On this page, scholars from across a range of disciplines give us a brief insight into the intersection between their work and the study of cultural identity and memory.
If you would like to contribute to our Spotlight on Research series, please email us at [email protected].
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14 February 2025.
Dr Gönül Bozoğlu (she/her). Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies, School of Art History.
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
Memory, politics, and identity are strongly linked in museum and heritage studies. How are the past and historical memory experienced, used, represented, diminished, erased, forgotten, and why, by whom and for whom? These are significant questions in museum and heritage studies. In my first book, I researched how the memory of historical events such as the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 has been represented and circulated through festivities, re-enactments, public imagery, TV shows and a spectacular museum to tell a glorious story of the Ottoman victory. These memory practices are closely linked to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ appeals to a glorious origin story for Turkey, aligning with a conservative Islamist identity. I also explored how the memory of 1453 meant something distinctive and more complex for other groups, such as secularist and native non-Muslim communities in Turkey. I also endeavoured to explore how digital memory mapping and filmmaking can be used to represent hidden heritages, as alternative platforms for memory practices of marginal communities. In a sense, I was trying to capture with these methods the ‘memory worlds’ in which people live because of their personal and community histories. I think another element is that I see filmmaking itself as ethnography, and it allows me to explore the sensory and affective, emotional, even poetic, aspects of how people experience and live with the memory in the present in ways that can’t be easily managed in other media, and certainly not easily in books and articles.
What are you working on now?
I have produced two documentary films about the memories and heritages of the Greeks of Turkey. I am currently working on the third one to complete a trilogy and on a new book: Worlds of Memory and Sensory Heritage: Living with the Past in the Greek Communities of Istanbul, under contract with Routledge. I am also developing some ideas for the heritage and memories of African Communities in Turkey. Afrikalı Türkler (‘Afro-Turks’) are descended from Sub-Saharan Africans enslaved during the Ottoman period. Subject to Turkey’s historical project of forced assimilation of minorities, Afro-Turks typically speak only Turkish, have little or no knowledge of their ancestry or family connections in Africa. My research will involve working with communities and organisations, including İzmir’s Afro-Turk Foundation, through interviews, memory mapping, filmmaking and co-production methods. These will represent this marginalised group, the identity politics in which different generations are engaged, and what it means to be severed from ancestral histories.
First documentary film, Life After Life: The Greeks of Istanbul: https://vimeo.com/728364016
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6 February 2025. Zehra Kazmi, School of English
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
I have recently submitted my thesis titled, “Indo-Muslim Nostalgia: Memory, Modernity and the Nation”. It examines historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Muslim writing within the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration following the Partition. I have analysed the category of the ‘Indo-Muslim’ as existing beyond the grand narrative of nation and showcased how literary nostalgia recuperates Indo-Muslim identity prior to the Partition and the ways in which these maps of memory provide spaces of alterity to question the political present. I contextualise Indo-Muslim nostalgic literary expression by focusing on recent historical events shaping Indo-Muslim society and connecting those with theoretical work in nostalgia studies in the western academy. Focusing on nostalgia, my work highlights the emergence of Indo-Muslim Modernism as a distinct literary phenomenon furthered by post-Progressive Urduphone Muslim writers in the 20th century.° While significant attention has been given to the Marxist Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) and its fraught relationship with religious identity, little scholarship exists on the Modernists—an influential but underexplored group of Muslim writers. I have highlighted the ways in which the storytelling and poetic genres of the subcontinent interacted with western, anglophone literary stylings to impact the aesthetic features of Indo-Muslim modernist writing.
What are you working on now?
Currently, besides teaching, preparing for my viva and sending in job applications, I am working on two potential postdoctoral ideas. One of them, which I recently presented on at the School of English PG Forum, is on the literary and cinematic representations of affective architecture in provincial India. This project continues to explore the continuities of memory and literature in South Asia, but I am moving away from my focus on Muslims and the Partition to instead examine the reconfiguration of Indian identity under colonialism by connecting space and its representations.
The other project, which I am still developing, is on the Muslim Gothic in South Asian popular culture.
° I borrow the term Urduphone from historian Sarah Fatima Waheed to denote a shared Indo-Persianate, Hindustani linguistic and literary arena largely present in urban North India and signal the interconnected histories of expression in Urdu and English in postcolonial South Asia.
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20 October 2022. Lucy Szemetová, Department of Film Studies.
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
Lucy: My research interrogates the relationship between memory politics and audio-visual archives, with a particular focus on the reuse of archival footage in documentary films in Hungary. I am particularly interested in the dialogues between historical preservation and appropriation in filmmaking across different political contexts and the ways in which they establish and/or challenge cultural memory on the screen.
What are you working on now?
Lucy: At the moment I am working on the first chapter of my thesis that traces the origins of the particular filmmaking practice of reusing archival footage in Hungarian documentary films. Working with a variety of historical footage (newsreel, war reportage, home movies) originated in the Béla Balázs Studio, a semi-independent film studio that laid the foundations for reworking pre-existing materials and revolutionised Hungarian audio-visual heritage starting from the 1960s. I have just came back from my archival research fieldtrip and looking forward to delving into how these filmmakers engaged with the past and memory in a future-focused socialist state.
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24 February 2022. Dr Karen Brown, School of Art History.
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
Karen: I specialise in the social role of museums, with particular focus on community museums and ecomuseums in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. My research involves extensive collaboration with diverse museum communities, mainly in remote island locations, seeking to address issues such as social diversity, climate change and well-being. My approach is situated between museology, sustainable development and memory studies—especially when the community museums are located in indigenous territories. From 2016-2021 I led a Horizon 2020 consortium project with 8 international partners called EU-LAC Museums that resulted in a new ICOM Resolution on ‘Museums, Community and Sustainability’ (2019), and a European Heritage/Europa Nostra Ilucidare Special Prize for Heritage-Led International Relations (2021).
What are you working on now?
Karen: I am currently working on several projects, including: community heritage and Scottish islands (funded by the RSE); decolonising the curriculum in museum and heritage studies (with Museum and Gallery Studies, CIMS and The University of the West Indies); the El Niño Phenomenon in northern Peru (with colleagues in Geography and Sustainable Development); collaboration with the National Museum of Costa Rica and network of community museums. I have recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2022-25) to consolidate this research into a monograph.
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13 October 2021. Prof. Nicki Hitchcott, School of Modern Languages.
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
Nicki: My current research has three strands, all of them focused on Memory Studies and Rwanda: First, I am interested in creative responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, looking at how the genocide is remembered through novels and films. Some of this research is published in my 2015 book, Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction After 1994. In a more recent essay, published in Memory Studies, I discuss the usefulness of Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory for analysing memory narratives from or about Rwanda. Through my analysis of Terry George’s 2004 Hollywood film, ‘Hotel Rwanda’ and the competing versions of that story told by genocide survivors, I suggest that prosthetic memory is a concept that should be treated with caution.
Second, I am interested in how those who are traumatised by the genocide against the Tutsi use narrative to reconstruct their lives in positive ways. This question was the starting point for my AHRC-funded project, Rwandan Stories of Change, which led to my being shortlisted for the AHRC/Wellcome medal for Health Humanities in the category of best international research in 2018.
What are you working on now?
Nicki: Finally, the subject of my most recent research is the different ways in which Belgium’s 40-year-long colonial mandate in what was known as Ruanda-Burundi is remembered through fiction. Using novels as an alternative historical archive, I am comparing fictional memory narratives from the three former colonial spaces (Belgium, Burundi and Rwanda).