Director: Prof Catherine O’Leary
Management Committee:
Catherine O’Leary (Modern Languages, Director): I am interested in how literature is employed in the present to explore a previously silenced past and also in how literature is used in both identity formation and contestation. Much of my work considers the intersections between culture and the state under the Franco dictatorship in twentieth-century Spain. In addition to several works about political theatre and women’s writing, I was one of the investigators on the AHRC-funded project Theatre Censorship in Spain: 1931-1985 (http://www.dur.ac.uk/mlac/tcs/).
Dora Osborne (Modern Languages, Deputy Director): Dora’s research looks at contemporary German memory culture, particularly the ways National Socialism and the Holocaust are remembered in Germany.
Dr Karen Brown (Art History): I am Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Director of the University of St Andrews’s Museums, Galleries, Collections and Heritage Institute (MGCHI). I am currently overseeing several projects relating to community heritage, cultural memory and sustainability with particular focus on Europe and the Global South. From 2016-2020 I am coordinating 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 (Social Anthropology): I am the Head of Social Anthropology; my research has focused on cosmopolitan methodology and the anthropology of the Caribbean.
Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri (English): I am a Senior Lecturer in English. My primary research interest is in the cultural representation and collective memory of war and conflict. I am also interested in postcolonial and diasporic identities and cultures. I am 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).
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Dr Kate Ferris (History): I teach and research 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. I am especially interested in 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 the national to transnational and supra-national scales of analysis.
Research Assistant (2022-2023): Clara Défachel (Comparative Literature, Modern Languages). My doctoral research explores recent government-sponsored literary translation flows between France and the Maghreb and their impact on redefining ‘la Francophonie’ as a multilingual literary space. I am interested in how contemporary literature, literary translation, and cultural policy & diplomacy respond to the idea of a unified Francophone identity, as well as in how these responses might echo or contradict each other.