About
The group has close links to wider research themes in the University including Transforming Conflict and Heritage, developing a language-sensitive approach that is a distinctive contribution of Modern Language Studies.
Key areas of inquiry are:
- The understanding and representation of conflict
- The construction and transmission of memory and heritage
- The critical understanding of memory and heritage under an expanding variety of theoretical approaches.
The research of the group is interdisciplinary and covers a wide range of topics, time periods and geographical areas, and frequently it responds to current intellectual and practical challenges.
Current research interests range from forms of late medieval history writing and their relation to more literary genres in Europe, to the representation of rebellion and revolution in Mexican Film or digital culture, the transformation of soldiering in the Federal Republic of Germany, and digital culture and the legacies of dictatorship in Latin America.
Research exploring the multiple memories and languages of the city of Liverpool aims to ground the understanding of 21st century ideas of the past, the present, and the future, in the multicultural and multilingual context of Liverpool.
As well as running a reading group, the Conflict, Memory and Heritage research group meets on a regular basis in order to discuss work in progress, grant capture and current and successful applications for funding.
The group also organises a keynote workshop every year, which have included a symposium on ‘Dark Tourism’ and a workshop on ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches to Political Violence’, which involved speakers from the Universities of Swansea and York.
The group hosts visiting speakers on a regular basis as part of the Department’s annual research seminar series, and co-sponsors a range of recent research activity in the Department, including the 2018 annual Buchanan lecture in Esperanto ‘Transnational Language and Conflicting Memories of the Spanish Civil War’ (Javier Alcade, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).
Members of the group are involved in collaborative projects with community organisation, such as the project ‘Italian Cultures in Multilingual Liverpool: Stories, Trajectories, People’, funded under the AHRC OWRI Language Acts and Worldmaking Research Project.
The group also plan to hold a workshop devoted to memories of conflict and their transmission within Liverpool’s diverse linguistic and transnational communities.
Current group members
University of Liverpool Staff
- Godfried Croenen
- Charles Forsdick
- Ian Magedera
- Gorka Mercero Altzugarai
- Marco Paoli
- Andrew Plowman
- Marieke Riethof
- Eve Rosenhaft
- Barbara Spadaro
- Claire Taylor
- Niamh Thornton