Associate Members of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research

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/

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/

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/

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/

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/

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/

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/

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/

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/