Members
Please find below details of their research interests and activities relating to memory.
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Sarah Arens (Lecturer in French) researches the histories, texts, and visual cultures produced during and in the aftermath of Belgian and French colonialism. She’s interested in a broad range of topics, from colonial and postcolonial museums to environmental history, the global history of the Spanish Civil War and antifascist organisations, and the connections between colonialism, climate change, and the contemporary global far right. Sarah is currently Principal Investigator for the British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grant project (2024-26), ‘Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC’, with Co-Investigators Prof. Emery Mudinga (Institut Supérieur de Développment Rural, Bukavu, DRC), Dr Bonaventure Munganga (UNSW Sydney, Australia), Dr Blake Ewing (University of Nottingham, UK) and Dr Nicola Thomas (Lancaster University, UK). She is also a founding co-editor of the Liverpool Studies in Environmental History series at Liverpool University Press and the editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. |
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Angela Becher is a Lecturer in Chinese Film Studies. Her research explores how Chinese visual culture negotiates place-based memory amid rapidly transforming cities. She focuses on media art and how they return to the past and address the instability of memory in contemporary China. As part of the British Academy-funded Decolonial Cities Collective, she looked at grassroots activists in the UK and Africa and their use of music, art and fashion to decolonise the city. She recently published on metaverse platforms’ invocation of collective memory and is currently completing a monograph on Chinese architecture and contemporary art. |
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Jordana Blejmar is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-editor of three books on art and politics in Latin America. She has curated art and photography exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and Paris. She was the PI of the AHRC-funded project "Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina" (2022-2024). Her second book, Cold War Toys in Latin America. Building Blocks, Miniatures, and Models from the Southern Cone is forthcoming with UCL Press. She is now working on a project on protest imagery, profiling photography, and biometric images in Latin America. |
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Sophie Fuggle is James Barrow Chair of French in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film. Her research focuses on French carceral and colonial cultures and their legacies. Her most recent book, France’s Memorial Landscape: Views from Camp des Milles (Liverpool University Press, 2023) focused on the Camp des Milles memorial museum, which opened in 2012. She is currently completing a monograph on France’s largest overseas penal colony in French Guiana and is co-editor of Framing the penal colony: Representing, interpreting and imagining convict transportation (Palgrave, 2023). Working on the history and heritage of the penal colony has led her to further interests in ecological legacies of colonialism, and she is developing a new project looking at the cultural and colonial history of the castor bean. |
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Alyssa Grossman (Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication and Media) is a social/visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker whose research focuses on everyday sites and practices of cultural memory and remembrance work. She has conducted fieldwork in Romania, Sweden and the US, exploring post-communist memorial landscapes, objects and discourses; decolonising practices in contemporary ethnographic museums and archives; and the remediation of home movies and amateur film. Embracing multi-sensory, audio-visual and practice-based approaches, her research pushes the boundaries between anthropology and contemporary art through methods such as filmmaking, gallery exhibitions and experimental writing. |
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Sietse Hagen is a Postgraduate Researcher in the English Department at the School of the Arts. His research examines representations of horror and trauma in children’s literature. While his broader academic interests extend beyond India and postcolonial studies, his PhD thesis specifically analyses how violent historical narratives and traumatic realities are conveyed to young readers through children’s literature by Indian authors. His corpus encompasses both diasporic and non-diasporic works, investigating distinctions between these authorial perspectives and underscoring the significance of such representations for child audiences in the UK. Sietse’s research explores how children’s literature serves as a medium for commemorating trauma, why engaging children with harrowing aspects of their cultural heritage is essential, and how authors can appropriately represent horror and trauma without retraumatising young readers. |
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Deana Heath (Professor of Indian and Colonial History, dept. of History). Her research focuses primarily on violence, particularly in colonial India, especially on the body and embodied forms of violence (including torture and sexual violence); gender and masculinity; pain and trauma; the state and sovereign power; law; biopolitics and governmentality; and necropolitics and bare life. Her publications include Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge, 2010), Communalism and Globalisation: South Asian Perspectives (co-edited with Chandana Mathur; Routledge, 2011) South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and Postcolonial Orderings (co-edited with Stephen Legg; Cambridge, 2018), Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India (Oxford, 2021; 2025), and Policing and Violence in India: Origins, Nature, Resistance (co-edited with Jinee Lokaneeta, Speaking Tiger). She is currently working on two research projects: one, ENLIvEN (Empire, Nature and Liverpool: Investigating and Engaging with Natural History) is on the role of Liverpool as an imperial hub for the global trade in plants and animals in the 19th-20th centuries, and the impact this has on Liverpool, its people and its environment, and the other on sexual violence as a tool of colonial power in India. |
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Marieke Riethof is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Politics. Her research focuses on the role of transnational solidarity and exile networks in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, including the memorialisation of these experiences. She is leading a project to digitise and analyse the Centro Cultural Tallersol archive in Chile (funded by the Modern Endangered Archives Program). This project explores grassroots cultural resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship, whilst developing innovative networks for community-based archiving and fostering academic-activist partnerships through participatory research strategies. Another area of interest is Brazilian foreign policy, examining traditional as well as non-traditional areas of foreign policy, including environmental politics, climate change, democracy and human rights. |
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John E Richardson (Senior Lecturer, Department of Communication and Media) is a critical discourse analyst. His research interests include critical discourse studies, rhetoric and argumentation, British fascism and commemorative discourse. The author of over ninety publications, his most recent books include: Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain: mass mediation, rhetoric, interpellation (2025), The politics and rhetoric of collective remembering (2025, co-edited with Tommaso Milani), the Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (2nd edition forthcoming, co-edited with Flowerdew) and British Fascism: A Discourse-Historic Analysis (2017). He is Editor of the international journal Critical Discourse Studies and co-editor of the book series Advances in Critical Discourse Studies (Bloomsbury Academic). |
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Les Roberts (Reader in Cultural and Media Studies) works in the interdisciplinary fields of urban cultural studies and spatial anthropology/spatial humanities. His research explores the intersection between space, place, mobility and cultures of everyday life, topics on which he has published extensively. Memory and everyday life have provided a central underpinning of work focused on archival film practices and urban historiography, and have informed the development of research in the wider fields of spatial anthropology and deep mapping. Current areas of memory-related research interest explore the phenomenology of memory and the creative imagination and poetic-inductive reflections on spatiality and the ‘presentness of memory’. |
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Anna Saunders works on contemporary anniversary and memorial trends in eastern Germany, with a focus on the built environment and memorial activism. Her current project focuses on the memory of racist arson attacks in post-unification Germany and their relevance to contemporary political developments. Her main memory-related publications include the monograph Memorialising the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989 (Berghahn, 2018), a special issue of German Life and Letters (2020) on the topic of ‘Anniversary Capital’, and a forthcoming volume (ed. with Caroline Summers) on East German Perspectives on Transformation after 1989 (Camden House, 2026). |
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Barbara Spadaro (Senior Lecturer in Italian History and Culture) is a historian of Italian migration and colonialism in Africa and the Mediterranean. Her research on memory practices of the Italian and Libyan diasporas in relation to ideas of coloniality, archive, heritage and translation, has recently produced the podcast ‘Diasporic Perspective: Unlearning Imperial Histories with Italian and Libyan Artists’ (available on all platforms) and the essay “Encountering Ghassan Fergiani: on Translation and Publishing as Archiving Practices”, in Alessandra Ferrini (ed), Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the archive of coloniality across Italy and Libya, Archive Book: Berlin (November 2024). A second strand of Barbara’s research develops transnational and translational approaches to comics and graphic novels, for example, through the Special Issue ‘Transnational Italian Comics: Memory, Migration, Transformation’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (14, 2023, IV), co-edited with Daniele Comberiati (University of Montpellier III). Barbara is currently writing on feminist anticolonial imaginable practices of the archive through the comics medium (2025). |
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Richard Stupart is a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media. He is broadly interested in the practical and philosophical issues that arise when violence, media and ethics intersect. This includes work on the ethics and practices of witnessing in wartime and humanitarian situations; affect and emotion in journalism and media work; humanitarian communication; the mediation of war; ethics of humanitarian image-making and circulation; and the epistemic structures of conflict spaces. Richard is presently the chair of the ECREA temporary working group on the ethics of mediated suffering, an editor for Media, War and Conflict and a British Academy ODA Fellow. |
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Niamh Thornton is a Professor in Latin American Studies in the department of Languages, Cultures, and film. She is a specialist in Mexican Film, Literature, and Digital Cultures with an interest in how judgements of taste and tastemakers determine what forms of violence are produced and circulated. She has published extensively. Her most recent books are: Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Mexico and Curated Screen Violence (2020) and María Félix: A Mexican Film Star and Her Legacy (2023), and co-editor with Miriam Haddu of Legacies of the Past: Memory and Trauma in Mexican Visual and Screen Cultures (2020). She is also interested in the ethics of violence and is exploring the use of a trauma-informed framework to understand approaches to storytelling and conflict with a particular focus on contemporary Mexico. |
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Ṣizen Yiacoup (Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies) specialises in the cultural history of medieval and early modern Spain and in Spanish-Ottoman relations. Her research explores cross-cultural conflict and exchange between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in pre-modern Iberia, particularly as recalled in the Castilian frontier ballads (Frontier Memory: Cultural Conflict & Exchange in the Romancero Fronterizo, 2013) and the sixteenth-century dialogue Viaje de Turquía (Turkish Voyage), which she is translating into English. Alongside this, Ṣizen is developing an emerging strand of research on Afro-Cypriot identity, memory, and cultural heritage. Rooted in her own Turkish Cypriot background, this work foregrounds how histories of conflict and displacement give rise to complex, hybrid cultures and identities in the present. |