork (UCC) where he works on the cultural memory of Fascism in Italian literature and cinema. After studying at the University of Florence and the University of Oxford, he completed an AHRC-funded doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London on Italian cultural memory of World War II. He is the author ofThe Italian Literature of the Axis War: Memories of Self-Absolution and the Quest for Responsibility (2021). Dr Bartolini is the ERC representative for The Society for Italian Studies (SIS). As a Visiting Fellow for the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory he curates the interdisciplinary seminar series ‘Mediated Memories of Responsibility’. [November 2020 - May 2021]
Françoise Campbell is an Early Career Researcher working on questions of subjectivity, identification and ideological ambivalence in contemporary French and Francophone texts. She is also the Secretary and ECR representative of the newly formed 'Women in French Australia' research group, which aims to facilitate collaboration between Australia-based researchers of gender, feminism and women’s writing in French and Francophone cultural contexts. Since 2020, Françoise has co-edited a special issue of French Cultural Studies on transgression in the works of Michel Houellebecq and has taken part in online seminars, speaking about confinement in novels by Houellebecq and Chloé Delaume. Françoise is currently preparing an article on precarity and care in Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce, as well as a monograph based on her PhD thesis, tentatively titled La Poursuite de l’impossible: The Ambivalence of Utopia in the novels of Michel Houellebecq. [September 2020-July 2021]
Sara Delmedico received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Cambridge. She has been MHRA Research Fellow at the Department of Italian (University of Cambridge), Luisa Selis Visiting Fellow at the IMLR, and awardee at the British School at Rome. She is also the recipient of two Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation grants. Her most recent publications include ‘Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica’, Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica, Special issue of The Italianist, 38.3 (2018), co-edited with Manuela Di Franco and Helena Sanson, and ‘I Forgive my Sons for any Disgust They Might Have Caused Me’. Alvise I Mocenigo and the Decline of Paternal Authority in Nineteenth-Century Venice’, Journal of Family History, 44/4 (2019) Her monograph Opposing Patriarchy. Women and the Law in Action in Pre-Unification Italy (1815-1865) is to appear in the Institute's 'imlr books' series in 2021. Her research interests cover women’s history with a particular focus on the law and the Italian peninsula. Sara is editor-in-chief of the history journal Chronica Mundi. [October 2020-June 2021]
Karunika Kardak completed her PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of St Andrews in 2019. Her doctoral research examined the representation of the 19th century in Uruguayan historical novels published in the aftermath of the country’s recent dictatorship (1973-85). Her exemplary thesis was awarded Runner-Up for the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) Thesis Publication Prize for 2019. Her first monograph, Memory, Identity and the Historical Novel in Uruguay: Opening up the Archive 1985-2010, is based on her doctoral research and is to appear with Legenda in 2021. Her research interests include women’s writing in Latin America, historical fiction, theatre and memory studies. Her current project is women’s writing in 19th-century periodicals in Uruguay. It focuses on El Indiscreto, an illustrated periodical primarily aimed at female readers, and explores how nation-building and the creation of cultural memory narratives are interconnected with the role of women as readers and writers in the 19th century. [October 2020-June 2021]
Ed Naylor is a historian of France and the French empire with research interests spanning decolonisation and colonial legacies, migration, housing and the politics of welfare. He completed his PhD in 2011 at Queen Mary, University of London, and was subsequently Deakin Fellow at the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford, and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is an associate member of the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (Université Paris I) and is collaborating on the research project ‘La ville informelle’ which investigates the transnational construction of ‘informality’ as a category of urban housing. His publications include the edited volume France’s Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire (2018) and journal articles in French History, Contemporary European History and Plein droit. Naylor is currently writing a monograph entitled Decolonising the City: Migration, Housing and Poverty in Marseille (1950-1980) which explores how ideas of marginality and social exclusion were reshaped during France’s transition from empire-state to nation-state. [September-October 2020]
Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, memory study, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco is working on a project on food discourses and alimentary imagination in the cultural history and memory of Italian women. Her project comprises the completion of a monograph, three articles of comparative nature, two public engagement events, and two international conferences. She is currently co-organising The Diasporic Plate: Food in the Contemporary Diasporic World in Times of Crisis, which stems from her research on the last chapter of her monograph. [September-December 2020]
Frederika Tevebring is an intellectual historian working across history of archaeology and German literature, with a focus on gender and material culture. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University where she was affiliated with the Departments of German and Classics. She also holds a MA and BA in Comparative Religious Studies and Ancient Studies from the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research investigates how the ancient past has been reconstructed in literature, museums and scholarship since the 19th century, and is particularly interested in how ancient figures and tropes described as obscene or primitive have challenged idealized notions of antiquity. Her current book project discusses one such figure, the mythical Baubo, who is said to have unveiled herself before the goddess Demeter. Tevebring has published on the reception of this figure in Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud. As a Sylvia Naish Fellow, she will be conducting research on J.J. Bachofen’s theory of a prehistoric matriarchy and the afterlife of this idea in 20th-century art and scholarship. [September 2020-June 2021]
Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specialising in German cinema. Her research specialisms include East German cinema, Cold War German cinema and contemporary historical film. Her monograph, East German Cinema and the Holocaust will be published in April 2021 with Berghahn Books and examines how East German filmmakers approached Jewish persecution in a country where memories of National Socialist persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Elizabeth will be developing her next project which examines the role of film festivals as sites for German cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. She will also be developing three further articles related to her research interests in East German and contemporary historical films, namely a chapter on Jutta Wachowiak’s film roles in 1980s East German cinema which will appear in an edited volume examining German Stars, an article on the GDR’s forgotten television star Agnes Kraus, which will be published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, as well as a chapter on the hit television series Deutschland 83, 86 and 89 which will appear in an edited volume exploring the transculturation of German cultural and intellectual history in contemporary cinema and television. Alongside her research and teaching interests, Elizabeth is also closely involved in developing inclusive practice at universities, as well as promoting German cinema through events and collaborations with museums, cinemas and public organisations. [Nov 2020-June 2021]
Konstantin Zamyatin is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His current research interests are ethnic politics and language politics in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. He currently works on completing a monograph tentatively entitled Language Policies in the Finno-Ugric Republics of Post-Soviet Russia: Revisiting Revivalism. [September 2020-June 2021]
2019-2020
Nathaniel J.P. Barron is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Ernst Bloch Centre, an early-career researcher and adult education lecturer specialising in German philosophy. He received a PhD in 2017 from the University of Central Lancashire in a funded project that explores the nature of language in Ernst Bloch's speculative materialism. He has been a visiting researcher at the Hegel-Archiv, Bochum, the Ernst Bloch Zentrum, Ludwigshafen, and the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Berlin. He is currently re-working his thesis, entitled Language in Ernst Bloch's Speculative Materialism: A Reading of Anacoluthon for Brill's 'Historical Materialism' series (2020). The work situates the importance of Bloch's language-speculation in the Continental tradition via a sustained reading of anacoluthon, a rhetorical figure which denotes a break in the flow of syntax. He is also currently writing a book-chapter on Bloch and creativity for a series entitled 'Anticipation, Creativity, Ontology: Making the Present from the Future' (2020). [September 2019-May 2020]
Sam Dolbear completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2018, where his work formed around a diagram of diasporic friendship, composed by Walter Benjamin in 1932: a representation of a generation fractured by various social, political and economic crises. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow, he will continue this work through the examination of two figures on the diagram: the radio-producer, composer and poet Ernst Schoen (1884-1960) and the physician, sexologist and chiromancer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), both of whom settled in London after 1933. The project forms around questions of sensory disintegration in exiled life, through various strains of sonic and haptic modernisms. In addition to this research, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Skidmore College, and has published and edited extensively including Walter Benjamin: The Storyteller (2016), edited and translated with Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski and, most recently, three self-published pamphlets on The Arcades Project, co-edited with Hannah Proctor. With a number of others, he has also recently founded MayDay Radio, an audio collective based in London. [September 2019-June 2020]
Christopher Hogarth is Lecturer in Comparative Literature/French at the University of South Australia. He received his PhD from Northwestern University and his BA from the University of Bath (French/Italian). Following his first year of work there, Northwestern University sponsored him to study in Senegal, which became the focus of his doctoral study. From 2006 to 2011 he was Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Wagner College, New York City. In 2012 he began his role as Lecturer in French in the University of South Australia. He currently teaches and co-ordinates courses in the Creative Writing and Literature major within the Bachelor of Arts degree and supervises seven doctoral candidates in Literary Studies, Translation Studies, History and Creative Writing. He has published especially on the intersection of literature from France, Italy and Senegal and Francophone African/Afropean intellectuals. Alongside his colleague Natalie Edwards, he has published seven different volumes of essays (with journals such as Women in French, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, French Cultural Studies and the Australian Journal of French Studies) and is at work on an eighth. In January 2019 they began work as joint Chief Investigator on a three-year Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project entitled 'Transnational Selves. French Narratives of Migration to Australia'. In 2020, he is taking up a Fellowship at Cardiff University's School of Modern Languages and Translation before working at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing. [April-May 2020]
Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology at University of Calabria (Italy). He was Vice-President of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia from 2012 to 2016. He has authored almost 200 publications ranging from the history of sociology to the sociology of culture, from studies on daily life to studies on memory, experience and narrative. His current research is about individual and collective memories of past futures, and about narrative approaches in the social sciences. Among his English-language articles are 'Simmel on Memory. Some Observations about Memory and Modern Experience' in Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology (1990); 'Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues' (Time & Society, 2001); 'Memories of the Italian Colonial Past' (International Social Sciences Journal, 2011); 'Memories of the Future' in Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (2015). Among his more recent Italian volumes are: Il racconto come dimora. Heimat e le memorie d’Europa (2009); Intenzioni di memoria. Sfera pubblica e memoria autocritica (2016); Memorie del futuro. Un percorso tra sociologia e studi culturali (2017). A partial intellectual autobiography was published entitled 'Becoming a Sociologist in Italy' in The Disobedient Generation. Social Theorists in the Sixties (2005). [April-May 2020]
James Leveque is a native of California. His research interests lie at the intersections of literature, religion, and social theory – particularly in 20th-century English, American, and French literature – and his first monograph, entitled Words Like Fire: Prophecy and Apocalypse in Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Pound (Legenda) will be published in late 2019. He has had the opportunity to teach literature at the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, and the University of Dundee, and currently teaches at the CityLit in London and the Scottish Universities International Summer School in Edinburgh. In 2018, James was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, where he began exploring the literature of the post-war counterculture, spirituality, and nationalism. James is also a poet and a producer of the Savage Reading podcast. [September 2019-February 2020]
Linde Koster-Luijnenburg is an OWRI Fellow in Languages and Communities, attached to the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. Her PhD dissertation (Warwick University) explores representations of the ‘Black Other’ in the commedia all’italiana, central figure in four nationally-celebrated Italian comedic films between 1952-1968. This cinematographic Black Other gains in agency over this period of two decades, coming to dominate iconic ‘Italian’ public spaces inside film plots, and from a meta-perspective, taking over a dominant position in some of the most critically acclaimed cinematographic productions now belonging to what we could describe as the ‘Italian cultural archive’. Luijnenburg is also a filmmaker, which is what brings her to the Institute: her project will focus on linguistic, sonic, visual, and material information communicating imaginaries of identities in the Somali diasporic communities in Birmingham and London relating to italianità (awkwardly translated with ‘Italianness’) by combining classical sociolinguistic and ethnographic analyses and approaches with postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and her practical and theoretical specialty, the ‘unimedial language’ (Moncao, 2009) of the cinematic gaze. She will produce a short film/documentary/performance or hybrid video, in which discussions (in Italian) with Somali diasporic individuals will provide insight into their associations with the Italian language and culture. Luijnenburg has published articles on Italian racial identities in film, Somali-Dutch literature, and Italian literature. She is currently working on an article on her documentary project, 'Africa is You', on the Somali-Dutch diasporic community in Birmingham, UK [September-November 2019]
Anna-Dorothea Ludewig is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow attached to the Research Centre for German & Austrian exile Studies at the Institute. She is a researcher at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam, and Lecturer at the University of Potsdam and at the Bundeswehr University, Munich. She has been a member and academic coordinator of the Graduate School MAKOM. Place and Places in Judaism and received her PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2007. More recently she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg and, in 2016, was Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College, NH. Since 2010 she has been member of the editorial staff of the online periodical MEDAON – Journal for Jewish Life in Research and Education. She is currently working on a research and book project (Habilitation): ‘Jewesses – Images of Femininity in 20th-Century German Literature’. Recent publications include: [co-ed. with Steffen Höhne] Goethe und die Juden – die Juden und Goethe. Beiträge zu einer Beziehungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte (2018); [with Elke-Vera Kotowski and Hannah Lotte Lund) Zweisamkeiten. Zwölf außergewöhnliche Paare in Berlin (2016); [co-ed. with Ulrike Brunotte and Axel Stähler] Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (2015). [February 2020]
Gianmarco Mancosu received his first doctorate in Italian Colonial History at the University of Cagliari (May 2015) and has successfully defended his second doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick (January 2020). His research interests deal mostly with Italian colonial history and culture, film production about the fascist empire and Italian decolonization, the post-colonial presence of Italian communities in Africa, the memories and legacies of colonialism in modern and contemporary Italy, the construction of national memories and identities. He has published extensively on those topics. He is currently working on a monograph about fascist film propaganda about the Ethiopian war. He was Luisa Selis Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute in 2018, working on history and belongings of Sardinian migrant communities in Europe, and Research Assistant of the project ‘The Dialectics of Modernity. Modernism, Modernization, and the Arts Under European Dictatorships’ (University of Manchester, 2018). As an Institute Visiting Fellow, he is working on representations of Sardinia as surfacing from a vast array of cultural products and practices. [October 2019-June 2020]
Ed Naylor is a historian of France and the French empire with research interests spanning decolonisation and colonial legacies, migration, housing and the politics of welfare. He completed his PhD in 2011 at Queen Mary University of London, was subsequently Deakin Fellow at the European Studies Centre of St Antony's College, Oxford, and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages and Area Studies at the University of Portsmouth. He is an associate member of the Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains (Université Paris I) and is collaborating on the research project ‘La ville informelle’ which investigates the transnational construction of ‘informality’ as a category of urban housing. His publications include the edited volume France’s Modernising Mission: Citizenship, Welfare and the Ends of Empire (2018) and journal articles in French History, Contemporary European History and Plein droit. Naylor is currently writing a monograph entitled Decolonising the City: Migration, Housing and Poverty in Marseille (1950-1980) which explores how ideas of marginality and social exclusion were reshaped during France’s transition from empire-state to nation-state. [October 2019-July 2020]
Aled Rees is an OWRI fellow in Languages and Communities. His research interests lie primarily in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature with particular focus on the themes of marginalisation, displacement, migration and translingualism. He received his PhD in 2017 from Swansea University. Using a theoretical framework rooted in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti, his doctoral thesis entitled ‘Literal and Metaphorical Spaces at the Margins: Marginalisation in Contemporary Colombian Literature’, explored the literary representation of otherness in current Colombian literary production employing the figures of the displaced subject, woman, the Afro-Colombian and the sicario as case studies. Before joining the Institute, he was a postdoctoral researcher on the OWRI ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’ project based at Swansea University. Under the research title: ‘British Bilingual Writers: Language Ambassadors or Mental Migrants’, he examined the manner in which British and Irish novelists with knowledge of two languages function as intercultural and interlingual mediators between language communities, in particular the Hispanic/Anglophone paradigm. At the Institute, he will be analysing the incorporation and presentation of parlache in three commercially successful Colombian texts. Additionally, due to the linguistically hybrid nature of parlache, the second strand of his research will investigate the translation strategies employed by translators when dealing with the language. [December 2019-February 2020]
Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, travel writing, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews, and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco will be working on a monograph and on a stand-alone journal article focused on food discourses and alimentary imagination in Italian culture. Looking at the interaction of political discourses and personal emotions emerging from autobiographical writing, memoirs, and fiction, her project investigates how taste and alimentary imagination are used to narrate emotions and memories significant for women’s history and subjectivities. [September 2019-June 2020]
Benjamin Schaper is Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford. He received an MSt and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, during which he analysed the poetological notion of readability in German literary history – with a particular focus on the post-1990 period. His subsequent monograph Poetik und Politik der Lesbarkeit in der deutschen Literatur was published in 2017. Schaper’s current project explores loneliness in the digital age and seeks to show how technologies such as social media, AI, virtual reality, and anthropomorphic machines have complicated questions of embodiment in transcending the traditional Cartesian distinction between body and mind. The project tackles the ambiguities of discourses on embodiment and technology through the lens of literary studies to establish loneliness as a complex result of human-machine-interaction. As Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow, Schaper will work on two articles enhancing both the narratological and theoretical underpinning of the project: the first will discuss the applicability of Sherry Turkle’s concept of the ‘robotic moment’ (2011), i.e. people’s ‘emotional [and] philosophical […] readiness’ to accept robots as pets, friends and even romantic partners, to the films Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014) as well as Black Mirror’s (since 2011) episode Be Right Back (2013). The second will analyse notions of embodiment in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963), Robert Seethaler’s Ein ganzes Leben (2014), and Thomas von Steinaecker’s Die Verteidigung des Paradieses (2012). [January–June 2019]
Mariano Martin Schlez is an OWRI Fellow in Languages and Communities and a CONICET researcher and assistant professor at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina. As an undergraduate he studied History at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires, where he took up his first teaching post in 2005. Mariano obtained a PhD Fellowship from CONICET (2008), and defended his doctoral thesis, 'The late-colonial commercial circuits. The case of a monopolist trader: Diego de Agüero (1770-1820)' in 2014. He was then awarded a CONICET postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-2016) for the project 'The trajectory of British commercial capital during the revolutionary period. The case of Hugh Dallas (1816-1824)'. This project studied the nature and trajectory of Spanish and British commercial capital in the River Plate during the crisis of the colonial system and the transition to independence. Mariano then joined the 'American and Argentine History Area', of the Humanities Department of the Universidad Nacional del Sur under the direction of Dr Hernán A. Silva and the Research Group 'The Others in political historical dimension: tensions, conflicts and power dynamics in the Río de la Plata (late 18th and early 19th centuries)', directed by Marcela Tejerina. In 2014, Mariano was awarded a research grant from the École des Hautes Études Hispaniques et Ibériques - Casa de Velázquez, in Madrid, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Nottingham for the project 'Nineteenth-century Latin America History: The Political Independence Process', under the supervision of Professors Tony Kapcia and Catherine Davies. This allowed him to develop his research in the Spanish (AGI, Seville), British (National Archives, British Library and Baring Brothers Archives, London) and Argentinian archives (National Archive, Archive of the Province of Buenos Aires Bank). Since September 2016, Mariano has held the position of assistant researcher at CONICET with the project 'Trade between Buenos Aires and Great Britain. Origin, development and measurement of an economic, political, cultural and social bond (1806-1829)'. This required research visits to London (the most recent funded by the OWRI CLDRC Fellowship at this Institute) and Spain (in 2018, with a grant from the International Postgraduate University Association -AUIP-). Mariano has published in major economic history journals (Revista de Indias, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, Boletín Americanista, Americanía y América Latina en la Historia Económica), and in edited books published in Argentina, México, France and Spain). His current OWRI CLDRC-funded research will be published as a monograph and studies the origins of the British commercial community in Buenos Aires. [October 2019-June 2020]
Konstantin Zamyatin is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His current research interests are ethnic politics and language politics in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. He is completing a monograph tentatively entitled ‘Language Policies in the Finno-Ugric Republics of Post-Soviet Russia: Revisiting Revivalism’. [January-June 2020]
Erica Y. Zou is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow at the Institute. Her PhD research entitled ‘Re-imagining Socialist Transnationality through Women’s Writing: A Comparative Literary Analysis of Christa Wolf and Ding Ling', undertaken at King’s College London and the Humboldt University, Berlin, deals with the transnational connection of socialism and feminism in the literary works of two socialist women writers: Christa Wolf from East Germany and Ding Ling from China. Zou has published on this topic in the Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies. During her stay, she will pursue her new research project on the internationalist literary connection between German and Chinese women writers in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular, this project asks, how did women articulate their experiences during the revolution and how did they imagine a truly internationalist socialist movement? [September 2019-June 2020]
2018-2019
Catherine Barbour is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Surrey and OWRI Visiting Fellow at the Institute, attached to the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She was previously Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she completed her PhD on narrative by Galician women writers in 2016. Catherine’s research interests lie primarily in contemporary Spanish and Galician literatures, with a particular focus on migrant writing and writing by women. At the Institute, she will be examining translingual migrant identities in Galician and Spanish-language novels written by women of German and Romanian origin, as part of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’. Her monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers will be published in 2019. [September-December 2018]
Deirdre Byrnes is Senior Lecturer in German at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests include GDR literature, contemporary women writers in German-language literature, generational memory transmission and contested memories. She has published extensively on Monika Maron, including a monograph Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context (2011). Her article 'Remembering at the Margins: Trauma, Memory Practices and the Recovery of Marginalised Voices at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial' appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies in December 2017. She is co-editor, together with Jean Conacher and Gisela Holfter, of German Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture (2018). As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will be exploring the media of testimony and the challenges of post-memory in Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe and Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther. [September-October 2018]
Tamara Colacicco received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. Entitled Strade e volti della propaganda estera fascista: la diffusione dell’italiano in Gran Bretagna, 1921-40, her dissertation focuses on the history of Italian Studies in Britain during the interwar period. Through an investigation of previously unexplored archival sources from the Archive of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the London National Archives, this research identifies and examines the use of Italian language and culture in British universities such as UCL, Oxford, Liverpool and Manchester as a tool of Fascist propaganda abroad. Colacicco has published several articles on this topic in British and American journals such as The Italianist (2015) and California Italian Studies (2016). She also developed her doctoral research themes into her first monograph entitled La propaganda fascista nelle università inglesi: la diplomazia culturale di Mussolini in Gran Bretagna due to appear with FrancoAngeli's Storia Internazionale dell’età contemporanea series by the end of 2017. In 2016-17 Colacicco was a member of the British School at Rome and an award-holder at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has researched Anglo-Italian cultural and political relations during the interwar period by looking at the use of English language and culture in Fascist Italy as an instrument of pro-British propaganda among Italians. In so doing, she has systematically compiled the history of British cultural institutions in Italy such as the British Institute of Florence and the British Council. She has developed the results of this research into an article for Modern Italy entitled ‘The British Institutes and the British Council in Fascist Italy: from Harold Goad to Ian Greenlees, 1917-40’. In connection with the exploration of the history of the Florentine British Institute and the spread of Fascist and anti-Fascist ideologies among British intellectual circles, Colacicco has been awarded a prize by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, dedicated to her late supervisor, Professor Duggan (1957-2015); this research will lead to an article which has been accepted for publication in 2018 by Contemporanea. Apart from specialising in Modern Italian History with a specific focus on Anglo-Italian history, Memory, Intellectual History and Cultural History, she has research interests in Cultural Studies and the History of the Church and Catholicism: this includes the investigation of organised crime in Southern Italy, particularly the Camorra, its cultural representations through literature and cinema and its ambiguous relations with religion and the Church. In connection with this research Colacicco was awarded a grant by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to present the results of her research at the University of Sydney in 2015 and has recently published a book chapter entitled ‘Il clero Campano tra collaborazione e lotta alla camorra’ in L’immaginario devoto tra mafia e antimafia: riti, culti, santi (2017). She has also cooperated with the Università di Roma Torvergata for an in-progress official website on the Italian mafia and the Church. She has given papers at several major conferences, including ASMI, ACIS and the Society for Italian Studies. At the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Colacicco will explore the ‘political memories’ of leading British pro-Italian personalities based in London and Florence and multidimensional aspects of transnational Fascism, particularly the links and exchanges between Italian and British fascists, with an emphasis on the impact of Catholicism and Italian economic theories in developing Fascist doctrine outside Italy. Among other outcomes to be developed during her Fellowship, this research will also result in a monograph entitled Anglo-Italian Transnational Fascism: Harold Goad and the ‘Italian Tradition’, 1919-45. [September 2018-May 2019]
Sara Delmedico received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Cambridge for her dissertation entitled 'From the Restoration to the Pisanelli Code (1815-1865): A Cultural and Historical Assessment of the Legal Status of Women in the North of the Italian Peninsula'. Her most recent publications include ‘The “Appropriateness” of Dowry: Women and Inheritance in the Papal States in the Early Nineteenth Century’ (GLOSSAE. European Journal of Legal History, 2016); ‘Alimenti e dote alla periferia dello Stato Pontificio: la famiglia Pucci’ (The Italianist, 2017); ‘Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica’ in Da madri a cittadine. Le donne italiane dall’Unità alla Repubblica (The Italianist [Special Issue], 2018), co-edited together with Manuela Di Franco and Helena Sanson. Her research interests cover women’s history with a particular focus on the law and the Italian peninsula. She is editor-in-chief of the history journal Chronica Mundi. During her tenure of the Luisa Selis Visiting Fellowship, she will be working on a project entitled ‘Being a Woman in 19th-Century Sardinia. Love, Seduction and Reputation in the Law in Action’. [April-June 2019]
Margit Dirscherl is a Research Fellow at the University of Munich and from October 2018, will be a Lecturer at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the University of London in 2012, and was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Bristol the following year. Her research interests lie in 19th- and 20th-century German and European literature and thought, particularly the history of literary modernism, 'Großstadtliteratur', everyday life in literature, and Anglo-German cultural relations. Her publications include the monograph Heinrich Heines Poetik der Stadt (2016), the co-edited volume Alltags-Surrealismus: Literatur, Theater, Film (2012), and articles on Louis Aragon, Siegfried Kracauer, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig. She is co-editor of the yearbook Angermion. At present, she is co-editing volumes on Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (2018) and the Austrian writer Alexander Lernet-Holenia (2018). Her current book project is a literary history of railway stations – on which she will also work as a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow, with a particular focus on Thomas Mann. [September 2018]
Artemis Ignatidou is an early-career cultural historian working on 19th century European history, with a special interest in western art music, musical exchange in the continent, and the construction of reciprocal musical and national identities through the arts. She holds a PhD in modern European history (2018), an MA in Modern World History (2013), and a BA in Media & Communications (2011). She enjoys writing literature, plays the piano and starts learning to play a new instrument every month; she performs and is a proficient kazoo player. Her work on 19th- and 20th-century musical exchange is currently under publication. In 2016 and 2018 she was awarded fully-funded residencies at the prestigious Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Canada. At the Ernst Bloch Centre she will be working on music and ideology in the 19th century, gender representation in the opera, and contemporary musical practice. [September 2018-June 2019]
Ellen Jones is an OWRI Fellow in Languages and Communities. She was previously Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Teaching Associate at Queen Mary University of London, where she completed her PhD. Her main research interests are translingualism and translation in contemporary Latinx and Latin American prose writing; at the Institute she will be examining how language and gender fluidity intersect in Mar Paraguayo (1992), a trilingual novella by Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno, and its recent translation by Canadian poet Erín Moure as Paraguayan Sea (2017). Ellen is Reviews Editor and Assistant to the Editor in Chief at the Hispanic Research Journal and Criticism Editor at Asymptote, a journal of international literature in translation. She is also a translator from Spanish into English and is currently working on Trout, Belly Up, a collection of short stories by the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Fuentes for Charco Press. [September 2018-June 2019]
Robert Leucht is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow at the Institute and Senior Lecturer at the University of Zurich. His primary literary research interests are utopias, exile, and translation studies. Leucht received his MA from the University of Vienna and his PhD from the University of Zurich, with an interdisciplinary study of the postmodern American writer Walter Abish, who was born in Austria and expelled by the Nazis in 1938 (2006). His second monograph [Habilitation], Dynamiken politischer Imagination, explores the history of literary utopias from 1848 until 1930 (2016). He has taught at the Universities of Zurich and Lausanne, Queen Mary College University of London, Rutgers University, the University of Illinois and – under the auspices of the Fulbright Program – the University of Oklahoma. At the Institute Robert is pursuing his current project, 'When poets become heroes. Alexander Pope and the German writers of the mid-18th century', part of a book-length study provisionally entitled Dichterdarsteller um 1800. During his time in London, he will explore how German authors such as Klopstock, Lessing, and Wieland composed a biographical legend of Alexander Pope, presenting him as an artistically and economically independent writer, and thus provided themselves with a sense of vocational aspiration and direction. [January–February 2019]
Malachi McIntosh writes fiction and literary criticism. His research focuses on writing by and about migrant communities and his work to date has been published in Broadcast, The Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Fugue, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Under the Radar, Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature, andThe Book of Birmingham and Wasafiri. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon. Malachi was the 2014 recipient of the David Higham Writing Award at the University of East Anglia, and led the Our Migration Story project that received the Royal Historical Society's 2018 Public History Prize for 'Best Online Resource'. He is currently working on Leicester University and the National Trust's 'Colonial Countryside' project and will be writing and co-editing a collection entitled Interpreting Communities: Minor, Minority and Small Literatures in Europe as an OWRI Fellow. [October-December 2018]
Cat Moir is Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Sydney, where she also contributes to the European Studies programme. Her research is broadly concerned with the history of ideas in Europe from the late 18th to the late 20th century. A particular focus has been 20th-century critical theory and its intellectual roots in German idealism and romanticism, historical materialism, (neo-)Kantianism, and psychoanalysis. Her first book, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Brill), provides a new interpretation of Bloch’s philosophy that situates it in the context of historical debates about the relationship between natural science and materialist philosophy. Moir's current project, 'Biological Thought and the European Left, 1800-1933', examines how progressive social and political thought in Europe was influenced by scientific biology from its emergence as a distinct discipline around 1800, to 1933 when the rise of the Nazi biological state fundamentally changed the European intellectual and political landscape. [January-March 2019]
Caroline Potter has published widely on French music since Debussy. A graduate in both French and music, her work situates music in broad cultural, artistic and social contexts. Caroline was Series Advisor to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘City of Light: Paris 1900-1950’ season and worked with the orchestra’s digital team on resources. Her most recent book, Erik Satie, a Parisian composer and his world (2016) was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year. She is musicological consultant to the AHRC-funded Baudelaire Song Project, based at Birmingham University, and at the Institute she will be researching the literary and intellectual contexts of Pierre Boulez’s music. [September 2018-June 2019]
Patrizia Sambuco’s main areas of research are modern and contemporary Italian culture. Her interests focus on women’s writing, travel writing, food and emotion studies. She is the author of Corporeal Bonds: the Daughter-Mother Relationship in 20th-Century Italian Women’s Writing (2012) published in Italian as Corpi e linguaggi (2014), as well as editor of Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-Wold War II Italian Culture (2018) and Italian Women Writers 1800-2000 (2015). She has held teaching positions at the University of Bristol and the University of St Andrews and was Cassamarca Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University in Australia. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Dr Sambuco will be working on a monograph and a stand-alone journal article focused on food discourses and alimentary imagination in Italian culture. Looking at the interaction of political discourses and personal emotions emerging from autobiographical writing, memoirs, and fiction, her project investigates how taste and alimentary imagination are used to narrate emotions and memories significant for women’s history and subjectivities. [September 2018-June 2019]
Fiona Sampson has published in more than 35 languages and has received the Zlaten Prsten (Macedonia), the Charles Angoff Award (US), the 2016 Slovo Podgrmec Prize and the 2015 Povelji za međunarodnu saradnju Award (Bosnia), the Aark Arts International Poetry Prize (India), and has been shortlisted for the Evelyn Encelot Prize for European Women Poets. She received an MBE for services to literature in the 2017 Queen’s New Year’s Honours. From 2005-2012 she was Editor of Poetry Review; she is now Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton, where she is Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre. She is a Fellow and former Council Member of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association, the Higher Education Association and the Wordsworth Trust, and Patron of the Anglo-Russian Cultural Institute and of Living Words. Her publications include 29 volumes of poetry, literary non-fiction and criticism; she has also co-translated 4 volumes of poetry and developed an editorial specialism in contemporary poetry in translation. She has received the Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from the Society of Authors, a number of Writer’s Awards from both the English and the Welsh Arts Councils, and various Poetry Book Society commendations, and has been shortlisted twice for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. A prolific broadcaster and critic, she has held a number of international writing Fellowships, and serves regularly on international juries. Earlier, she pioneered writing in health care in the UK, and directed an international poetry festival in Wales for 5 years before becoming Director of the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust for literary translation. She recently published a critically acclaimed biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Her study of musical form in poetry, Lyric Cousins, and her latest collection The Catch (Penguin Random House) both appeared in 2016. She is currently completing work on an AHRC-funded research project looking at poet to poet trio translation, and writing a libretto for the composer Philip Grange as part of the AHRC-funded OWRI initiative. [September 2018-June 2019]
Adina Stroia is an early-career researcher working on women’s life-writing and visual culture. She received a PhD from King’s College London for her AHRC-funded thesis entitled ‘Narratives of Loss and Mourning in Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Marie Nimier, Camille Laurens and Annie Ernaux’. Her research interests include life-writing, thanatology, temporality in autofiction, doubling and queerness, and visual culture. Her most recent publications include the article ‘Reconfigurations of Mourning in Contemporary French Women’s Writing’ in Études Francophones and the interview ‘Camille Laurens: L’écriture depuis soi’ in Dalhousie French Studies. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will be investigating the process of ageing in Agnès Varda’s late documentary works. [September 2018-February 2019]
Jack Tarlton is an actor, director and teacher with extensive experience of international work. His theatre credits include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Sheffield Crucible, nominated for Best Supporting Actor at Broadway World UK Awards), The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Attic Theatre Company), City of Glass (59 productions, Lyric Hammersmith & HOME, Manchester), BRENDA (High Tide & The Yard), Hedda Gabler (Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh), From Morning to Midnight and Coram Boy (National Theatre), A Doll’s House and Rats’ Tales (Royal Exchange, Manchester), Crave, Illusions and The Golden Dragon (Actors Touring Company), The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents (The Gate), Afore Night Come (Young Vic) and A Month in the Country and Troilus and Cressida (Royal Shakespeare Company). Screen work includes The Imitation Game, Doctor Who and The Genius of Mozart. He has directed staged readings of plays from Catalonia, Iceland, Norway and Sweden at festivals and cultural institutions across Britain including the Embassies of Iceland and Norway and the Free Word Centre. Jack has taught Shakespeare and modern drama studies and adaptation of prose for the stage at the University in Munich, Oxford University, East 15 Acting School and for The Old Vic and Out of Joint. [October 2018-April 2019]
2017-2018
Catherine Barbour is currently Lecturer in Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast and OWRI Visiting Fellow at the Institute, attached to the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. She was previously Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she completed her PhD on narrative by Galician women writers in 2016. Catherine’s research interests lie primarily in contemporary Spanish and Galician literatures, with a particular focus on migrant writing and writing by women. At the Institute, she will be examining translingual migrant identities in Galician and Spanish-language novels written by women of German and Romanian origin, as part of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’. Her monograph Contemporary Galician Women Writers will be published by Legenda in 2019. [May-July 2018]
Tamara Colacicco received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. Entitled Strade e volti della propaganda estera fascista: la diffusione dell’italiano in Gran Bretagna, 1921-40, her dissertation focuses on the history of Italian Studies in Britain during the interwar period. Through an investigation of previously unexplored archival sources from the Archive of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the London National Archives, this research identifies and examines the use of Italian language and culture in British universities such as UCL, Oxford, Liverpool and Manchester as a tool of Fascist propaganda abroad. Colacicco has published several articles on this topic in British and American journals such as The Italianist (2015) and California Italian Studies (2016). She also developed her doctoral research themes into her first monograph entitled La propaganda fascista nelle università inglesi: la diplomazia culturale di Mussolini in Gran Bretagna due to appear with FrancoAngeli's Storia Internazionale dell’età contemporanea series by the end of 2017. In 2016-17 Colacicco was a member of the British School at Rome and an award-holder at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has researched Anglo-Italian cultural and political relations during the interwar period by looking at the use of English language and culture in Fascist Italy as an instrument of pro-British propaganda among Italians. In so doing, she has systematically compiled the history of British cultural institutions in Italy such as the British Institute of Florence and the British Council. She has developed the results of this research into an article for Modern Italy entitled ‘The British Institutes and the British Council in Fascist Italy: from Harold Goad to Ian Greenlees, 1917-40’. In connection with the exploration of the history of the Florentine British Institute and the spread of Fascist and anti-Fascist ideologies among British intellectual circles, Colacicco has been awarded a prize by the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, dedicated to her late supervisor, Professor Duggan (1957-2015); this research will lead to an article which has been accepted for publication in 2018 by Contemporanea. Apart from specialising in Modern Italian History with a specific focus on Anglo-Italian history, Memory, Intellectual History and Cultural History, she has research interests in Cultural Studies and the History of the Church and Catholicism: this includes the investigation of organised crime in Southern Italy, particularly the Camorra, its cultural representations through literature and cinema and its ambiguous relations with religion and the Church. In connection with this research Colacicco was awarded a grant by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies (ACIS) to present the results of her research at the University of Sydney in 2015 and has recently published a book chapter entitled ‘Il clero Campano tra collaborazione e lotta alla camorra’ in L’immaginario devoto tra mafia e antimafia: riti, culti, santi (2017). She has also cooperated with the Università di Roma Torvergata for an in-progress official website on the Italian mafia and the Church. She has given papers at several major conferences, including ASMI, ACIS and the Society for Italian Studies. At the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Colacicco will explore the ‘political memories’ of leading British pro-Italian personalities based in London and Florence and multidimensional aspects of transnational Fascism, particularly the links and exchanges between Italian and British fascists, with an emphasis on the impact of Catholicism and Italian economic theories in developing Fascist doctrine outside Italy. Among other outcomes to be developed during her Fellowship, this research will also result in a monograph entitled Anglo-Italian Transnational Fascism: Harold Goad and the ‘Italian Tradition’, 1919-45. [November 2017-June 2018]
Jeremy Coleman is a Teaching Assistant in the Music Department, University of Aberdeen, and a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre for German Thought. He received his PhD in Musicology from King’s College London for research on Wagner, supervised by Michael Fend and John Deathridge (2016). Prior to that, he read Music at Clare College, Cambridge, and continued studies there at graduate level. His various research interests centre on social and material approaches to 19th-century music history, with particular focus on French and German composer-critics. He is pursuing two main projects: a study of musical production and criticism during the Vormärz and July Monarchy, and a more theoretical contribution to Marxist music historiography. In general, he seeks to use critical theory and philosophy, especially Marxist thought, in order to shed new light on the more traditional concerns and materials of music history. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Musical Association and Music & Letters, and he has presented on various topics to international conferences in UK, USA, Belgium, Italy and Poland. He is also in demand as a pianist and accompanist, specialising in song accompaniment and opera repetiteurship. [September 2017-June 2018]
Jean Conacher is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing. Her literary research focuses primarily on GDR and post-1989 literature and film, with a particular interest in cultural legacy. Recent publications include: 'Capturing the Zeitgeist: On human experience and personal historiography in Helga Königsdorf’s 1989 oder Ein Moment Schönheit' in Enriching Perspectives: Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture (2018), 'Adapting Hein’s Willenbrock: Andreas Dresen and the legacy of the GDR "ensemble" tradition' in Adaptation as a Collaborative Art – Process and Practice (2018), 'Women at work. Reflections on social identity and the private self in Die Polizistin (2000), Willenbrock (2005) and Steigerlied (2013)' in Andreas Dresen (2017), and 'Transformation and education in GDR youth literature: a script theory approach' (International Research in Children's Literature, 2016). She is currently completing a monograph on the portrayal of transformation and education in GDR literature to be published by Camden House. During her fellowship at the CCWW, she will be pursuing a study of the work of mathematician and writer Helga Königsdorf with a view to developing the first full-length critical treatment in English of her complete political and literary writings. [January–February 2018]
Corinna Deppner received her PhD in Romance Literature from the University of Hamburg. Her PhD thesis (2016) deals with the transformation of knowledge in the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa and Moacyr Scliar, the influence of Jewish culture on Latin American literature, and questions of literary and visual culture. Whilst conducting her doctoral research, she held a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, and worked for a year at the Institute for the History of German Jews (Hamburg). She has lectured at the Institute for Romance Literature at the University of Hamburg and the University of Erfurt. Her main research interests are the Spanish Golden Age, Jewish and Converso Literature, and Argentine exile literature. In January 2017, her monograph on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story 'El Aleph' was published. She currently holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Erfurt. At the Institute she will conduct research into 'Interreligious encounters in mystical worlds of experience of the early modern era. Emotion research as a passageway between literatures of the 16th and 20th centuries', of which the aim is to establish a relationship between the poetical writings in which Teresa of Ávila reproduced her emotionally charged utterances and literatures of the 20th century. One outstanding example in terms of comparable characteristics in the Ibero-American context is the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, whose literature draws on major sources of inspiration that are also decisive for the work of Ávila. The research project has the goal of newly interpreting the mystic poetry of Teresa of Ávila and the modern mystic literature of Clarice Lispector from the perspective of emotion research. One achievement of this branch of research, which has arisen over the last 20 years, is to reveal trans-epoch structures that relate to the articulation of mysticism and emotions in the arts. [October-November 2017]
Anje Müller Gjesdal is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication at the Norwegian School of Economics, where she teaches French language and culture. Gjesdal holds a PhD in French Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, and her current research is centred on the linguistic representation of migration and exile in contemporary francophone literature, with a strong interest in transdisciplinary collaboration. She is a member of the interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic research group Migrant Narratives at the University of Bergen, which focuses on the representation of migration and exile in literature, film and the visual arts. As an OWRI Visiting Fellow associated with the ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’ project, Gjesdal will analyse translingual practices in Abdellah Taïa’s novels with particular attention to how such practices shape the representation of a post-colonial critique, and challenge stereotypical representations of national identity and gender. [February 2018]
Gisela Holfter is Senior Lecturer in German and Joint Director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick. She studied in Cologne, Cambridge and St Louis. Prior to her appointment in Limerick in 1996, she worked in Dunedin and Belfast. Her research interests include German-Irish relations; German literature (19th century to contemporary writing); exile studies; intercultural communication and Business German. She is a member of the PEN German-speaking Writers Abroad and has published on Heinrich Böll, Ludwig Hopf, Ernst Lewy, Annette Kolb and Friedrich Engels among others. Her latest book (with Horst Dickel) is An Irish Sanctuary: German-speaking Refugees in Ireland 1933-1945 (2017). During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellowship, she will pursue her research into the links between British and Irish aid organisations helping German-speaking refugees. [May-June 2018]
Dr Marcas Mac Coinnigh is a Lecturer in Irish and Celtic Studies at Queen’s University Belfast (2007–). He has also held positions as Senior Fulbright Irish Language Scholar in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2010-11), IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Modern Irish, University College Cork (2006-2007) and Vera Furness Research Fellow at the University of Ulster (2003-2006). His principal research interests lie in the fields of Irish Phraseology and Lexicography, Folkloristics and Cultural Memory. He has published in numerous journals including the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, Folklore, Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship and the International Journal of Lexicography. As Visiting Fellow at the Institute, he will pursue research on the Cultural Memory of the Irish Language within Ulster Unionism-Loyalism [February–June 2018].
Sebastian Raj Pender received his doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, and holds degrees from Aberystwyth University and the University of Oxford in International Relations, and Contemporary South Asia respectively. His research focuses on practices of commemoration conducted in colonial and postcolonial settings and, as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will continue his work on the memorialisation of the so-called Indian 'Mutiny' of 1857. Focusing on the (re)construction of physical sites of memory, as well as commemoration ceremonies conducted to mark anniversaries of the colonial conflict, this study interrogates the different ways in which the controversial events of 1857 have been memorialised over the course of 150 years. In so doing, this study contends that it is possible to identify a succession of distinct phases in which commemoration responded to contemporary concerns by shaping the events of 1857 from the perspective of the present. By charting shifts in what it has meant to remember 1857, this study demonstrates the extent to which memory is an inherently contingent process, rooted within the broader socio-political terrain which gives the past its meaning at a given historical moment. Specifically, it shows the extent to which the events of 1857 have always been in a state of becoming as the past is negotiated by successive generations within the ever-changing present. [September 2017-June 2018]
Ellen Pilsworth is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow at the Institute and a Teaching Associate at the University of Bristol, where she teaches courses on German language, literature and culture. Her doctoral thesis, entitled 'Säbel- und Federkriege': Authorial Strategies in Poems of War (1760–1815)' was completed at University College London. She has also studied at St. John's College, Cambridge (MPhil), Ruprecht-Karls Universität, Heidelberg (DAAD-funded visiting scholarship), and The Queen's College, Oxford (BA). Her publications include: '"Also mein allerliebster redette ihre Sapho mit dem Kriege." Literary Roleplay in the War Poetry of Anna Louisa Karsch' (German Life and Letters, 2016), which was awarded the Women in German Studies Postgraduate Essay Prize in 2015; 'Infanticide in Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Faust I: Romantic Variations on a Sturm und Drang Theme' (Oxford German Studies, 2016); and 'R=T=Dialogue? Dialogue as a Model for Research-based Learning at University, with a Focus on Translation in Foreign Language Study.', in Connecting Research and Teaching: Shaping Higher Education with Students edited by Vincent Tong, Alex Standen and Mina Sotiriou (2018). [September 2017-July 2018]
Caroline Potter has published widely on French music since Debussy. A graduate in both French and music, her work situates music in broad cultural, artistic and social contexts. Caroline was Series Advisor to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘City of Light: Paris 1900-1950’ season and worked with the orchestra’s digital team on resources. Her most recent book, Erik Satie, a Parisian composer and his world (2016) was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year. She is musicological consultant to the AHRC-funded Baudelaire Song Project, based at Birmingham University, and at the Institute she will be researching the literary and intellectual contexts of Pierre Boulez’s music. [September 2017-June 2018]
Maria Roca Lizarazu is a Sylvia Naish Fellow, and holds an IAS Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she co-organises the Warwick Memory Group and teaches German language courses Her PhD, completed at the University of Warwick, was entitled ‘Finding the Holocaust in Metaphor. Renegotiations of Trauma in Contemporary German- and Austrian Jewish Literature’, and analysed representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War by a range of contemporary German-and Austrian Jewish writers belonging to the so-called third generation. She examined specifically how these authors relate to the events from the position of the non-witness and in the face of major shifts in Holocaust memory, which include its increasing hypermediation and globalisation. Her publications include ‘Thomas Mann in Furs: Remediations of Sadomasochism in Maxim Biller’s Im Kopf von Bruno Schulz and Harlem Holocaust’ (Edinburgh German Yearbook, 2017); ‘The Family Tree, the Web, and the Palimpsest: Figures of Postmemory in Katja Petrowskaja's Vielleicht Esther’ (Modern Language Review, 2018); ‘Why Don't You Talk To Me? Transmissional Objects in the Works of Gila Lustiger and Nicole Krauss’ in Translated Memories. Transgenerational Perspectives in Literature on the Holocaust (2018). [March 2018-June 2018]
Eva-Maria Thüne holds a Professorship in German Language and Linguistics at the School of Modern Languages and Literature, Translation and Interpretation at the University of Bologna; she is also Dean of the International MA Degree Course, 'Language, Society and Communication’. She held a Fellowshiip at the Bogliasco Foundation in 2008, and at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 2017. Apart from research in the analysis of spoken language in literature and studies in the field of German as a Foreign Language (2010) and German Sociolinguistics (2009), one of her main interests is the interaction of migration and language (mainly from the point of view of the reconstruction of language biographies). For many years she has been engaged in research on what is called in German the 'Israel-Korpus. Emigrantendeutsch in Israel', a corpus of interviews with German speaking refugees (so called 'Jeckes') who settled in Palestine, a project led by Professor Anne Betten of the University of Salzburg (Austria) between 1989 and 1994. Thüne’s investigations have centred on speech representation in the interviews (2008), the importance of objects in this special form of migration (2009), the representation of identity (2010), metaphors of roots (2011; 2015), body experience and identity (2013), and the linguistic expression of grief resulting from loss and separation (2016) - the latter being part of the volume Emotionsausdruck und Erzählstrategien in narrativen Interviews. Analysen zu Gesprächsaufnahmen mit jüdischen Emigranten, edited with Simona Leonardi and Anne Betten (Königshausen & Neumann). During her Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller Visiting Fellowship , she will pursue her research by comparing the interviews she has collected in the UK in 2017 with German-speaking refugees of the pre-war period with the collection of interviews which form the basis for the book Changing Countries (2002) conducted by members of the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute. [February-March 2018]
Will Visconti completed a joint PhD in French Studies and Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the visual and performing arts, transgression, gender and sexuality. He is particularly interested in late 19th-century Paris, early 20th-century art and performance, and the interplay of the past and present across fields including art, fashion, cabaret and burlesque. Visconti's current projects include a biographical study of the performer La Goulue (born Louise Weber), and an exploration of the life and legacy of the Marchesa Luisa Casati. [September 2017- July 2018]
Georgia Wall is an OWRI Visiting Fellow at the Institute and Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study. As part of the OWRI project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Communities’, she will be exploring the relationship between language and community in different generations of Italian-speaking communities in London. Her PhD, ‘Consuming Italy: Contemporary Material Culture and Ethnographic Approaches in Modern Languages’ (University of Warwick/Transnationalizing Modern Languages) used food to profile different patterns of Italian mobility and investigated the themes of class, value and memory. Some of the questions this research has raised are presented in the forthcoming article, ‘Putting the accent on authenticity: a case study of celebrity chef, Gennaro ‘Gino’ D’Acampo’ (Modern Languages Open: Italy Made in England, edited by Giacomo Comiati, Martina Piperno and Kate Willman). (November 2017-January 2018)
2016-2017
Giorgia Alù is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests range from 19th-century Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. She is the author of Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910) (2008), and has published numerous articles on travel writing, women’s writing, the relationship between literature and photography, and 19th-century visual representations of Italy. She has co-edited Enlightening Encounters. Photography in Italian Literature (2015) and special issues of journals on the interrelation between words and the visual. She is completing a monograph on contemporary women’s writing, mobility and photography, and working on a study on photography, identities and ethics in Italy, 1860-1920. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the IMLR.
Bettina Brandt received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and holds MA degrees in French and German Language and Literature from the University of Utrecht. She taught at Harvard, MIT, Columbia University, Barnard College and Montclair State University before joining the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University. Brandt has published articles and book chapters on 20th- and 21st-century literature, the literatures and arts of the historical and the neo avant-gardes, literary multilingualism (especially Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Herta Müller, Yoko Tawada); global early modern relations, and, most recently, she started working on Austrian-Jewish relations and the Holocaust. Brandt co-edited Herta Müller. Politics and Aesthetics (2013) and China in the German Enlightenment (2016). She is also the co-translator of Yoko Tawada’s De Berghollander (2010) and has translated a dozen shorter Tawada pieces in various Dutch and English-language journals and books. During her stay at the Institute Brandt will be working on a new monograph tentatively entitled 'With Love from Vienna: Contextualizing the Daily Life of Viennese Elderly Jews after the Anschluss’. In the last two decades Holocaust studies have seen a notable shift in focus, moving away from examining the persecutors towards the study of Jewish daily life in the German Reich, often through ego-documents such as letters, diaries, memoirs or other personal objects. 'With Love from Vienna' follows this trend and contributes to it by concentrating on a still understudied group — elderly Jews in Vienna awaiting emigration to safe havens, including the USA, often via the UK. The former was, of course, a difficult destination because of the American immigration quotas that were not increased despite intensified anti-Semitism across much of Europe, and, especially relevant here, age discrimination. [May 2017]
Aleksandra Budrewicz is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Modern Languages at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland. Her PhD thesis was devoted to 19th-century Polish translations of William Shakespeare. Her research concentrates on comparative literature, the reception of British authors in Poland (in particular William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and William Morris), as well as Polish translations of British and American literature. She has published widely on these topics, and has co-edited a volume devoted to the reception of Victorian writers in Poland. Her recent monograph entitled Dickens w Polsce. Pierwsze stulecie [Dickens in Poland. First Centenary] (2015) discussed the Polish reception of Dickens between 1839 and 1939. During her stay at the Institute, she will continue her work on literary and cultural reception in conjunction with some of the findings of Cultural Memory. [September-October 2016]
Clara Rachel Eybalin Casséus received her PhD in Political Geography from the University of Poitiers. She also holds a MPA in Strategic Public Policy (from the American University of Paris) and a MA in International Affairs and Sociology (from the Institut Catholique de Paris). Taking memory as a powerful dynamic engine to deconstruct citizenship while connecting beyond borders challenges the two diciplines of geography and political science. Her research interests deal with an interdisciplinary approach on the notions of mobility, citizenship and state politics. She regularly participates in academic fora in the Gulf region as well as in the Caribbean. Her publications to date include articles on transnationalism and South-South cooperation and a recent book Transnationalisme Associatif Haïtien et Jamaïcain. Géographie du développement local et politiques diasporiques. During her stay at the Institute, Clara Rachel will work on her new monograph, provisionally entitled 'Geopolitics of Memory and Transnational Citizenship. Thinking Local Development in a Global South'. [October 2016-July 2017]
Christine Ivanovic received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Erlangen University, Germany, as well as her Habilitation in Comparative Literature and in German Literature. Following eight years as foreign Professor for German Literature at Tokyo University, she moved to Austria in 2011 where she currently holds a Berta Karlik Professorship in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Her PhD thesis dealt with Paul Celan's readings of Russian poetry. She is especially interested in the works of German and Austrian writers in exile, as well as in exophonic writing, and has published widely on both topics. Currently her work focuses on the twin sisters Ilse Aichinger and Helga Michie, born in 1921 in Vienna. While Ilse Aichinger is a German writer of high repute – whose literary work comprises a novel and eight volumes of prose, radio plays and poems, and has been awarded several important literary prizes – Helga's art work has so far found little recognition. Helga emigrated at the age of 17 with one of the last Kindertransporte to London where she still lives. Very little is known about her life story, even though she came into contact with many famous writers and artists who also emigrated to England from Austria or the former Habsburg Empire. Helga herself composed and also published a small number of poems and other literary texts as well as literary translations. In her later years she became an artist and produced remarkable graphical works which have been shown in three exhibitions. The project to be conducted at the Institute traces Helga Michie's life story and her connections with other émigrés from Austria, and will result in an exhaustive documentation of her artwork which will be published and presented at the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute in spring 2017. [December 2016]
Ina Linge’s research focuses on the interrelation between sexual sciences and European literature and visual culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ina holds an MPhil in Multi-Disciplinary Gender Studies and a PhD in German, both from the University of Cambridge. As the MHRA Scholar at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge, Ina is currently writing her first monograph on sexological and psychoanalytic life writings and the queer performance of livability. In connection with her PhD thesis on the same topic, Ina has produced various publications, including an article on gender and agency in the context of sexological life writing in German Life and Letters, part of the Women in German Studies postgraduate essay prize in 2015. As Sylvia Naish Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow, Ina will be starting a postdoctoral project investigating the cross-disciplinary relations between zoological and sexual sciences (1890-1930), revealing how German-language literature and visual culture imagined with both longing and horror the consequences of the transgression of species and sexual borders. This project will tackle a series of questions at the heart of the medical humanities and the study of literature, culture and sexuality: What can be gained by exploring the construction of sexuality as a collaborative effort between the sciences and creative arts? How stable are definitions of health and normality? And what can we learn about definitions of human health by considering them in relation to sexuality, race and non-human animals? [October-November 2016]
Matthew Mild holds a doctorate from Bangor University and four Dutch interdisciplinary degrees in the field of history. He has lectured in Italian and European history at Bangor University, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and the University of Salford, from 2009 to 2014. His main research interests lie in the body, medicine, and everyday social renewal, in the history of contemporary European writing and acting. He held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of London in 2011, and co-organised three annual seminars for the American Comparative Literature Association in Providence (2012), Toronto (2013), and New York (2014). He co-edited the interdisciplinary history volume Crisis, Rupture and Anxiety (2012), and has published journal articles in the field of contemporary history of fiction and performing arts in European languages. He has worked on medicine and esoteric mystical models in writing and performance in French, German, Italian, Dutch, and English, by Patrick Süskind, Luigi Pirandello, Menno ter Braak, Amélie Nothomb, Marilyn Manson, and Lars von Trier. As Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will focus on medical and mythical understandings of sex and race in Turkish European cinema and European migrant literature, from France, Somalia, and from Lebanon to Syria, Italy, and Germany. [September 2016-June 2017]
Massimo Riva is Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. Educated at the University of Florence (Laurea in Philosophy, 1981) and at Rutgers University (PhD, 1986), he has held visiting appointments at the University of Sydney, the University of Bologna, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and the École des Hautes Études, Paris. He has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics and authors from Giovanni Boccaccio to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and from Giambattista Vico to Italo Calvino. He is the author of four monographs: Saturno e le Grazie (1992), Malinconie del Moderno (2001), Il futuro della letteratura (2011) and Pinocchio digitale (2012). He is the editor of Italian Tales. An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction (2004; 2007), and co-editor of Renato Poggioli: An Intellectual Life (2012), and of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (2012). He also co-edited, with John Davis, a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies entitled Mediating the Risorgimento (2013). Professor Riva’s pioneering engagement with information technology in both teaching and research over the past twenty years, has led to a number of award-winning projects, such as: 'The Decameron Web' (supported by two consecutive two-year grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1999-2002) and the Brown-University of Bologna 'Pico Project'. In 2004, he and his co-investigators were awarded a two-year NEH grant for the creation of a Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University. Under Riva's direction, the VHL provides a platform for interdisciplinary projects in the area of Italian Studies (literary studies, history and the history of art). His latest initiative in this area, the 'Garibaldi and the Risorgimento' project, features a digital copy of a 270’ long and 4.5’ wide moving panorama, made in England in 1860-62 to celebrate the life and career of the Italian national hero. An interactive installation of the panorama has been the object of several exhibits at the British Library (2010), the Sala del Risorgimento at the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, the Biblioteca Salaborsa, Bologna (2011), and the Italian pavillon at the Congress of the International Council of Museums in Rio de Janeiro (2013). In 2012, Riva was awarded a ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship. He is currently at work on a book project tentatively entitled ‘Italian Shadows: Casanova’s Polemoscope and Other Tales of Imaginary and Forgotten Media’, a project selected for the Brown Digital Publishing initiative and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. [February 2017]
Sonita Sarker is Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the English Departments at Macalester College in St. Paul, USA. She has published two collections Trans-Status Subjects (2002) and Sustainable Feminisms (2007), and numerous essays on subalternity, globalization, and postcolonialism in relation to English-language and Italian literature, including Virginia Woolf and Antonio Gramsci. Her most recent presentations were on Grazia Deledda and Antonio Gramsci at the American Association of Italian Studies conference in Zurich (2014) and on Italian colonial and postcolonial literature at the Modern Language Association in early 2016. The latter is forthcoming in Italian Culture in 2017; an essay on 21st-century subalternity and feminist organisations was recently published in Cultural Studies (2016), and another on Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault in Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (2014). She is currently working on a monograph on the concepts of ‘native’ and ‘subaltern’ in the early to late 20th century; this work-in-progress includes Grazia Deledda and Gabriella Ghermandi. She is also planning a volume on Gramsci and Feminism. She teaches 20th- and 21st-century literature in the context of post/modern, post/colonial, and transnational issues, and is co-organiser of the Italian Language conversation group in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, USA).
Sabrina Schneider, a former newspaper reporter, holds a PhD in Letters – with emphasis on Literary Theory – from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), and a four-month research appointment at the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies of Brown University. Her thesis, 'Ficções sujas: por uma poética do romance-reportagem', was received with honours in 2013. In connection with her doctorate, she published two articles: one on the fictionalisation of reality by Brazilian works of literary journalism, adopting the concept of mimesis as the creation of a fictional time experience, and another deconstructing the direct relationship between the so-called 'reportage-novel' from the 1970s and the Brazilian military dictatorship, widely accepted by academic literary critics. Having completed her thesis, she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Santa Cruz do Sul, with a research grant from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), a funding agency under Brazil’s Ministry of Education. Her main research interests concern the theory of narrative, the relationship between literature and journalism, and Brazilian literature, although she has published articles and presented conference papers on other Lusophone literatures. As a Visiting Fellow at the Institute, she will conduct research for the study 'Fictions of the City: the Poetics of Urban Spaces in João do Rio, Lima Barreto, and George Ade', which will analyse how fiction and the so-called 'factual literature' address the matter of metropolises subjected to periods of intense cultural and social change, in texts depicting the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Chicago during the the 19th- and 20th-century transition. [September 2016-June 2017]
Kate Willman recently completed her PhD in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick, under the supervision of Dr Jennifer Burns and Dr Fabio Camilletti. Her doctoral thesis analysed the recent literary phenomenon known as the New Italian Epic, a label that refers to a large corpus of hybrid texts that mix genres, styles and media. She argued that the New Italian Epic is an important stage in the development of the novel form in the 21st century. Before her PhD, she completed an MA in Comparative Literature at King's College London and a BA in French and Italian at the University of Bristol, where she also taught in the Italian Department during the academic year 2015-2016. She is currently developing a comparative project on 21st-century autofiction and, during her Fellowship, she will focus particularly on autofiction by women writers.
2015-2016
Kate Averis is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris. She is the author of Exile and Nomadism in French and Hispanic Women’s Writing (2014) and the co-editor of Exiles,Travellers and Vagabonds: Rethinking Mobility in Francophone Women’s Writing (forthcoming, University of Wales Press). Her research lies in the field of 20th- and 21st-century Francophone and Latin American literature, and more particularly, in women’s writing, transnational identities and cultures, writing of migration and exile, gender studies, and feminisms. Her current research project examines women’s ageing in contemporary women’s writing, and during her Fellowship at the Institute she will work on literary representations of migration and exile whose focus moves beyond the experience of arrival and transition to that of ‘settlement’ and ageing in displacement in the works of a range of Francophone and Latin American authors. [April-July 2016]
Emma Bond is Lecturer in Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews. She works mainly on the link between identity and space in cultural production, and specifically on border, migration and trans-national narratives. Some recent publications include ‘Towards a Trans-national Turn in Italian Studies?’ (Italian Studies, 2014) and the co-edited volume Destination Italy: Representing Migration in Contemporary Media and Narrative (2015). She is Joint Editor of the Transnational Italian Cultures Series at Liverpool University Press. During her Fellowship she will work on her new monograph, provisionally entitled Writing the Trans-national Body. [September-November 2015]
Alessandro Carlucci is a John Fell Fund Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where he also teaches Italian linguistics. His research focuses on the spread of English as an international language, especially its effects on Italian culture and the development of the Italian language. Dr Carlucci is also interested in modern political and intellectual history, and in the history of linguistics, and has published widely on the linguistic views that the Italian philosopher and political leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) expressed in his writings, as well as on previously neglected aspects of Gramsci’s life. In particular, he is the editor of New Approaches to Gramsci: Language, Philosophy and Politics (Journal of Romance Studies, 2012) and the author of Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony (2013; 2015). [September 2015-June 2016]
Carla Mereu Keating received her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Reading. She has recently completed an archival research project in Rome and in Los Angeles entitled 'The Language and the Image of a Nation: Diplomatic Relations between the Italian Foreign Office and the MPPDA' with the support of the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust. Carla has contributed to several publications on film history, censorship, ethnicity, and audiovisual translation. Her monograph, The Politics of Dubbing: Film Censorship and State Intervention in the Translation of Foreign Cinema, is forthcoming under Peter Lang’s new series in 'Translation Studies' (2016). She co-organises Migrating Texts, a series of interdisciplinary colloquia on subtitling, translation and adaptation hosted by the Institute and currently in its second year. Her research at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory deals with portrayals of warfare and war legacy in films, political censorship and the formation of historical memory. [October 2015-June 2016]
Alice Lovejoy (Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Moving Image Studies Program, University of Minnesota) is a film and cultural historian whose research examines governmental and institutional media cultures in transnational perspective. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright-Hays, and Fulbright, and her writing has appeared in journals including Screen, The Moving Image, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, and Film Comment, where she has also worked as an editor. In 2015, Indiana University Press published her book Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military, with a companion DVD of thirteen short films. As Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, she will conduct research for her current project on exile-government filmmaking in World War II London. [May-June 2016]
Sam Merrill is a postdoctoral researcher in digital sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His interdisciplinary research practice focuses on questions of memory, landscape, heritage and infrastructure within a broadly conceived underground (spatial, political and cultural). He completed a PhD in cultural geography at University College London in 2014 and also has a postgraduate degree in Heritage Studies from the Brandenburg Technical University, Germany, and an undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Ancient History from the University of Birmingham. He has also worked at, or been associated with, Architectural Conservation, Tourism, Urban Studies and Modern Languages departments in the UK, Germany and Australia. In 2014 he was awarded first prize in Peter Lang’s Young Scholars in Memory Studies Competition. He has published on a varied array of topics and is currently completing his first monograph, Excavating Buried Memories: Mnemonic Production in the Railways Beneath London and Berlin, to be published by Peter Lang. As a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Sam will work on his new project; Mobilising The Past: The Transnational and Digital Social Memories of Contemporary European Antifascism. [September 2015-June 2016]
Anne Mulhall has recently completed her PhD thesis 'Tiqqun and the Event: Literature, Philosophy, Politics' at King’s College London. Her thesis interrogated the intersections between the conceptual persona and the theory of the ‘event’ in the work of the contemporary French philosophical collective, Tiqqun. From September 2015, Anne will commence work on her new research project, Philosophy, Redemption, and the New Women’s Literature of the Office, at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing. This project will read the emergence of a category of French and German women’s literature that offers a transformative approach to depictions of office life in the 21st century by emphasizing a capacity for resistance and redemption within the contemporary administrative experience. Her article ‘Joyce’s Bloom as Event in the Philosophy of Tiqqun’ is currently under review at James Joyce Quarterly. She is also completing an article on early 2000s’ women’s psychogeographical experimentation in France. Anne’s translation of Marc Décimo’s ‘Marcel Duchamp et la Collège de ’Pataphysique’ for Pataphysics Then and Now will appear with University of Pennsylvania Press in December 2015. Anne has previously held scholarships at New York University and University College Dublin. [September 2015-June 2016]
Máire Ní Annracháin is Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin. Her doctoral dissertation was on the Scottish Gaelic poetry of Sorley Maclean. Her work focuses on the literature of two similar but distinct Celtic languages, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Recent articles have been on the 20th-century poetry of Biddy Jenkinson, Sorley Maclean and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and on the long and iconic 18th-century poem 'Cúirt and Mheán-Oíche' ('The Midnight Court') by Brian Merriman. Most of her publications are in Irish but a small number are written in English, including 'Affinities in Time and Space: Reading the Gaelic Poetry of Ireland and Scotland' in Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (2011). She recently participated in a research project on motherhood in the Institute, and in a project on Irish and Scottish Poetry based in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She will work on a project on irony and cultural memory during her stay at the Institute in early 2016, as part of a wider project on figurative language in Gaelic poetry. She will work mainly in the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. [January-February 2016]
Ryan Prout is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Co-Director of Personal and Professional Development at Cardiff University’s School of Modern Languages. His current work is on the visual cultures of Spain and Latin America. Recent publications include ‘Otras competencias: Ethnobotany, the Badianus Codex, and Metaphors of Mexican Memory Loss and Disability in Las buenas hierbas’ in Libre Acceso: Critical Disability Studies in Latin American Literature and Film, edited by Susan Antebi and Beth Jörgensen (2016), and ‘From Boom to Bubble and Bust: Comical Economics in Aleix Saló’s Troika Trilogy (International Journal of Comic Art, 2014). Forthcoming publications include ‘Canine Colloquium: Skeuomorphism and the Transitional Dog in La Criatura, Solas, and Recuerdos de perrito de mierda’ (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2017) and Piensa diferente: Rethinking Neurodiversity in Spanish and Latin American Visual Cultures (2016). During his fellowship he will be completing an article on the trivialization of Hitler and Nazism in discourse around secessionist movements in Spain ('Reductio ad Hitlerum: Uses and Abuses of Cultural Memory in the Secessionist Debate in Catalonia'), and working on a monograph focused on Spanish graphic novels and the history of social protest. He is an active trade unionist and contributed to the working group on the TUC’s International LGBT Solidarity Charter (published in March 2015). [April-June 2016]
Francesco Ricatti is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in History and Italian Studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he is also the Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Arts. His research interests are in migration history, critical whiteness studies, political history, the history of emotions, football history, historiography, and creative approaches to history and public memory. He is the author of Embodying Migrants: Italians in Postwar Australia (2011) and co-editor of Politica ed emozioni nella storia d’Italia dal 1848 ad oggi (2012). In 2013 he co-edited a special issue of Cultural Studies Review on emotional geographies of the uncanny. His current research on Italian migration to Australia focuses on emotional geographies, resilience in challenging rural environments, the intersections between migration and colonialism, the colonial roots of Australian multiculturalism, and migrants’ attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. [March-May 2016]
John Charles Ryan is Research Fellow in Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. His areas of interest span the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and practice-led research. His books Green Sense (2012), Unbraided Lines (2013), Being With (2014) and Posthuman Plants (2015) have contributed to the new field of critical plant studies. He is also the co-editor of two collections, The Green Thread (2015) and The Language of Plants (2016), with Patrícia Vieira and Monica Gagliano. His FloraCultures archive explores plant-based cultural heritage. While at the Institute, John will be further developing ‘botanical memory’ based on interviews he has conducted in the South-West of Western Australia. [March-June 2016]
Maria Cristina Seccia is an early career researcher in Italian and Translation Studies. Her doctoral thesis 'Translating Caterina Edwards’ The Lion’s Mouth: A Case of Cultural Translation in Practice' (Bangor, 2014) explores the link between cultural translation and Italian-Canadian literature through the lens of postcolonial theories and from a practice-led perspective. Her articles and book chapters have been published in the journal Italian Canadiana and in volumes of Italian-Canadian literature, while some poem translations appeared in the Journal of Italian Translation. Maria Cristina has co-edited the volume Writing Cultural Difference: Italian-Canadian Creative and Critical Works (2015) and is currently co-organising the 16th AICW (Association of Italian Canadian Writers) biennial conference 'Italian-Canadian Literature: Departures, Journeys, Destinations'. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute she will work on her new research project, which will explore the representation of the mother-daughter relationship in Italian migrant women’s writing from a translation studies perspective. More specifically, she will examine how the migrant women narrators’ relationship with their Italian mothers affects their own transcultural and transnational identity, as well as the approach towards their mother tongue and motherland. [September 2015-June 2016]
Tom Smith's research focuses on post-war and contemporary literature and film in German. He is particularly interested in gender and queer studies, critical and literary theories, the culture and politics of the German Democratic Republic, and the role of music in film and literature. He recently completed a PhD thesis at University College London on literature and film depicting the GDR military, in which he proposes a more nuanced account of masculinities in the GDR which focuses on masculinities that challenged or contravened the state's gender ideals. In connection with this thesis, he has published an article on uniform and the body. Tom has also published an article on Helga Koenigsdorf's queer protagonists in her writing around reunification, and it is to post-reunification literature that his current research turns. As a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow, Tom will be starting a project investigating the political function of music in contemporary writing in German. In 2015, he co-organised an interdisciplinary conference exploring critical approaches to music and literature at Durham University. He is currently a Continuing Research Student at UCL, and Stipendiary Lecturer in German at Worcester College and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. [May-June 2016]
Donald Weber is Lucia, Ruth, and Elizabeth MacGregor Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He is the author of Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs (2005). More recent and forthcoming essays include 'My Puritan Origins' (Early American Literature, 2012) on Sacvan Bercovitch and the emergence of Puritanism studies in the 1970s, 'Fatih Akin’s Cinema of Hospitality' (The Massachusetts Review, 2015), and 'Mike Leigh’s British Jewish Soul' inThe Hidden Presence of Jews in Film and Television. Donald’s research project is entitled 'The Anxiety of Belonging', a study of contemporary literature and film in terms of what Caryl Phillips calls 'the new conversational babble': a creative zone of shifting identities and geographic locations. For the writers and filmmakers that interest him, Donald would like to explore, among other key terms, the notion of 'homeland', a vexed matter these days, filled with ambivalence, an imaginary site that can produce (in some) a disabling nostalgia, or more dangerously, a rage in those citizens of immigration nations who feel unwelcome, displaced, strangers in their very country of origin. 'The Anxiety of Belonging' explores this charged emotional-imaginative landscape that stirs a host of writers and filmmakers distressed, yet also spurred to creativity, by what Phillips calls the effects of 'assimilation fatigue'. [April-May 2016]
Erica Wickerson is a Sylvia Naish Research Fellow. Her PhD thesis, undertaken at the University of Cambridge, is called ‘Towards an Architecture of Narrative Time: Telling Subjective Time in Selected Works by Thomas Mann and Other Writers’. From October, she will begin work on a post-doctoral project on narrative space in the works of Franz Kafka and other writers. Her work at the Institute will consider space in exile narratives (written either during or about exile), looking in particular at the poet Rudolf Majut. She will investigate the ways in which the dislocation caused by exile affects presentations of space and how this in turn impacts upon constructions of subjectivity. Her publications to date include an article on Ruth Klüger in The Modern Language Review, a comparative analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Gérard de Nerval in Orbis Litterarum, and articles on Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull in Forum for Modern Language Studies and The German Quarterly respectively. [Autumn term 2015]
Tegan Zimmerman (PhD, Comparative Literature, University of Alberta) is College Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Okanagan College for the 2015-2016 academic year. Her work focuses on contemporary women’s historical novels, especially those from the Caribbean, and on contemporary gender theory. Zimmerman is the Canadian Liaison Officer for the Comparative Gender Studies Committee (an official committee of the International Comparative Literature Association), and she has published articles in Gender Forum, the Journal of Feminist Studies, and Simone de Beauvoir Studies. Her article “Feminism and Marxism: Revisiting Irigaray’s Essay ‘Women on the Market’ in a Postfeminist Era” is forthcoming in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her dissertation Writing Back Through Our Mothers: A Transnational Feminist Study on the Woman’s Historical Novel was published by Lit-Verlag in 2014. During her Fellowship she will work on her new monograph, provisionally entitled Matria Redux: Caribbean Women’s Historical Fiction [May-June 2016].
2014-2015
Eloisa Betti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of History, Culture & Civilisation at the University of Bologna. Her research concentrates on the intersection between labour history, urban history and women’s history and gender studies. She has written several articles in Italian and in English, the latest of which are 'Women's Working Conditions and Job Precariousness in Historical Perspective' (2010), and 'Bologna in the Cold War' (forthcoming). During her stay at the Centre for Cultural Memory she will develop the project 'Women workers unfairly dismissed in Cold War Bologna. Gendering memories of class conflict in 1950s Italy', based on her book Senza Giusta Causa (2014). Her research will provide an in-depth analysis of the memory-building process related to unfair dismissals occurring in Cold War Bologna. She will compare the gender-neutral 'grand narratives' that have developed over the past forty years within the labour movement and trade unions with the gendered counter-narratives emerging from research into unfairly dismissed women workers and their life stories. [November 2014-July 2015]
Michael Darroch is an Associate Professor of Media Art Histories and Visual Culture at the University of Windsor and Director of the IN/TERMINUS Creative Research Collective. He has published essays on art, media, language, and urban culture and is co-editor of the anthology Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (2014). Whilst at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, he will be completing a book manuscript on transatlantic and interdisciplinary influences on Canadian media studies and the journal Explorations (1953–1959). [January - May 2015]
Rebecca Dolgoy’s work explores the theory and praxis of Cultural Memory. Her doctoral project, 'Berlin’s Neues Museum: A Case Study in Cultural Memory', examined the changing turn-of-the-century memory landscape in Berlin and sought to contextualize it within larger cultural narratives. Some of the fundamental questions underpinning her work include: What does the way in which we use the past tell us about the present? How can we establish an ethical model of Cultural Memory that emphasizes the appropriation, use, and transformation of cultural heritage? What is the place of the 20th century in longer narratives of history? While establishing the theoretical dimensions of her project, she has presented at conferences and workshops and published on the subject in several journals including Comparative Literature and Culture and Austausch. Complementing this theoretical work, Rebecca is currently developing interpretive and curatorial experiments with the Ashmolean and The Story Museum in Oxford. While at the Institute, she will investigate London’s Imperial War Museum to ascertain how the recent renovations can be contextualized in the current World War One centenary commemorations as well as with the longer history of the museum itself. [September 2014-June 2015]
Dr Natalie Edwards is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research concentrates on late 20th- and early 21st-century French women’s writing, feminist theory, autobiography and visual studies. Among her publications are Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Women’s Autobiography and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (edited with Amy Hubbell and Ann Miller). During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing, she will be completing a manuscript entitled Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in Contemporary France. [January-February 2015]
Anne Martina Emonts is Assistant Professor of German Culture at the University of Madeira, Portugal. Her Masters (Madeira) in Portuguese Contemporary History, won her the National Award for Feminist Studies in Portugal, and was published in 2001. In 2006 she completed her PhD at the University of Madeira: Mechtilde Lichnowsky – Sprachlust und Sprachkritik. Annäherung an ein Kulturphänomen, published in 2009. She is co-editor of Encontro entre Culturas. Conferências sobre temas luso-germânicas (2012) and Mulheres: Feminino, Plural (2013). As a senior researcher in the Culture and Conflict Sub-Group at the CECC (Communication & Culture Research Centre) at Lisbon University, her current research interests include the cultural heritage of war in the 20th century, gender studies and the transfer of (German-Jewish) modernisms in literature and visual art. She cooperates with the research group ‘Escritura autobiográfica de escritoras judeo-alemanas (s. XIX y XX)’ at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Her work as a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies will focus on Mechtilde Lichnowsky’s ‘voluntary exiles’ and cultural life among others exiled in London before World War I and after World War II. [April-July 2015]
Sally Faulkner is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, where she is Founder-Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures, and a 2013 Philip Leverhulme Prizewinner in Modern Languages and Literature. She has published widely in Film Studies, and is particularly interested in cinema’s interaction with other media, especially literature, politics, authoritarianism, dissent, and social mobility in connection with the question of the middle classes. She held an AHRC Research Leave Award in 2005 and an AHRC Research Fellowship in 2011, and is the author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (2004), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (2006) and A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (2013). She currently leads a project on Middlebrow Cinema, for which she is editing a volume of that title for Routledge (2015). As a Visiting Fellow at the Institute, she will continue her work on the middlebrow, especially in connection with Heritage Cinema debates, as well as beginning a new project on Spanish silent film in connection with intermediality and the transnational. [October 2014-June 2015]
Claudia Jünke teaches French and Spanish literary and cultural studies at the University of Bonn. Her research interests include French and Spanish literature and culture from the 19th century to the present, narrative, cultural memory, cultural identity and intermediality. Among her publications is a book on the memory of the Spanish Civil War in contemporary Spanish literature and film (Erinnerung – Mythos – Medialität. Die Darstellung des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs im aktuellen Roman und Spielfilm in Spanien (2012). During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory she will be engaged in developing a project entitled 'Entangled Pasts – War, Violence and Cultural Memory in the Contemporary French Novel'. [February-March 2015]
Eglė Kačkutė is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Vilnius University Gender Studies' Centre. Her monograph Savi svetimi tapatumai naujausioje britų ir prancūzų moterų literatūroje [Familiar and Strange Identities in Contemporary British and French Women’s Writing] was published in 2012. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing in English, French, and Lithuanian, identity, gender and contemporary feminist theory. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will focus on motherhood and maternal subjectivity in a culturally and linguistically foreign environment. [October 2014]
Claudia Karagoz is an Associate Professor of Italian and Women’s and Gender Studies, and a member of the Core Faculty staff at the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. Her research interests include contemporary Italian women’s writing, photography, and film, motherhood studies, and Sicilian culture. She has co-edited a volume on Sicily and the Mediterranean (2015), and published articles and book chapters on Italian women writers, filmmakers and photographers such as Rosetta Loy, Elsa Morante, Francesca Comencini, and Letizia Battaglia. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing she will be working on a book project entitled Demeter’s Journey: Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing and Cinema. [February-April 2015]
Angelika Kemper obtained her doctorate at the University of Mannheim and worked as a research Fellow in an interdisciplinary research programme at the University of Münster (in the area of symbolic communication and social value systems from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. She is now a post-doctoral assistant for German language and literature of the Middle Ages at the University of Klagenfurt. Her current research interests include the art of memory and transfer of knowledge in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, especially from a comparative and interdisciplinary point of view. Her work at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory will focus on mnemonic literature by conducting basic research into the London manuscript tradition. [January-February 2015]
Elsa Laflamme teaches French and literature at the Collège Gérald-Godin, a post-secondary institution in Montréal, Canada. In 2013, she completed her PhD in French Literature at the Université de Montréal. Entitled ‘Récit de l’événement et événement du récit chez Annie Ernaux, Hélène Cixous et Maurice Blanchot’, her thesis was conducted under the impulse of both Jacques Derrida’s thought and that of psychoanalysis, focusing on the events in the making in Ernaux, Cixous and Blanchot’s writings. She is now working on a book proposal to publish her thesis. Her article ‘Vision spectrale du génie: Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous et le génie’ is appearing in Esprit créateur (2015). During her stay at the Centre for the Study on Contemporary Women’s Writing, she will concentrate her research on her post-doctoral project entitled ‘Hélène Cixous’ Monsters: Propositions for an Ethics of/at the Limits’. She regularly contributes to Spirale, a Canadian journal dedicated to arts and humanities. [September 2014-June 2015]
Claire Launchbury is a Lecturer and SPF 03 Fellow in French and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities and Modern Languages at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. During her Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, she will be working on documentary practices in contemporary Lebanese audio-visual cultures, part of a monograph project entitled Documenting Lebanon, to be published by Wallflower Press. She completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in French at Leeds (2011-13), specialising in cultural studies approaches to literature, popular music, film and visual cultures from the Francophone Machrek with particular focus on Lebanon. Dr Launchbury initially studied music at Exeter University, then continued her studies at University College Cork before undertaking her doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, which was awarded in 2009. Her thesis investigated constructions of French cultural memory at the BBC during the Second World War through broadcasts of music, poetry and political programmes and was published in the ‘Modern French Identities Series’ in 2012 (Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War). She was resident in Paris for several years, worked as a lectrice at the IUT Ville d'Avray, and taught at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. [December 2014-February 2015]
Ana Gabriela Macedo is Professor of English Literature at the University of Minho, Portugal. She is Director of the 'Humanities Research Centre' (CEHUM) where her main areas of research are comparative literature; feminist and gender studies; interarts and visual poetics; English literature (Modernism and Postmodernism). Among her publications are Paula Rego e o Poder da Visão. ‘A minha pintura é como uma história interior’ (2010) and Dicionário da Crítica Feminista, edited with Ana Luísa Amaral, (2005). During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing she will be engaged in developing a project and book entitled Framing/Unframing, Resisting. Ways of ‘seeing differently’. Women and Gender in Contemporary Art and Literature. [October 2014-June 2015]
Kate Roy completed her PhD at the University of Manchester in 2008 and has subsequently been a postdoctoral researcher and recipient of small grants from among others, the Universities of Tübingen and Innsbruck, and from the DAAD, the Berlin State Library, and the Leverhulme Trust. She was most recently a Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds. Her current research project, tentatively entitled ‘1001 Re-tellings: Emily Ruete’s Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin in a literary context’, explores how both the writings of Emily Ruete (1844-1924), born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, and the rewritings of her life story, have intersected with different discourses over time, including Orientalism, German colonialism, and Islam in/and the West. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, she will work with material relating to the figure of Rudolph Said-Ruete, Emily Ruete’s son, a committed pacifist and long-time London resident, focusing on the narratives produced both by his own collection of pamphlets and popular literature from the First World War, gifted to Senate House Library, and by his recent novelistic reimagining. [September-December 2014]
Klaus Seidl obtained his doctorate at the University of Munich where he worked as a Research Assistant at the Department for Modern and Contemporary History. His thesis investigated the final phase of the German revolution of 1848 focusing on non-violent protest and public opinion, and will be published by Ferdinand Schöningh. Most recently he held a post-doctoral Fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. His current research project is a biography of the liberal German historian Veit Valentin (1885-1947) who migrated to London (and later to the USA) in 1933, having being dismissed from his post as 'politically unreliable'. As a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellow at the Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies, Klaus will work with material relating to Valentin’s time as a special lecturer at University College London, his involvement with German émigré networks, and the English perception of the refugee scholars. [October–November 2014]
Pamela V. Sing is Professor at Campus Saint-Jean, the francophone campus of the University of Alberta, where she teaches Franco-Canadian, Québécois, and French literatures. Her research and publications are mainly in the fields of Western Canadian Francophone and Quebec literatures and textual production by Métis of French-Canadian ancestry, the latter including a monograph, co-edited collections of essays, as well as articles and book chapters. Her most recent project seeks to contribute to the body of existing literature and knowledge on cultural memory and graphic narratives through the rediscovery and multidisciplinary study of an unexplored 1940s' French-Canadian loup-garou comic series published in a Jeunesse étudiante catholique newspaper targeting children. The study of intersections between JEC ideology, the loup-garou’s traditionally scary traits and inherently transgressive qualities, and the comics series’ role as a source of entertainment will perforce involve the investigation of the slippery 'borders' between identity and alterity, realism and the marvellous, and ideology and artistic expression. Before her stay at the Institute, she will be working on the series’ 1943 textual source and its apparently uncensored, pre-Grande noirceur 1944 panels, as the 2014-15 recipient of the University of Glasgow’s Stirling Maxwell Fellowship. During her stay at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, her research will concentrate on the transformations that the series underwent from 1945 to 1949, and the signification of those transformations in regard to the relationship between identity/alterity, realism/the marvellous, and ideology/imagination. [April-May 2015]
Barbara Spadaro (University of Bristol) is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the AHRC Project Transnationalizing Modern Languages: Mobility, Identity and Translation in Modern Italian Cultures. Her work engages with history and memory narratives of transnational communities. She researches memories of subjects from the former Italian and French colonies of North Africa, targeting transformation of ideas of subjectivity, citizenship and Italianness inside and outside of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. During her Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Barbara will develop her work on the memories of the Jews from Libya across multiple destinations of their diaspora across Italy, Europe and North America. This strand of her research considers the memories of the Jews from Libya in the wider spectrum of the memory narratives of the Jews from former European colonies in Europe and 'the West', focusing on ideas of Italian domestic culture and citizenship. Barbara’s research questions stem from her background as historian of gender and European imperial cultures. She is the author of articles on history of gender, Italian fascism and colonial relations, and of a monograph analysing ideas of whiteness in the representations and social practices of the Italian bourgeoisie in Italy and Libya (1910s-1930s), Una colonia Italiana. Incontri, memorie e rappresentazioni tra Italia e Libia (2013). [November 2014-January 2015]
Bruno Tribout (University of Aberdeen) is an AHRC Early Career Fellow (2014-15) and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute’s Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. His research concentrates on the intersections between literature, historiography and political thought in 17th-century France, with a particular focus on the representation of conflicts. His first monograph explored the theory and images of conspiracy in the age of Louis XIV (Les Récits de conjuration sous Louis XIV, 2010). He has co-edited a collection of essays on life writing (Narrating the Self in Early Modern Europe, 2007) and published articles on the historiography of the civil wars known as the Fronde and on the frondeurs and memoir writers Retz and La Rochefoucauld. During his stay at the Institute, he will be working on a book project which looks at the memory of the Fronde and its significance for the representation of absolutism and the development of political criticism in early modern France. [April-May 2015]
2013-2014
Giorgia Alù is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute. She completed her PhD thesis at the University of Warwick and now teaches in the Department of Italian Studies of the University of Sydney. Her research interests range from 19th-century Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. She is the author of Beyond the Traveller’s Gaze: Expatriate Ladies Writing in Sicily (1848-1910) (2008) and has published articles on women’s travel writing, the relationship between literature and photography and 19th-century representations of Italy. She has co-edited (with Nancy Pedri) one volume on Italian literature and photography (UTP) and a special issue on 'Word & Image, East & West' for Literature & Aesthetics. She is now working on two projects: one monograph on contemporary women’s writing, mobility and photography; and one study on aspects of 19th-century Italy through photographic portraits. [November 2013-February 2014]
Michela Baldo is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing. Her doctoral thesis (Manchester, 2009) dealt with the translation into Italian of Italian-Canadian writing, focusing on the treatment of multilingualism in the translation of the trilogy of one of the best-known Italian-Canadian writers, Nino Ricci. She held a teaching Fellowship in translation studies at the University of Birmingham, and is currently employed by the Università per stranieri di Siena, where she researches into subtitling and intercultural communication. She has written articles on Italian-Canadian works and their written and audio-visual translation into Italian, the most recent of which, published in the journal Translation Studies, is on translations by the Italian publishing house Cosmo Iannone editore. During her stay at the Institute she will be investigating more broadly the reception through translation of Italian-Canadian and Italian-American women writers in Italy (especially the recent translations of Louise de Salvo, Kym Ragusa and Mary di Michele). She is particularly interested in looking at the role played by this imported literature in the construction and representation of concepts like ‘Italianness’ and ‘foreignness’ in Italy and abroad. Another strand of research she is pursuing is the investigation of the concept ‘queer’, and its migration/translation into the Italian cultural sphere. Baldo has published articles on this topic and, in June 2013, was involved in the organization of the first queer ‘femme’ conference in Italy, held in Rome. She is currently working on a co-authored/co-edited book on drag kings in Italy, due to be published by ETS 2013. [September 2013-June 2014]
Colleen Becker is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. She completed her PhD at Columbia University and an MA at New York University. Using the lapse of anti-Socialist legislation in 1890 as a starting point, her doctoral thesis investigated how high art and mass media represented Germans’ challenged and changing national identity as the working classes achieved greater socio-political empowerment. Her Master’s thesis examined the disjunction between Nazi social policies towards women and state-subsidized visual arts propaganda. In broad terms, she studies the cultural history of German nationalism. Her published work includes flash fiction, academic articles, journalism, art reviews and essays. She has presented works of fiction at a number of venues including the Tate Modern and, most recently, her flash fiction piece ‘What We Made’ served as the basis for the exhibition project ‘Translation Games,’ an investigation of the theory and practice of translation in art and language. Formerly, she was a Teaching Fellow at Columbia University and Barnard College. She began her career at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, followed by an assistant archivist position at the Art Institute of Chicago and assistant archivist and archivist roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her article on Aby Warburg, historiography and Germania will appear in the Journal of Art Historiography. [October 2013-June 2014]
Kai Bleifuß is a Sylvia Naish Research Fellow, and obtained his PhD from Augsburg University, where he had received a scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. His thesis, published in 2012 as Demokratie im Roman der Weimarer Republik. Annäherung und Verteidigung durch Ästhetik, was awarded the Mieczysław-Pemper-Prize by the Augsburg University Foundation. His research specialises in the junction between literature and politics, the 20th-century German novel, and writers in exile. In October 2013, he will lecture at the University of South Bohemia České Budĕjovice/Budweis. His article on Erik Reger, Rudolf Brunngraber, and the German anti-war novel will be published in the 2014 Jahrbuch zur Kultur und Literatur der Weimarer Republik. During his stay at the Institute, he will pursue research into Robert Neumann’s exile novel The Inquest. [November-December 2013]
Simone Brioni is Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, in the Department of European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, where he was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Simone was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute in 2013-2014. His doctoral thesis, The Somali Within: Questions of Language, Resistance and Identity, deals with the work of writers of Somali origin in Italian. Using cultural studies, translation studies and postcolonial theory, his work analyses the literary and cinematographic representation of migration and Italian colonialism. He edited the volumes Somalitalia:.Quattro vie per Mogadiscio (2012) and Aulò! Aulò! Aulò! Poesie di nostalgia, d’esilio e d’amore (2012) by Ribka Sibhatu, which respectively contain the documentaries Aulò. Roma postcoloniale and La quarta via. Mogadiscio Italia, for which he was co-director and co-author. His publications also include J.G. Ballard. Il futuro quotidiano (2011). [September 2013-September 2014]
Francesca Calamita is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing at the Institute. She completed her PhD at Victoria University of Wellington where she is currently a Teaching Fellow in Italian in the School of Languages and Cultures. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the fictional depiction of eating disorders in Italian women’s writings from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s. Francesca’s research interest focuses on the representation of women’s relationship with food and body from a feminist perspective as well as the fictional portrayal of psychopathologies and she has published articles and book chapters in this area. She is currently co-editing a volume on new perspectives on Italian gender studies. At the Institute she will work on the research project Addiction, Compulsion and Starvation: Eating Disorders as a Mean of Self-empowerment in Contemporary Italian Women’s Writing (1990-2011) in preparation for the publication of her doctoral dissertation. [December 2013-July 2014]
Christian Cargnelli is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller Fellow. He studied at the University of Vienna and completed his thesis on Austrian film personnel in British exile at the University of Southampton in 2008. Since the early 1990s, he has been doing extensive research on film exile and exile film, and since 1998 has been teaching film history and film exile at the University of Vienna. From 2004 to 2007 he worked in the AHRC-funded research project ‘German-speaking Emigrés in British Cinema, 1925-1950’ at the University of Southampton. In 2009-10 he was part of the research project ‘Filmwissenschaft in Wien 1929-1980’ which explored the history and development of film studies in Austria. His edited or co-edited volumes include Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Österreichische Filmschaffende in der Emigration vor 1945 (1993), the melodrama reader Und immer wieder geht die Sonne auf. Texte zum Melodramatischen im Film (1994), Schatten. Exil. Europäische Emigranten im Film noir (1997), Carl Mayer, Scenar[t]ist (German & English, 2003), Gustav Machaty - Ein Filmregisseur zwischen Prag und Hollywood (2005), and Destination London: German-speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950 (2008). He has also worked as a film journalist for many years, curated film retrospectives, and organized several international conferences. He was twice (2004, 2006) nominated for the Willy Haas Award (best publication on German-language film). At the Institute he will pursue his interests in continental film personnel in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. [September-December 2013]
Isabella Ferron is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert Miller Fellow. She studied at the University Ca' Foscari in Venice, then at the University of Tübingen. In 2008 she was awarded a doctorate by the University of Munich for her thesis on Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language (published in 2009 as 'Sprache ist Rede'. Ein Beitrag zur dynamischen und organizistischen Sprachauffassung Wilhelm von Humboldts). She also studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2010-2012), where she held a DAAD Fellowship from October 2011 to February 2012. In October 2012 she was awarded a one-month Fellowship at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach to work on Rudolf Borchardt's image of Italy. She teaches German at the University of Padua and her interests lie in literary theory, philosophy, German and English literature, cultural studies. Among her recent publications are: ‘”Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedankens”. Ein Nachdenken über die Sprachreflexion Wilhelm Humboldts und ihren Einfluss auf die Entstehung der modernen Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie’ (2007); ‘Von der Wahrheit (1947): Zur Rolle der Sprache bei Karl Jaspers’ (2009); ‘Schelling und die Sprache. Einige Anmerkungen zu Schellings Nachdenken über die Sprache. Von der Philosophie der Kunst bis zu dem pasigraphischen Versuch’ (2009); ‘Wilhelm von Humboldts Übersetzung von Aischylos' Agamemnon (1816). Ein singulärer Beitrag zur Entstehung des Begriffs “Deutsche Nation“’ (2011). Her current research is on the work of Rudolf Borchardt and German literature in the first half of the 20th century, and on exile literature. Her research project at the Institute will deal with the work of Rudolf Majut and his relationship with the George Circle. [October-December 2013].
Yosefa Loshitzky is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Media and Film Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. From January to April 2014 she will also be a Visiting Researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility based in Barcelona. She has been a Visiting Research Fellow and Professorial Research Associate at the Annenberg School of Communication (University of Pennsylvania), the Yitzhak Rabin Centre for Israel Studies, the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute, the French CNRS, and the Italian CNR. Until 2002 she was a Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2003-2004 she was Visiting Professor at King’s College London, in 2004-2005 Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University College London and, from 2005 to 2012 she was Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. She has given keynote and plenary papers in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Brazil, Israel and elsewhere. From 1994 to 2003 she served on the editorial board of Cinema Journal, the official organ of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently a member on the international advisory board of The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is the author of The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (1995), Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001, selected by Choice Magazine as an outstanding academic title for 2002), Screening Strangers: Diaspora and Migration in Contemporary European Cinema (2010), the editor of Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on ‘Schindler’s List’ (1997), and a guest editor of a special issue of Third Text on ‘Fortress Europe: Migration, Culture, Representation’ (2006). She is currently writing a book entitled ‘Just Jews? Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Contemporary Culture and Beyond’. Author of numerous articles and book chapters, Loshitzky’s work has been translated into French, German, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Arabic and Hebrew. [September 2013-August 2014]
Markus Messling is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute's Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory. He teaches French and Italian literary and cultural studies at Potsdam University and is Head of the research group ‘Philology and Racism in the 19th Century’, funded by an Emmy Noether Excellence Award of the German Research Foundation. He holds a DPhil from the Freie Universität Berlin (2007). His research specializes in the épistémologie of philology, literary theory, the historical anthropology of language and writing, French and Italian Literature in the long 19th century, and the Mediterranean avant-gardes. His doctoral dissertation, published as Pariser Orientlektüren. Zu Wilhelm von Humboldts Theorie der Schrift (2008), was awarded the Tiburtius Prize by the Universities of Berlin. He was Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2011, and is a member of the ‘Working Group Zukunftsphilologie’ at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). He is also heading (with Franck Hofmann) the international research project ‘Transmed! Pensée méditerranéenne et conscience européenne’ (with the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris). Amongst his recent publications are: Champollions Hieroglyphen. Philologie und Weltaneignung (2012); Maurice Olender: Die Sprachen des Paradieses. Religion, Rassentheorie und Textkultur [Engl.: The Languages of Paradise], ed. and prefaced by Markus Messling (2013); ‘L’archipel des hommes-crocodiles. Modernité, archaïsme et stratégie narrative chez Kossi Efoui’ in: Worldwide. Archipels de la mondialisation, ed. by Ottmar Ette and Gesine Müller (2012); ‘Philology and Racism. On Historicity in the Sciences of Language and Text’ in: Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 67/1 (2012). [March-mid-April 2014]
Dr Annja Neumann is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow. She was educated at the Universities of Heidelberg and Uppsala, and at Queen Mary, University of London. She studied German and Cultural Antropology, graduating with an MA. Her Master's thesis examined Nelly Sachs’s poetics and language in the volume of poems Flucht und Verwandlung. She completed her PhD in German literature in May 2012 with a thesis on the poetics of temporality in the late poetry of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, which is due for publication in 2013. The thesis demonstrates how a poem’s trajectory of articulation follows its own temporality and conveys the meaning ('den Sinn des Gesagten') of Sachs’s and Celan’s poetry; its purpose being partly to use time as a means of engaging with the experience of the Shoah that forms one main dimension of Sachs’s and Celan’s poetic texts. Dr Neumann's current project is Anglo-German literary representations of science. Her interdisciplinary research focuses particularly on the disciplines of astronomy and literature, and aims to show how the intellectual discourse of the ‘two cultures’ debate took shape in 18th- and 19th-century Anglo-German literature. [September-October 2013]
Dr Renata Schellenberg is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory and Associate Professor of German at Mount Allison University, Canada. She obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto (2004) for a thesis on Goethe’s scientific writings. She has since published widely on 18th-century German literature and co-edited a collection of essays (2008) on word and image relations in 18th-century European culture. More recently, her research and publications have focused on museum studies and cultures of remembrance in 18th-century Germanophone Europe. She is currently completing a monograph on this subject to be published in 2014. A speaker of Croatian, Dr Schellenberg’s research has also evolved to examine recent Croatian history in the light of the country’s museological culture and commemorative practices. Hence her work at the Centre will explore the curating of conflict, specifically relating to the so-called Homeland War (1991-1995), in the EU’s newest member-state. [May 2014]
2012-2013
Marie Carrière teaches Francophone and Comparative literature and is Director of the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. She recently published a monograph titled Médée protéiforme (2012). She is also the author of Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (2002). She is co-editor of Migrance comparée/Comparing Migrations (2008) and Les réécrivains (2011). Her research focuses on feminism, ethics, and contemporary writing. [May 2013]
Andrea Celli teaches history of literary criticism at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). He is a member of the scientific committee of the Master in Studies on European Islam at the University of Padua, where he is Research Fellow at the Department of Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on 20th-century orientalism and is reflected in monographs and essays on Miguel Asín Palacios, Louis Massignon, Enrico Cerulli and Leo Spitzer. [September 2012-June 2013]
Simona Corso is Lecturer in English literature at the Comparative Literature Department of the University of Rome (Roma Tre). Her research interests include 18th-century English literature, postcolonial studies, narratology and visual and material cultures. She is currently working on the representation of cognitive displacement in contemporary prose fiction. Her publications include Postcolonial Shakespeare (co-edited with M. d’Amico [2009]), Letteratura e Antropologia (co-edited with M. Bonafin [2008]), Automi, termometri, fucili. L'immaginario della macchina nel romanzo inglese e francese del Settecento (2004), and articles on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Martin Amis, Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee. Her novel Capodanno al Tennis Club (2002) was awarded the Premio Mondello Opera Prima in 2003. [November 2012-February 2013]
Stef Craps is Research Professor in English literature at the University of Ghent, where he directs the Centre for Literature and Trauma. He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (2005), and has guest-edited special issues of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (2011; with Michael Rothberg) and Studies in the Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens) on the topics of, respectively, transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory and postcolonial trauma novels. His next book project, on which he will be working during his stay as Visiting Fellow at the Institute, is an introductory guide to the concept of trauma for Routledge’s 'New Critical Idiom' series.[September 2012-June 2013]
Ned Curthoys graduated from the University of Sydney and is currently Research Fellow in English at the Australian National University. His research interests include German-Jewish intellectual history, émigré studies, and the work of Hannah Arendt. His forthcoming monograph 'Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt and the Fate of Liberal Judaism' (2013) analyses the significance of liberal Jewish thought for two prominent émigré philosophers. His current project is a study of the revival of the concept of 'character' in literary studies and political theory. [November-December 2012]
Ruth Dawson is Emeritus Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Her research combines feminist analysis of literature and history, focusing in particular on European representations of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia during her lifetime and afterwards. [January-June 2013]
Martin Endres is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow and Lecturer in German Literature at the Institute of German Philology at the Free University of Berlin. His doctoral dissertation dealt with ‘Poetische Individualität’ in Friedrich Hölderlin (2013). He is a founding member of the research group ‘Textologie der Literatur und Wissenschaften’, and is currently working on his ‘Habilitation’ treatise on 'Poetizität philosophischer Texte. Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derrida' (working title). From 2005 to 2009 he worked as graduate assistant on the ‘Historisch-Kritische Franz Kafka-Ausgabe’ and the ‘Brandenburger Kleist-Ausgabe’ publication projects, and in 2009-2010 was Lecturer at the Institute for Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism at the University of Hildesheim. Since 2012 he is editor of a historico-critical edition of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, based on the surviving typescripts of the chapter ‘Toward a Theory of the Artwork’ (De Gruyter). During his stay at the Institute, he will work on the 'poetic/aesthetic form' of writing in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. [February-April 2013]
Evi Fountoulakis is a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow at the Institute. She graduated from the University of Basle in German and English Studies, and teaches German at the University of Basle and the University of Applied Sciences in Zurich. In her dissertation 'The Guest’s Disquiet. A Figure on the Threshold of Modernity' (2012) she explores the figure of the 'guest' in German narratives of the 19th and early 20th century while also focusing on traces of hospitality as a metaphor in literary theory. She has published a variety of articles on the topic of hospitality and is co-editor of a volume on the relationship between guest and stranger (Der Gast als Fremder, 2011). Her current project is a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to ageing as reflected in contemporary literature. During her Fellowship she will focus her attention on the aesthetics of decline in contemporary narratives. [May-June 2013]
Laure Guilbert is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute. She holds a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute of Fiesole. Her monograph Danser avec le Troisième Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme [Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism] was published by Éditions Complexe in 2000 (new edition by André Versaille Éditeur in 2011). She has taught mainly in performing arts departments in Paris 3, Versailles, Metz and Lille Universities. From 2002 onwards she has been in charge of the dance publishing department of the Paris National Opera. Her current research project concerns the exile and diasporas of the German choreographic world in the 1930s and 1940s. During her stay at the Institute, she will focus her attention on the German refugees in Great Britain. [October-December 2012]
Laurence Paul Hemming is a Research Fellow of the Lancaster University Management School. He was until 2007 on the staff of Heythrop College, University of London, latterly as Dean of Research. He has written, edited, and translated a number of books, the most recent of which is a full-length study for Northwestern University Press, Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism, for publication in January 2013. He is leading a group who will translate Ernst Jünger's 1932 book on the meaning and metaphysics of work, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft ind Gestalt [The Worker: Dominion and Form]. [September 2012-June 2013]
Martina Kolb is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute, and Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. She taught in the Humanities Core Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the Universities of Constance and Bologna. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, a graduate degree (Staatsexamen) in Modern Philology from the University of Tübingen, and an MA in German Studies from the University of Oregon. She is the author of Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria (2013). and has published articles on Dante’s and Brecht’s love poetry, on Benn’s poetics, on Freud’s Nietzscheanism, on Brecht, Weigel and the Asian stage, on Pound’s prison writing, and on the uncanny in Uwe Johnson. She has translated Benn into English, and interviews with Holocaust survivors into German, and is contributing editor of Bloom’s Major Dramatists: Bertolt Brecht. Her main research interests are place, displacement, and emotion in art and literature, with an emphasis on geo-poetics, exile studies, the inter-arts, and psychoanalysis. She is in the process of writing a book on visual and verbal representations of fear and pain. During her stay at the Institute, she will work on the chapter that examines Ingeborg Bachmann’s exilic poetics. [May-June 2013]
Hadwig Kraeutler is a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellow at the Institute. She graduated in 1974 from the Academy of Fine Arts and the University in Vienna, and holds a doctorate from the School of Museum Studies at University of Leicester. Her thesis was published as a monograph, Otto Neurath. Museum and Exhibition Work. Spaces (Designed) for Communication (2008). From 1992 until 2012 she was on the staff of the Belvedere in Vienna, and has been lecturing and publishing about museum communication and learning, exhibition design, and its interpretive potential for engaging (with) the users. Her research interests are basically interdisciplinary and concern museology, communication, art and cultural history, exhibition texts and evaluation, more recently with a focus on exile studies. Her current research concerns the life story and scholarship of Alma S. Wittlin (1899-1992), an exiled Austrian museologist, writer, and educationalist. During her stay at the Institute, she will focus her attention on this émigré’s time and networks in Great Britain. [March 2013]
Elisa Marti-Lopez graduated from the University of Barcelona in 1983 with a Llicenciatura in History, and obtained her PhD in Spanish Literature from New York University in 1995. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is the author of Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (2002), Un passeig pel Cementiri de PobleNou (2004), and Somnis de Barcelona: El Cementiri de Montjuïc, 1883-1936 (2008), and has published book chapters and articles on the popular novel and the literary market in 19th-century Spain. [Spring 2013]