Dr Les Roberts BA (London) PhD (Middlesex)

Personal Statement

My research interests and practice fall within the areas of urban cultural studies, the mediation of cultural memory, and spatial anthropology/spatial humanities. With a background in anthropology and cultural studies my work explores the intersection between space, place, mobility, and memory, with a particular focus on film, popular music, and cultures of everyday life.

I am the author of the monographs Film, Mobility and Urban Space: a Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (Liverpool University Press, 2012), Spatial Anthropology: Excursions in Liminal Space (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Posthuman Buddhism and the Digital Self: the Production of Dwellspace (Routledge, 2023). I have edited/co-edited several books and special issue journal editions, including Spatial Bricolage (2018), Deep Mapping (2016), Mapping Cultures (2015/2012), Locating the Moving Image (2014), Sites of Popular Music Heritage (2014), Liminal Landscapes (2012), The City and the Moving Image (2010).

I am currently working on, or towards, three new book projects: 1) a special issue of the journal Humanities (and follow-on book), co-edited with Hazel Andrews, on the phenomenology of travel and tourism (2023); 2) a collection of edited interviews (with Sara Cohen) on music, memory and everyday life (Bloomsbury, 2024); and the nascent stirring of ideas which I hope will form the basis of a new monograph, provisionally titled Poetic-inductive Interventions.