Members of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research
David Barton, Professor of Language and Literacy, Department of Linguistics and English Language
David is Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, which is a core partner in the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy. His recent publications include Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language, Blackwell, 2nd edition, 2007; Models of Adult Learning, Leicester: NIACE, 2006 (with K. Tusting); Beyond Communities Of Practice: Language, Power And Social Context, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (ed. with K. Tusting); Letter writing as a social practice, John Benjamins, 2000 (ed. with N. Hall); and Situated Literacies, Routledge, 2000 (ed. with Mary Hamilton and Roz Ivanic). http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/50
Yvonne Battle-Felton, Creative Writing PhD student, Department of English & Creative Writing
Yvonne Battle-Felton is a Creative Writing PhD student at Lancaster University where she researches and writes fictional versions of truth in a work exploring Reuniting the African American Family after the Emancipation. Her pursuit of words has taken her from the U.S to the UK and across the divides of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction and back again. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County and currently teaches at University of Maryland University College while writing, studying, and studying writing. http://yvonnebattle-felton.blogspot.co.uk/
Rebecca Braun, Lecturer in German Studies
Rebecca’s research focuses on authorship – the different ways authors are constructed in literary texts, as well as in wider social, cultural, and political contexts. Her specialism is in 20th and 21st century German-speaking Europe, but she has also worked comparatively on European and North American constructions of literary celebrity. Broader questions surrounding the relationship between the media and the culture industry, self-presentation, and notions of cultural value in the contemporary world underpin her work. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/eurolang/profiles/Rebecca-Braun/
Mercedes Maroto Camino, Professor, History
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/history/profiles/435/5/
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). EntitledMulticultural 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/
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/
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 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/
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/
Ruth Wodak, Distinguished 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