This research area brings together scholars working with transnational themes and methods. Transnationalism is an analytical concept with radical potential. It transcends national barriers, cutting through the limits of national historiographies and research cultures, opening up new ways through which we can study important social and cultural phenomena.

Current and recent research projects and other activities

This is a new research area of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories. We have two aims: to seek links in our members’ work that will help lead to different forms of collaboration; and to be part of the wider scholar debate on transnational themes, research skills and methods. Some common themes explored by our members include:

  • transnational memory cultures and politics
  • transnational histories of identities, family, kinship and communities
  • histories of diaspora, refugeedom and migration
  • witnessing and narrating in/of transnational experiences, and creative practices within transnational communities
  • transnational histories and memories of contestation, conflict, trauma and resistance
  • transnational intellectual history

Our current activities are:

  • We run an informal discussion circle that meets regularly to discuss key texts, research questions, and works-in-progress.
  • We are liaising with the Centre for Transnational Studies at the University of Southampton to collaborate in future activities.

Current and recent PhD research

Martha Beard, Cross-community Oral History, Post-Conflict Geography and Conflict Resolution at West Belfast Interfaces, funded with a AHRC/Techne Collaborative Doctoral Award. Her research examines the role of oral history as a peacebuilding tool in Northern Ireland. A core part of her work involves the critical exploration of the strategies and practices devised by the Dúchas Oral History Archive, situated in West Belfast, to acknowledge and deal with a conflicted history of the Troubles. Martha is especially interested in debates and discussions related to the use of oral history within post-conflict contexts at a local, regional and transnational level.

Ian Cantoni, Camp de Rivesaltes; topography of French cultural memory, funded with a AHRC/Techne studentship (PhD awarded 2019)

Catherine Lynott Wilson, Transformative storytelling in one transnational family: explores disrupting othering – contesting nationalist bordered notions of identity whilst navigating shifting socio-political contexts.

Andrea Potts is a PhD Researcher, funded by an AHRC/Techne studentship. She is interested in the role that contemporary museum exhibitions across Europe play in mediating how people engage with the colonial past.

Melina Sadikovic, Narrating the war experience: the politics of war memory and commemoration within the framed peace process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, University of Brighton studentship (PhD awarded 2019)

Vanessa Tautter, Exclusive and Excluding Perspectives on the Past: Narratives of Victimisation among the Contemporary Right in Austria and Northern Ireland, funded with a AHRC/Techne studentship. She uses oral histories conducted in Austria and Northern Ireland to explore how trans|national shifts in dominant memory frames since the 1980s have been experienced by those socialised in ‘traditional’ memory cultures, and how they compose their own and/or their family’s life stories in relation to these shifts.

Najma Yusufi is a PhD Researcher working on the ‘Identification of subconscious and unconscious hybridity in cultural hybrid writing’

Staff researchers, postdoctoral researchers and research fellows

Dr Katy Beinart is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture. Her research and artistic practice have explored Jewish diaspora histories and memories through personal family history stories, which have then formed invitations for cross cultural transnational retellings of diasporic memory. She also has a long term research project, Salted Earth, which investigates the transnational and transcultural symbolic meanings of salt.

Dr Ian Cantoni is a Research Fellow developing his doctoral research for publication. His work applies theories of transnational memory to physical memorial sites (the site in question itself lying at the intersection of innumerable transnational movements).

Dr Eugene Michail is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History. He has worked on a variety of transnational history themes, mainly in relation to British contacts with other parts of Europe, especially Germany and the Balkans. Currently he is working on refugee histories – a quintessentially transnational – from a local micro-history angle.

Dr Ceren Özpınar, is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design. The creative works produced within the transnational Kurdish communities is the focus of her Rising Star project (2021-22). She aims to demonstrate how the experiences of conflict and resistance can be re-constituted as visual forms of knowledge through everyday materials and techniques, and bridge transnational communities.

Dr Anita Rupprecht is a Principal Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial histories related to transatlantic enslavement, abolition and their long afterlives. She is interested in transnational history as it relates to the representation and politics of ‘race’, diaspora and the shaping of cultural memory.

Dr Melina Sadikovic is a Research Fellow with an interest in culture and cultural memory of war. In her PhD thesis she examined the cultural-political process of construction of memory of war(s) in Bosnia and Herzegovina and wider post-Yugoslav space in relation to European and global contexts, and in the light of intellectual, political and cultural shifts after 1989.

For full details of individual research interests, look at our Pure profiles.

To take part in our activities or to become a member of our research area please contact: Dr Eugene Michail  E.Michail@brighton.ac.uk