Organisation & Researchers

Research Centre Directors

The Directors, Dr Andrew Asibong and Dr Nathalie Wourm, coordinate the activities of the Centre, and in consultation with the Steering Committee are responsible for developing strategic initiatives and priorities. The Advisory Board includes over fifty researchers from eight subject areas at Birkbeck as well as other institutions inside and outside London and the UK, who advise the Directors and Steering Committee on strategic priorities.

Steering Committee

Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Damian Catani (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Matt Cook (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck - History of Art & Screen Media)
Joanne Leal (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Ann Lewis (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Paul Watt (Birkbeck - Sociology)
Zhu Hua (Birkbeck - Applied Linguistics)

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Advisory board / Consultant Researchers

FILM AND VISUAL CULTURE

Andrew Asibong (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Subject Co-ordinator
Representations of new kinships and communities in contemporary French film and literature.

Marie-Claire Barnet (Durham - French)
Representations of family in contemporary French writing and visual culture.

Shirley Jordan (QMUL - French)
Contemporary French women's writing and visual culture.

Joanne Leal (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Post-political masculinities in German cinema and cultural representation.



FINE ARTS

Carmen Fracchia (Birkbeck - Iberian and Latin American Studies)
The construction of the image of black slaves in the Spanish Empire and its visual representation.

Gabriel Koureas (Birkbeck - History of Art & Screen Media)
Subject Co-ordinator
Memory, conflict and commemoration in the construction of national and gender identities.

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (Birkbeck - History of Art & Screen Media)
Mechanisms of staging the sense of community in cartoons, 'Eastern European' emigrees in Britain.

Kate Retford (Birkbeck - History of Art & Screen Media)
Representations of the family in eighteenth-century Britain, representations of the domestic sphere.



HISTORY AND MEMORY

Sunil Amrith (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
Cosmopolitanism and race in Tamil Southeast Asia, migration and diaspora in Modern Asia.

Darren Aoki (Birkbeck - Japanese)
Masculinities in modern Japan, Japanese migration in the 20th century.

Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Subject Co-ordinator
Memory communities and German cultural identities.

Matt Cook (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
Queer families and domesticity in the twentieth century.

Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
History of the family in London, family and household groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Jessica Reinisch (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
Refugees and displaced people in Central-Eastern Europe after 1945.

Hilary Sapire (Birkbeck - History, Classics and Archaeology)
'Black Atlantic' history, black loyalism in the British Empire.

Martin Shipway (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
French nationalism; decolonisation.

Luis Trindade (Birkbeck - Iberian and Latin American Studies)
Portuguese nationalism and national identity.



LITERATURE

Anthony Bale (Birkbeck - English and Humanities)
Histories and theories of anti-semitism.

Emma Campbell (Warwick - French)
Kinship and community in Old French hagiography.

Aude Campmas (King's College, London - French)
Representations of kinship and community in Wajdi Mouawad plays, representations of the recomposed family in the Second French Empire.

Damian Catani (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Terror and slavery in Hugo, consumerism and politics in Mallarmé.

Nora Cottille-Foley (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA - French)
Literary practices of oppositional discourses in the context of identity politics in contemporary texts.

Nicolette David (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Psychoanalysis and gender, love, hate, desire, in literature.

Isabel Davis (Birkbeck - English and Humanities)
Representations of family and the Trinity in late medieval literature and art.

Stephen Dodd (SOAS - Japanese)
Representations of the native place in modern Japanese literature.

Ella Dzelzainis (King's College, London - English)
Women, the family and political economy in English industrial fiction, 1832-1855.

Jessamy Harvey (Birkbeck - Iberian and Latin American Studies)
Catholic girlhood in twentieth century Spain, the place of children's culture in adult memory.

Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford University - French)
The relation between poststructuralism and postcolonial theory; notions of universality, specificity and community.

Thomas Karshan (Queen Mary, London - English)
Nabokov; theories of family cultures and memory.

Ann Lewis (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Subject Co-ordinator
The representation of the figure of the prostitute in eighteenth-century France, sensibility and the eighteenth-century novel.

Robin Howells (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
The emerging bourgeois family: representations in 18C France and England.

Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
The mother-son relationship in Proust, the image of Japan in the French literary imagination.

Mpalive Msiska (Birkbeck - English and Humanities)
Identity in theory and in literature, particularly post-colonial African theory and literature.

Peter Sorrell (Rutgers University, USA - French)
Fictional worlds and the role of the reader in worldbuilding; representations of film in literature.

Nathalie Wourm (Birkbeck - European Cultures & Languages)
Subject Co-ordinator
Post-structuralist visions of kinship; anticapitalism in contemporary French literature.



PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Cécile Fabre (Edinburgh - Political Philosophy)
Philosophy of war: just war theory from a cosmopolitan perspective.

Patrick ffrench (King's College, London - French)
Post-structuralist philosophies of community; kinship and belonging in contemporary French cinema.

Peter Hallward (Middlesex University - Philosophy)
Postcolonial criticism and theory; contemporary political movements in postcolonial states.

Susan James (Birkbeck - Philosophy)
Subject Co-ordinator
The social position of women.

Cécile Laborde (UCL - Political Philosophy)
Contemporary theories of nationalism, toleration, republicanism, and multiculturalism.



PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOSOCIAL STUDIES

Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck - Psychosocial Studies)
Maternal subjectivity, psychosocial understanding of motherhood, therapeutic interventions with mothers.

Virginia Eatough (Birkbeck - Psychological Sciences)
Phenomenological research into kindred spirits.

Margarita Palacios (Birkbeck - Psychosocial Studies)
New forms of sociality accompanying general processes of individualization.

Lynne Segal (Birkbeck - Psychosocial Studies)
Shifting gender practices, changing family forms, new sexual dilemmas.



LINGUISTICS

Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck - Applied Linguistics)
Subject Co-ordinator
Multilingualism studies.

Penelope Gardner-Chloros (Birkbeck - Applied Linguistics)
European Immigrant Languages.

Li Wei (Birkbeck - Applied Linguistics)
Diaspora studies, bilingualism (including bilingual education) and cross-cultural pragmatics.

Maria Elena Placencia (Birkbeck - Iberian and Latin American Studies)
Small talk and politeness; service encounters and public sociality; youth talk.

Zhu Hua (Birkbeck - Applied Linguistics)
Diaspora studies, changing family values and linguistic practices in Chinese families in Britain.



SOCIOLOGY

William Ackah (Birkbeck - Community and Voluntary Sector Studies)
Pan-Africanism; black identities in Liverpool.

Dina Kiwan (Birkbeck - Citizenship Education)
Education for inclusive citizenship.

Linda Milbourne (Birkbeck - Community and Voluntary Sector Studies)
Young people and communities.

Yasmeen Narayan (Birkbeck - Psychosocial Studies)
Racisms in contemporary London; sexualisation and racialisation.

Paul Watt (Birkbeck - Sociology) - Subject Co-ordinator
Socio-spatial inequality and difference in the city and the suburb.