Members of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research

Directors and Steering Group         Members of the Centre

Members of the Centre's steering group

Director of the Centre: Graham Mort, Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature, Department of English & Creative Writing

Graham is a distance learning specialist and designed and ran the British Council Crossing Borders mentoring scheme for African writers (2001-2006).  He was the UK adviser and designer for the British Council Beyond Borders literature festival (Kampala 2005), designed and piloted Radiophonics, a new British Council radio-writing project in East/West Africa, and was a co-applicant on Moving Manchester. Other academic research has focused on emergent African writing, eLearning and the pedagogy of Creative Writing. He has published seven collections of poetry and also writes short fiction and radio drama.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/625/

 

Director of Web Development: Lee Horsley, Reader, Department of English & Creative Writing

Lee has worked increasingly in recent years on web design and eLearning in relation to creative writing pedagogy and interdisciplinary, transcultural uses of virtual space.  Her research work focuses on crime fiction as a vehicle for counter-cultural protest and socio-political critique (The Noir Thriller, 2001, reissued 2009; Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 2005); she co-edited The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (2010), which is both cross-cultural in content and cross-disciplinary in its arguments, drawing in the diverse disciplinary affiliations of crime fiction study. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/114/

 

Roger Bromley, Visiting Professor, Department of English & Creative Writing

Roger Bromley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and Honorary Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and has recently been appointed Visiting Professor with the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster. He will work closely with the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research. Author of the seminal work, Narratives for a New Belonging, Roger is currently working on a new book, Narratives of Hope? Conflict, Reconciliation and Cultural Forms (with reference to Bosnia, Rwanda and South Africa). He is also involved with a project on the representation of migration and displacement in cinematic forms, provisionally entitled People on the Move: Narratives of Displacement and Belonging.

 

Muli Amaye, PhD student, Department of English & Creative Writing

Muli has set up a writing partnership and facilitated and project-managed workshops and projects throughout Greater Manchester with various schools and community groups. She is writing (for her Creative Writing PhD) a novel that spans from the 30's and pre-independence Nigeria to current-day Manchester. This research has taken her from the National Archive in London to the Labour History Museum in Manchester; it includes oral accounts from Nigerian women who settled in Manchester in the '50's and '60's and those of family members who live in Sapele, Nigeria. The novel explores memory and consciousness and the effect of migration on second and third generations. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/849/

 

Charlotte Baker, Lecturer in French, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Charlotte's research interests centre on the comparative study of twentieth-century French and Francophone African literature and culture, with a particular interest in the representation of marginalised groups in society.  Her research draws on recent developments in postcolonial theory, as well as theories of the body and identity.  Her current project, an edited volume, Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image (Peter Lang, 2008 - Forthcoming) demonstrates her commitment to interdisciplinarity.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/754/

 

Robert Crawshaw, Senior Lecturer, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Robert teaches in the Department of European Languages and Cultures, where he specialises in the study of comparative literature and intercultural communication.  He has acted as a consultant to the European Commission and directs the Interculture Project and the ESRC funded Pragmatics and Intercultural Communications Project.  He has also directed the IAS Annual Research Programme 2006-07: Regions and Regionalism In and Beyond Europe. He is part of the project team of Moving Manchester and his current academic interests are mainly in the area of transcultural narratives - writing which defines the experience of crossing cultural boundaries or living between cultures.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/264/4/

 

Ian Gregory, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Before coming to Lancaster, Ian was the Associate Director of Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queens University, Belfast. In September 2006 he joined FASS to lead a new initiative in Digital Humanities. He is on the editorial boards of Social Science History and Historical Methods, is serving his second term as co-chair of the Social Science History Associations's Historical Geography network, and is on the Institutional Board and Technical Steering Committee of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/113/30/ .

 

Kate Horsley, Teaching Assistant, Department of English & Creative Writing

Kate has been working as a research associate and web designer for CTWR and is a tutor in part 2 creative writing at Lancaster. She has has taught literature and writing on both sides of the Atlantic and completed a volunteer teaching stint in Uganda. Her short stories have been published by Storyglossia, Momaya Press and Best British Crime Stories. She has forthcoming poems in Erbacce magazine and won first prize in the July 2010 Sentinel Poetry competition. She has just completed her first novel, a nineteenth-century gothic mystery called Secrets of the Skin. She has worked as researcher for the Radiophonics project, co-curated the 'Writing Manchester' exhibition at Manchester Central Library and is currently working on the Lancaster/Uganda Friends Writing Project website. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/852/

 

Lindsey Moore, Lecturer, Department of English & Creative Writing

Lindsey works in the field of postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on women's writing, film, and visual media. Her first book, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (Routledge, May 2008) discusses a wide range of Arab women's literary and visual texts in English, French and translation from Arabic, using the postcolonial as a frame to problematise feminism and nationalism as well as monolingual and single disciplinary frameworks. She has wider interests in postcolonial, particularly South Asian and British-Asian, literatures, and is beginning research on a new project entitled 'Modernism at the Margins'. She is the co-organiser of the Trans-Scriptions series.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/526/

 

Lynne Pearce, Professor of Literary Theory and Women's Writing, Department of English & Creative Writing

Lynne is the Project Director of Moving Manchester:Mediating Marginalities. Her teaching and research have been mainly in the field of feminist literary theory, but with wide-ranging historical and disciplinary interests. Particular thematic concerns have been in 'the politics of reading', feminist re-scriptings of romance, and national / regional literature(s) and identities within the UK. Her most recent books are The Rhetorics of Feminism : Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press (Routledge, 2004) and Romance Writing (Polity, 2007).   http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/84/

 

Members of the Centre

 

Mercedes Maroto Camino, Professor, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Mercedes’ main research areas are: early modern voyages of exploration, film and media studies, Baroque women’s writing and history of cartography. Her fourth book, Exploring the Explorers: Spaniards in Oceania (1519-1794) (Manchester University Press, 2008), is the result of some years of collaboration with anthropologists and cultural ethnographers. She is currently working on the use of women and children as points of identification in films dealing with Spanish guerrilla fighters in the 1940s.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/435/

 

Sondra Cuban, Lecturer, Department of Educational Research

Sondra’s current research projects are an ESRC study,  called, Home/Work: the roles of education, learning, and literacies  in the networks and mobilities of migrant carers. It focuses on the  gendered geographies of skilled migration at the intersections of  labour, care, and rurality. The other project is a European Commission partnership focusing on the changing learning and  literacy needs of trade union representatives (with Sweden, Latvia,  Bulgaria, and Portugal). She uses feminist ethnography, grounded  theory, and narrative analysis in her work, and draws heavily on  theories on mobilities, feminist transnational praxis, intersectionist, and post-colonial theories. Her writing focuses on:  women, learning and literacies community technologies; non-formal  and informal education; and the feminisation of migration and  education. In her teaching in the education department, she draws on action research for learning.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/edres/profiles/209/

 

Allyson Fiddler, Professor of German and Austrian Studies, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Much of Allyson's research focuses on contemporary Austrian culture.  The intersection with transcultural scholarship resides in her interest in multicultural Austria and in intercultural aspects of contemporary politics, literature and cinema.  Her article on ‘Carinthia, Interculturalism, and Austrian National Identity’ (GLL, 2005) explores topics of Slovenian-Austrian historical and contemporary friction.  She offers one of the first, broader explorations of multiculturalism and contemporary Austrian literature in a recent, new history of Austrian Literature (Camden House, 2006).
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/434/

 

Anne-Marie Fortier, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Director of Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies

Anne-Marie’s research interests include critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and nation formation, critical migration and diaspora studies, the cultural politics of emotions. She has published on 'migrant belongings', 'queer diasporas', and multiculturalism. She recently completed a book on discourses of multiculturalism in Britain (2000-2006). Entitled Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation, this book examines how the 'New Britain' of the twenty-first century is variously re-imagined as multicultural. In her current research she is pursuing her interest in 'multicultural intimacies' as they manifest themselves in Gordon Brown's (and David Cameron's) post-multicultural Britain.   
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/24/

 

Cornelia Gräbner, Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Cornelia Graebner was trained in the discipline of Comparative Literature.  She works on contemporary performance poetry with a focus on its intercultural aspects, on critical and cultural theory, and on politically committed contemporary literature, especially in Latin America.  Her work on critical and cultural theory includes the enquiry into the academic use of concepts related to interculturality, for example mobility, hybridity, and transnationalism.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/766/4/

 

Sophie Krossa, Lecturer in European Studies, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Sophie is interested in a range of topics within 'European' sociology, mainly in the question of a 'European society', but also in classical and current sociological theory in general, integration, identity, conflict, communication, religion, culture and everyday life, cybersociality, transnationalization and Europeanization, 'European identity', European Union and enlargements (East Central Europe, Turkey). She is currently working on projects on: the question of a 'European society' in relation to ideas of diversity and processes of conflict communication instead of homogeneity and integration; young European inter- and supranationalilites, viewing them as some kind of 'European society'; and the concept of a 'European identity' which generally asks why we are (and who is) interested in something so risky.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/792/

 

Adrian Mackenzie, Reader, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen)

Adrian's research combines ethnographic, textual, theoretical and activist/participant approaches in areas such as open source software, hactivism, coding work, consumption and branding of technologies. It focuses how new media infrastructural objects such as databases, protocols, images, codings and frameworks can be read as collectively embodied imaginings.  His recent papers and publications include discussion of  'software and sociality', technology and 'the cultural inversion of infrastructure', 'science and cultural theory'.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/158/33/

 

Deborah Mawer, Senior Lecturer in Music

Deborah teaches in the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and specializes in research of twentieth-century French music, particularly its cultural interplay with both jazz and dance. Books comprise Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (1997); The Cambridge Companion to Ravel (2000) and The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation (2006). She is currently editing Ravel Studies for Cambridge, in which she and Nicholas Gebhardt (ICR) provide a centrepiece on Ravel’s crossing of borders, in respect of jazz and Americanization. A major article on ‘“Parisomania”: Jack Hylton and the French connection’ will appear in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (November 2008).

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/lica/profiles/Deborah-Mawer/

 

Nayanika Mookherjee, Lecturer, Department of Sociology

Nayanika's research on the public memories of sexual violence during the Bangladesh War lies at the crossroads of Anthropology, Sociology and Political theory. By means of ethnography as well as exploration of literary and visual sources she is interested in the identifying the role of affect and the nation-state in the context of violence. She has published in Edited collections, peer-reviewed Journals (Journal Of Royal Anthropological Institute, Space and Culture, Feminist Review, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Childhood, Economic and Political Weekly) and her book Specters and Utopias: Sexual Violence, Public Memory and the Bangladesh War is forthcoming with Duke University Press. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/28/16/

 

Shuruq Naguib, Lecturer in Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies

Before joining religious studies at Lancaster, Shuruq worked in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Modern Cultures in Manchester, where she studied and taught Islam in a variety of cultural contexts. In her view, researching Islam is necessarily transcultural. Muslim societies have a long history of responding to Islam as a way of life in their own particular cultural contexts but have also developed transcultural dimensions with strong religious underpinnings. This is perhaps why it is possible to study Modern Islamic writings through exploring the shared intellectual genealogies of Muslim writers, for example, in Egypt, Syria and India. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/religstudies/profiles/78/

 

Liz Oakley-Brown, Lecturer, Department of English & Creative Writing

Liz Oakley-Brown's principle area of research is concerned with translation and the construction of early modern identities (1480-1700). Her publications include the co-edited collection Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness (with Roger Ellis, Multilingual Matters, 2001) and the monograph Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006). She is currently working on a book-length study entitled Travel, Translation and Identity in the Works of Thomas Churchyard (1523?-1604). http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/profiles/Liz-Oakley-Brown/

 

Emma Rose, Professor of Contemporary Art, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts

Emma produces primarily practice-based research in experimental video, painting, drawing and printmaking. Video pieces, made in collaboration with Neil Boynton (Music), are designed not only to achieve aesthetic and communicative goals but also to serve as the means for practical, experimental and theoretical research into the creative possibilities of new technology and its cultual significance.  She is a co-initiator and core member of 'Poetics, Theory Practice Research Group' and a co-investigator on AHRC funded project 'Re-enchantment and Reclamation: New Perceptions of Morecambe Bay through Dance, Film and Sound'. This is a multi disciplinary project which aims to discover and develop methods in dance, film, and the sonic arts for re-enchanting and reclaiming the landscape of Morecambe Bay and the Lune Estuary, and to contribute positively to the changing perceptions and understandings of the area's different communities and interest groups. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/lica/profiles/682/

 

Jane Sunderland, Director of Studies, PhD in Applied Linguistics

Jane's main area of research is language and gender. Within this, she is particularly interested in 'Language and gender in African contexts'. This refers not so much to the diversity of languages and dialects in Africa and their grammatical expressions of gender (though these are of course of interest), as to the competing gendered discourses which pertain in relation to Africa (for example, of empowerment and of marginality).  In conjunction with my National Teaching Fellowship (2007), she has set up a programme of seminars to promote networking and scholarship in this area. This includes (see http://groups.google.co.uk/group/gal-africa?hl=en) the development of a research agenda and a series of small-scale projects.
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/300/

 

Deborah Sutton, Lecturer in the Department of History

Deborah’s work on the Nilgiri Hills of South India is concerned with the juridical interfaces that were formed between the incoming state, settlers and the indigenous communties in the nineteenth century. This research explored the cultures of property and landscape that allowed the reinterpretation and subdivision of the hills into different categories of resources. Her recent research is concerned with the jurisdiction presumed by the Indian state over overseas populations of Indian origin after independence in 1947. This project interrogates the presumptions reflected in the influence Indian missions attempted to exercise over Indian politics and society in remnant British territories. Her forthcoming book is entitled Other Landscapes: Colonialism and the Predicament of Authority in Nineteenth-Century South India.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/Deborah-Sutton/History/

 

Christine Sylvester, Professor of International Relations and Development, Department of Politics and International Relations

Most of Christine’s research in international relations is on aspects of feminist IR, a twenty year-plus effort by feminist scholars to influence international relations --as a set of practices (e.g., war, diplomacy, terrorism, aid, trade, etc) and a set of theories (such as realism, liberal institutionalism, international society, international political economy, globalisation, constructivism, security studies, etc).  Publications include Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Her latest project in IR is 'Touching War', an interdisciplinary project she directs with a team of colleagues at Lancaster in the arts, law, and American cultural studies and colleagues from the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/politics/profiles/37/

 

Amit Thakkar, Lecturer in Spanish American Studies, Centre for Gender and Womens' Studies

Amit's research centres on fictional and visual representations of Mexican culture and particularly the work of author and photographer Juan Rulfo (1917-1986). The focus on Rulfo's irony and the rhetoric of revolution on ethnic integration has unlocked transcultural dimensions in his work: firstly, the place of pre-colonial, indigenous myth in a post-Revolutionary, predominantly mestizo Mexico; secondly, indigenous approaches to the modern market economy; thirdly, the representation of indigenous 'folklore' in photography. The first of these is dealt with in a forthcoming book, The Fiction of Juan Rulfo: Irony, Revolution and Postcolonialism. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/gws/profiles/440/

 

David Whitton, Professor of French Theatre Studies, Department of European Languages and Cultures

Apart from a general interest in the complexity of theatre as a cultural, social, political, institutional, and economic practice, David has a special interest in the performance life of dramatic texts, particularly where it involves trans-cultural production and reception. This has led to him undertaking a series of comparative production studies. In his book Molière: Don Juan he explores modern European stagings of the play to show how, through the process of performance, the text is re-actualized to achieve resonance in a variety of specific cultural contexts.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/431/

 

Hager Weslati, Lecturer, Institute for Cultural Research

Hager's general research interest explores the cultural politics of literary and visual texts from the lens of critical theory and comparative studies. Her current research focuses on what Albert Memmi describes as "la pensee du desert". The desert is a trans- national space in the narrow sense of a 'real' physical geography shared by 'desert cultures' in the East and West alike. In a more general sense, Hager's research explores the dissemination of images of 'emptiness' and nomadism in post-modern urban heterotopias that challenge the stereotypical representation and understanding of desert spaces. This desert journey started with a student produced film on "the Great American Desert made in the northwest of England" and will soon be followed by her forthcoming book The Empire of the Real: From the Great American Desert to the Greater Middle East.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/cultres/profiles/Hager-Weslati/

 

Professor Ruth Wodak, Professor of Discourse Studies, Department of
Linguistics and English Language

After moving from Vienna, Ruth has stayed co-director of the Austrian National Focal Point (NFP) of the European Monitoring Centre for Racism, Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism.  Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 which made six years of continuous interdisciplinary team research possible. The main projects focussed on include "The Discursive Construction of European Identities" and "Racism at the Top. Parliamentary Debates on Immigration in six EU countries". Ruth's main research agenda is the development of theoretical approaches in discourse studies (combining ethnography, argumentation theory, rhetoric and functional systemic linguistics); gender studies; language and/in politics; prejudice and discrimination.  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/265/13

Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, County College, Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, UK