Co-Director: Prof Catherine O’Leary
Prof Catherine O’Leary is Director of the Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute and Professor of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. Her research explores how literature is employed in the present to engage with a previously silenced past, and how it functions in processes of identity formation and contestation. Much of her work focuses on the intersections between culture and the state under the Franco dictatorship in twentieth-century Spain. In addition to publications on political theatre and women’s writing, she was a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project Theatre Censorship in Spain: 1931–1985 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/tcs/).
Co-Director: Dr Dora Osborne
Dr Dora Osborne is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute. Her research focuses on contemporary German and Austrian memory culture, with particular attention to the legacies of National Socialism and the Holocaust. She is the author of What Remains: The Post-Holocaust Archive in German Memory Culture (Camden House, 2020). The monograph examines the archival turn in Berlin Republic memory culture, showing how the material legacy of the Nazi past shapes memorials, film, theater, and literature, and how this “post-Holocaust archive” both ensures and unsettles the future of Holocaust remembrance.
Dr Karen Brown is Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Director of the University of St Andrews’s Museums, Galleries, Collections and Heritage Institute (MGCHI). She is currently overseeing several projects relating to community heritage, cultural memory and sustainability with particular focus on Europe and the Global South. From 2016–2020 she coordinated an EU Horizon 2020 international consortium project entitled “EU-LAC-MUSEUMS: Museums and Community: Concepts, Experiences, and Sustainability in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Dr Huon Wardle is Head of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics, with an ethnographic emphasis on the Caribbean and its ‘creolizing’ social-cultural processes. Over more than thirty years of fieldwork and supervision in the region, he has developed a conceptual toolkit for understanding everyday experience in a cosmopolitanizing world, with ‘common-sense’ as a pivotal category. He is the author/editor of ten volumes, most recently Cosmopolitan Moment, Cosmopolitan Method in conversation with Nigel Rapport.
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the cultural representation and collective memory of war and conflict, as well as on postcolonial and diasporic identities and cultures. He is the author of two monographs: Narrating South Asian Partition: Oral History, Literature, Cinema (OUP, 2019) and Homemaking: Postcolonial Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Dr Kate Ferris teaches and researches in the field of modern European history, with a particular focus on Italy and Spain from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Her research interests include questions of subjectivity, agency, and the lived experience of dictatorship; processes of cultural production and reception; and methodologies related to ‘playing with scales’ between different spatial units of analysis, from the micro and individual scale through the local and national to transnational and supra-national scales of analysis.
Research Assistant (2025-2026): Caroline May
Caroline May is a postgraduate researcher in German Literary Studies, undertaking a joint doctoral program at the University of St Andrews and the University of Bonn. Her research is focused on authorship and queer storytelling in contemporary German-language novels, investigating how literary and performative practices reshape concepts of authorship and challenge hegemonic frameworks of identity.
