Current Visiting Researchers
Professor Ahmet Atay
aatay@wooster.edu
Ahmet Atay (Ph.D. Southern Illinois University- Carbondale) is Professor of Global Media and Communication Studies at the College of Wooster. His research falls into two categories. Although they might seem distinct, both categories revolve around the issues of culture and the differences (such as queer, transnationality, postcoloniality, and decoloniality) and diversity in mediated texts, cyberspace, and everyday situations. More specifically, his research at large focuses on transnational and diasporic experiences and communities. He often writes about the transnational flow of texts, information, and bodies. While some of his current projects are focused on the distinct aspects of transnational and diasporic communities, others explore the aspects of transnational media and the representations of transnational and queer bodies in global media. His research often employs textual analysis, queer and feminist analysis, critical and cyber ethnography, autoethnography (decolonizing autoethnography and digital/cyber autoethnography), and other transnational and postcolonial media and cultural methods.
He is the author of Globalization’s Impact on Identity Formation: Queer Diasporic Males in Cyberspace (2015) and the co-editor of several books. His scholarship appeared in number of journals and edited books. He served as the chair of Global Media and Digital Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies departments at the College of Wooster. Currently he is serving as the First Vice President (and the program planner of 2023 conference) of Central States Communication Association. He will become the president of the organization in April 2023.
Dr Hélène Abiraad
heleneabiraad@hotmail.com
My research is an exploration of urban activists’ narratives and experiences of space and place, the past, and urban activism in contemporary Beirut. It explores the physical, temporal and emotional relationships of Beiruti activists to a contested past and to a contested city. I am a long-standing member of CMNH, was awarded my PhD from the University of Brighton in December 2020, and am now Visiting Research Fellow and member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective working on our monograph, Unsettling Memories of Violence: Complex Temporalities in ‘Post-conflict’ Societies.
Professor Geoffrey Bird
Geoffrey Bird leads the War Heritage Research Initiative at Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada. His PhD in anthropology at the University of Brighton focused on tourism, remembrance and landscapes of war, examining how sites are managed and interpreted as well as the meaning and insight gained by visitors. He has thirty years’ experience in heritage-related roles including battlefield tour guide, field researcher in Europe, Canada, and Vietnam, and documentary film-maker. His collaboration with CMNH’s Heritage in the 21st Century research area explores themes of memorialisation, heritage, landscapes of war, and meaning.
Dr Ian Cantoni
ian.cantoni@gmail.com
I am a historian who draws on interdisciplinary methodologies from the fields of history, memory studies, and anthropology to consider the contemporary resonances of 20th Century conflict in French culture. My doctoral thesis is a site-specific study of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes, a major site of memory in the French historical landscape. My PhD was awarded by University of Brighton in 2019. I am a CMNH Visiting Research Fellow contributing to the ‘Negotiating Complex Temporalities in “Post-Conflict” Spaces’ research area as a member of the ‘Brighton Memory Studies Collective’.
Dr Karen Charman
Dr Karen Charman is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the founder of the Public Pedagogies Institute and editor of the Journal of Public Pedagogies. Dr Charman’s research interests are in the intersections of public pedagogy, curriculum, memory, psychoanalysis and public history.
Dr Ken Clarry
k.clarry2@brighton.ac.uk
Ken Clarry is a practising artist and researcher whose work focuses on aesthetics, theory and the politics of power. His PhD, awarded by the University of Brighton in 2020, was a practice-based investigation of how representations of power and violence evolve in wars and conflicts as spectral phenomena, and how artists and theorists strive to make sense of them. As a Visiting Research Fellow in CMNH his current project – “Conflict Pollution” – explores the environmental and ecological effects of armed conflict.
Professor Graham Dawson
Graham Dawson works in interdisciplinary cultural studies on popular memory of war and conflict, with a focus on the memories, legacies and afterlives of the Northern Irish Troubles in Ireland and Britain. Drawing on memory studies, history, literature, cultural geography and psychoanalysis, his research investigates lived experience, subjectivity and memory as represented in oral histories and life stories; the temporal dynamics of ‘post-conflict’ culture; community-based memorywork; and the cultural politics of conflict transformation and historical justice. Graham was formerly Professor of Historical Cultural Studies at the University of Brighton, co-founder and Director of the Centre for Memory Narrative and Histories.
Professor Kirsten Forkert
Kirsten.Forkert@bcu.ac.uk
Kirsten Forkert is a researcher, teacher and activist. She is based at the Birmingham Institute of Media and English at BCU, where she’s also one of the Associate Directors of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. Her work is based in Cultural Studies and engages with questions around migration and nationalism; her most recent project is the co-authored book, How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants (2020), which was based on a collaborative project with researchers and community organisations in the UK and Italy. She’s also on the editorial collectives of Soundings and Lawrence and Wishart Books. Kirsten is developing on new research around the transnational political imagination and migrant justice, and is interested in exploring the role of memory and history within the context of this work.
Dr Anna Girling
Anna is currently an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London. Her work is broadly interested in the relationship between the literary representation and theorisation of community, and the relationship between politics, gender, and literary form in writing from across the twentieth century. She completed her PhD in 2022 at the University of Edinburgh on the American writer Edith Wharton and her engagement with a gay male literary tradition, queer social politics, and literary cosmopolitanism and decadence. She is currently an Early Career Fellow in the Institute of English Studies at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where she is working on a project about the publication of ‘classic’ American literature during the Cold War.
Anna has also been working on the writer and political activist Nancy Cunard, and in particularly on her anti-colonial journalism in Caribbean and Black US newspapers. She had an Eccles Centre Fellowship at the British Library to work on this and will be offering a workshop on her research on Cunard.
Dr Struan Gray
struancgray@gmail.com
I am a Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. I am a longstanding PGR member of CMNH and organised its Complex Temporalities Reading Group for several years. My PhD was awarded by the University of Brighton in in 2019 for my thesis, ‘A Haunted Transition: Dealing with Ghosts in Post-dictatorship Chilean Film’. My research continues to focus on Latin American film, film-makers and memory politics. I am a CMNH Visiting Research Fellow and member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective working on our book, Unsettling Memories of Violence in ‘Post-conflict’ Societies.
Dr Andrea Pruchova Hruzova
Andrea Pruchova Hruzova Ph.D. is a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences and an associate professor at the department of sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Charles University in Prague. She is a founder of the visual research platform Fresh Eye and works in the fields of historical and digital visual culture and memory studies. Her research work has been published in the form of articles in Visual Studies and European Journal of Cultural Studies and as book chapters in Amsterdam University Press 2023 (in print), Palgrave Macmillan (2021, 2015) and Turku University Press (2017). She has translated Berger’s Ways of Seeing and co-translated Mitchell’s Picture Theory and Mirzoeff’s How to See the World to Czech. In 2019, she published the artistic book We Have Never Been Earth (Visual Studies Workshop Press).
Dr Manus McGrogan
Manus McGrogan is a historian, researcher, oral historian and political activist. Manus will be facilitating two oral history workshops that draw on his research and activism, as well as presenting a paper at the Centre’s seminar series on visual culture. Manus’s work focuses on French and international social movements of the radical or global 60s, their press and propaganda. His interest in 1960s radicalism and the counter culture stems from a background in political activism and a love of art and music of the 60s. Postgraduate work on the May 1968 events in France and their consequences led to a study of the seditious leftist paper, TOUT! (Everything!), a revolution in both form and content for the press of the day. This work featured in forums commemorating 40 and 50 years of May ’68 with publication of a book on TOUT! in 2018. In addition to analytical readings of the paper, the testimony of is creators and distributors proved crucial in telling the story of TOUT! Manus became an oral historian, drawing on the approach of Martin Evans and his work on underground resistance to the Algerian War in the 1950s and 60s. His ongoing research has probed the transnational dimension of the global arc of radicalism that spanned the ‘Long ’60s’, also relying heavily on interviews with former activists of different countries. Currently he works with another group of scholars on the International Socialist History project, an oral history venture seeking to recover the memories and experiences of a disappearing generation of UK based activists of the 1960s and 70s.
P.J.Maguire@brighton.ac.uk
Paddy Maguire is a social and political historian who taught at Brighton University from 1978–2018, becoming Head of Humanities in 1996, and co-founding CMNH in 2008. He was active in the History Workshop movement, Labour History and the Workers Educational Association. He has published on a variety of topics including working class writing, literature and politics, the co-operative movement, social class and Labour politics, and design and the British economy. As a CMNH Visiting Research Fellow, he is researching the changing structure, culture, location and representation of the English working class 1960-2010.
Dr Lucy Kate Newby
lucyorkate@gmail.com
My research concerns the theory and practice of oral history in relation to cultural memory discourses, with a particular focus on youth experience of the Northern Ireland Troubles. As a former doctoral researcher at the University of Brighton, I have been a highly active member of CMNH since 2015. My PhD was awarded in 2020 and I am now a CMNH Visiting Research Fellow and a member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective, working towards publication of our co-authored monograph Unsettling Memories of Violence: Complex Temporalities in ‘Post-conflict’ Societies.
Dr Cathy Palmer
C.Palmer3@brighton.ac.uk
I am a Visiting Research Fellow, a member of CMNH’s Steering Group, and lead the Heritage in the 21st Century research area. As a social anthropologist I am experienced in ethnographic methods such as observation, interviewing, and photo‐elicitation. My research interests lie in the broad area of culture, space and place, focusing on tourism, heritage sites, memorialisation and embodiment. I am particularly interested in commemorative landscapes of war; in ‘dark tourism’ where memorialisation of conflict and death may become framed as ‘heritage’; and in visitor experience of conflict heritage.
Dr Melina Sadikovic
melina.sadikovic071@gmail.com
A long-standing PGR member of CMNH, I was awarded my PhD from the University of Brighton in 2018 for my thesis: ‘Narrating the War Experience. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration within the Framed Peace Process in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. I am now a CMNH Visiting Research Fellow. My work merges Cultural Studies, Memory Studies, post-conflict studies, and contemporary European History to focus on post-war and post-communist transition in South-eastern and Eastern Europe. I am a member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective working on our co-authored book.
Professor Darko R. Suvin
Professor Darko R. Suvin, scholar, critic and poet. Born in 1930 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, Suvin is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. He was co-editor of Science-Fiction Studies, editor of Literary Research/Recherche littéraire and visiting professor at 10 universities. Suvin has won many awards for scholarship and prizes for poetry and has published 35book titles, edited 14 volumes and written hundreds of articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction, political epistemology and communism, as well as three volumes of poetry. Vita and essays can be accessed at www.darkosuvin.com; papers to read and download at https://independent.academia.edu/DarkoSuvin/Papers
Dr Kasia Tomasiewicz
kasiaalextee@gmail.com
I am an independent postdoctoral researcher, having been awarded my PhD from the University of Brighton and the Imperial War Museums in 2021 for my thesis entitled: “Memory in the Museum: Representing the Second World War in the Imperial War Museum, London 1960–2020.” I am a longstanding active member of CMNH and now, as Visiting Research Fellow, plan to continue its collaborative relation with IWM through research on the new WW2 Galleries. I am also a member of the Brighton Memory Studies Collective working towards publication of our co-authored monograph.
