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Working with Publishers - a one-day workshop for PGRs and ECRs - Registration now open

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Winners of the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to:

Aidan Diable (History) / Adam Coleman (History of Art) - Pride and Place: Negotiating Self, Civic, and National Identities in Space

Jade Lindo (History) - Empire’s Fruit: Colonial Ecologies, Food Systems, and Imperial Power

Francesca Luppino (SMLC) - Say a Body where None. Necromanticism and Thanatological Imagination of the Afterlife in the Modern and Contemporary Age (1764-2027)

Doctoral Fellowship Competition - Winners announced

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 06:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to all the winners.

Eloisa Ocando Thomas and Jingyang Xu (both History): EDIBLE BOUNDARIES: Food, Identity, and the Material Culture of Eating and Drinking

Xiaoyan Tan (SMLC and Gustavo Ruiz da Silva (Philosophy): (Neo)Colonial Images and Literature: The Construction of the Other

Archana Vinod (English) & Malvika Nair (SMLC): Is a Better World Possible? - Solidarity as a Conversation across Temporalities

Winners announced - HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 05:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to the winners of the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition.

We look forward to their conferences next year (24/25)

Airelle Amédro (SMLC) & Enrica Leydi (SMLC) - ‘Irresistible Decay: Aestheticization of death and life imbrications from the 18^th Century to today’

Lu Feng (English) & Chun-Wai (Wayne) Kwong (English) - ‘After Postcolonialism: Global Theory, Local Transformations’

Julián Harruch-Morales (Hispanic) - ‘Uses and Abuses of the Decolonial’

Anna Pravdica, Himesh Mehta & Mia Edwards (all History) - ‘Individualism, Human Nature, & the Self: From the Early Modern Era to the Modern Western World’

Warwick Festival of the Gothic

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 14:49:00 GMT

Happy Spooky Season! The SMLC is joining the Warwick Festival of the Gothic with a series of events celebrating the recent publication of Italian Gothic. An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Marco Malvestio and Stefano Serafini and including contributions by Fabio Camilletti and Simona Di Martino. Events will take place on the 31^st of October and the 1^st of November:

31 October, 5pm onwards, TRC. Film night: Mario Bava, La maschera del demonio (Black Sabbath, 1960), introduced by Jacopo Francesco Mascoli. In Italian with English subtitles. In collaboration with the Italian Cinema Seminar Series.

1 November, 2-5pm, FAB M0.01 Study Café Space, Student workshop: London Gothic 'Made in Italy'. Transnational, Translational, and Transmedial Readings of 'Dylan Dog', with Silvia Vari and Fabio Camilletti. No previous knowledge of Italian is needed. In collaboration with the Comics Reserch Network.

1 November, 5:15-7pm, OC 0.01, Roundtable: Italian Gothic, with Fabio Camilletti, Simona Di Martino, Francesco Dimitri, Marco Malvestio, Stefano Serafini, and Mark Storey. In collaboration with The Revolving Century. Transdisciplinary Network for the Study of Cultures in the Age of Revolutions (1751-1849).

All events are part of the Italian Studies Research Seminar Series and have been generously sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre.

Launch Event for Doctoral Fellowship Competition

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 15:25:00 GMT

There will be a launch event taking place on Wednesday 6th December from 12.00 - 14.00 in FAB2.25 - we recommend that all potential applicants attend - useful information - free lunch - meet Alison and Sue - ask questions.

Booking for this event is now open - Booking Form

Doctoral Fellowship Competition (warwick.ac.uk)

Call for Papers - Archaeology, Psychoanalysis and Colonialism: The Return of the Repressed in European Culture in the Modern Age

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 15:36:26 GMT

This conference aims to explore the different forms that the idea of a ‘return of the repressed’ has taken over a broad chronological period ranging from the early 18th century through to the Second World War. The notion of an area, inaccessible to rational consciousness, where memories, thoughts, and images could be ‘stored’ and re-activated without any agency of the conscious mind, is largely credited to Sigmund Freud, whose theoretical model of repression, return and ‘compromise formation’ has been highly influential for a vast part of the 20th century. The idea of the ‘return of the repressed’, however, has a remoter and more ramified history, and its pervasiveness extends far beyond the spheres of psychology and psychoanalysis.

In bringing these areas of research together, this conference ultimately seeks to examine the multifaceted presence of the ‘return of the repressed’ – as a polyvalent metaphor, a philosophical concept, and a theoretical method, or as all three simultaneously – throughout cultural modernity as a whole. In particular, we aim to examine three distinct discourses: that of archaeology, in which the ‘return of the repressed’ applies to the physical exhumation of the past; the discourse of psychoanalysis, covering individual memories; and, finally, that of post-colonial theory, exploring the ways repressed colonized voices are subject to a re-emergence and a haunting return in collective spaces, discourses, and praxes. In doing so, the conference employs the notion of ‘return of the repressed’ as a quintessentially inter- and trans-disciplinary tool, enabling us to cross-fertilize different domains and research practices, provoking questions such as: Does the notion of ‘repression’ change in different historical, geographical, and broadly cultural contexts? To what extent, if at all, can psychoanalysis’s view of the repressed be disentangled from its original cultural context? What role has the repressed played in the legitimation, maintenance, and deconstruction of colonial powers? What was the role of physical excavation in the creation, manipulation, showcasing and exploitation of cultural memory? (e.g. the discovery of ancient ruins and archaeological searches for the garden of Eden)?

Bringing together academics from diverse disciplines and fields (including but not limited to (post)colonial studies, archaeology, literary studies, film studies, media studies, psychology and anthropology), this conference aims to attract the attention of academic staff, postgraduate research students and early-career researchers working in the UK and beyond.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers with different methodological approaches and temporal focuses. Topics may include but are not restricted to:

Pre-freudian concept of unconscious in literature and media;
The notion of the civilized/uncivilized in colonial discourses;
The representation of personal and collective pasts;
Return of ‘primitive’ beliefs, i.e colonial engulfment;
Social and cultural repression;
The uncanny, memory and trauma;
Archaeology of the mind: mind as colonial territory;
Exoticism, orientalism and racism in literary/cinematic discourses;
The return of the surmounted;
Colonial literature and cinema;
The role of archaeology in the legitimization of colonialism.

Those interested in presenting a paper should send a short abstract (max. 300 words) and a biographical note (max. 150 words) to apcwarwick@gmail.com by 15 December 2023. Participants may also be invited to publish their contributions in an edited publication as part of the Warwick Series in the Humanities, published by Routledge.

This conference is sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the University of Warwick.

We look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the organizers, Gennaro Ambrosino and Kerry Gibbons at apcwarwick@gmail.com

Annual Report 2022/23

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:26:15 GMT

Read our latest Annual Report 2022/23

‘Homecoming' after war: An After-Action Report by Niels Boender

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT

On Saturday the 20th of May, we brought together at the University of Warwick an international group of scholars working on various themes relating to themes of post-war return. The desired outcome was to initiate a discussion between scholars across disciplines, geographies, and periods, thinking about the subjective dimensions of homecoming. This is significant as this field has long been dominated by normative and prescriptive social science analysis. We were particularly interested how literary theory and criticism might fertilise detailed historical analysis, and specific examples from the past might enrich and nuance broader theorisation.

Our keynote speaker Kate McLaughlin from the University of Oxford got us going with a fascinating, challenging and provocative talk on the ‘silent’ veteran, using the particular example of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Her remarkable interweaving of philosophical theory, in particular drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, and close literary analysis, was remarkably applicable to historical analysis. Through the speech she made the figure of the ‘silent veteran’, a problematic in all our studies, a fruitful field of analysis. The importance of ‘listening’ to the silences was particularly resonant and significant to all the presenter’s studies.

The first session ‘What home? Disrupted Homecomings’ spoke very closely to some of the key themes of the conference. All three papers stressed different dimensions of the problematic of ‘home’: what constitutes home in the post-war, across time and place, and for different individuals. Professor Taylor Soja’s discussion of a British officer, dragged backward and forward across the Empire in the ‘Small Wars’ of the late-Victorian era, complicated how ‘home’ for many could be the Front itself, but also how this would change over one’s life. On the other side of the colonial divide, Rose Miyonga gave an account of the inability of many Kenyan men and women to come home, even 60 years after the Mau Mau conflict. Due to close ancestral ties to their land, which was taken by the colonial government, people continue to feel discombobulated so long afterwards. War however can also provide a tool for making one’s idea of home much more secure, as Amy Carney elucidated. In studying a German-born Jewish soldier in the American Army, she revealed that the war itself crystallised his identity as an American, which became, undisputedly, home.

Our next panel considered how women specifically experienced, and are represented in accounts of, post-war homecoming. Alison Fell gave a remarkable account of what place combatant women came to have in post-war memory and myth-making. Due to women’s personification as the nation, tied closely to traditional ideas of motherhood, the image of homecoming was the putting down of the rifle, used to protect the home, and the taking up once again of mothering roles. In a different register, Marcin Filipowicz analysed contemporary Czech literature to illustrate how women’s homecomings disrupt easy theorisations of good and evil in post-war contexts. His powerful rendition of a scene of violent homecoming of a female holocaust survivor, with real bearing on how we consider post-war homecoming, precisely indicated the value of an interdisciplinary approach to this subject.

The third and largest panel of the day considered the broad question of the politics of homecoming, and especially how veterans made claims on the state. Robin Bates introduced to the conference a theme which would come up repeatedly, the battle for veteran’s rights, in his case, Union veterans of the American Civil War. His conception of the struggle for veteran’s rights contrasted the very different idea of the veteran in contemporary Russia. Elena Racheva shared how since the fall of the Soviet Union the state has weaponised veterans for their own ends, slowly incorporating the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan as part of a glorious struggle in the defence of Russia. The instrumentalisation of veteran’s status was similarly demonstrated in Drew Flanagan’s discussion of French far-right activist François de la Rocque, who used his status of front-line soldier to resist allegations of collaboration. The final speaker of the panel, Susan Carruthers, spoke to a very different way post-war homecoming was framed by the state - through the British offering of ‘demob’ suits to returning servicemen. Hereby they were to be re-civilianised, although multiple groups (i.e women) were excluded.

Ably chaired by Holly Furneaux, our fourth panel brought the focus specifically on disability-centric histories of Homecoming. Nick Bailey spoke to a specific institution that mediated disabled homecomings, the British Corps of Commissionaires, with strong disciplinary overtones. This genealogy of veteran’s rights was continued by Michael Robinson, who discussed debates about provisions for veterans across Canada, Britain and Australia in the 1920s and 1930s, with a special focus on ‘invisible disabilities’. The different treatment in different countries was also reflected in Sofya Anisimova’s excellent reflection on disabled Imperial Russian officer veterans. Here too was remarkable picture of fluctuation over time, and the political uses of disability by the veterans themselves.

The final panel tied together many of the themes of the conference, discussing how veterans produce narratives that reflect on their homecoming. Chloe Storer spoke on reticence in her own oral histories with British Afghan veterans, linking back to the notions of silence considered in the keynote speech. Eamonn O’Keeffe spoke by contrast on a very talkative veteran, Shadrick Byfield, who leveraged his literacy and experiences with members of the elite to survive in Victorian Britain. The final speaker of our conference Dimo Georgiev showed how the staid, jargonistic, novels of Bulgarian International Brigadiers became standard reading in socialist Bulgaria, omitting the difficult realities of homecoming.

Altogether, the conference met the objectives we set wholeheartedly. This panoply of scholars has a real contribution to make to the study of the post-war, and to that end we seek to keep the momentum going with an edited collection. Such an opportunity is available with Routledge’s Warwick Series in the Humanities, which we hope to take advantage of in the coming months.

Teaching Medieval French - Conference Report by Emma Campbell

Wed, 31 May 2023 14:45:23 GMT

Conference Report

Title of Conference:

Teaching Medieval French: Sustainable Approaches for the Next Generation

Dates: 27-29 April 2023

Organisers: Emma Campbell and Liam Lewis

Background and Objectives

This three-day event for U.K.-based university teachers, researchers, and early career academics came out of two online ‘state-of-the-discipline’ workshops for Medieval French Studies organised in 2022. Responding to a need identified at those workshops, this in-person event at the University of Warwick enabled participants to develop new, sustainable, interdisciplinary approaches to teaching medieval French materials to undergraduates across a range of HE institutions.

The interconnected aims of this event were: (1) to introduce participants to strategies that they could take forward in their teaching practice, (2) to provide space and time for attendees to workshop ideas they could integrate directly into their present or future teaching, and (3) to discuss the sharing and development of pedagogical resources cross-institutionally. To that end, invited speakers with expertise in areas that intersect with studies of medieval French–particularly performance studies, visual culture, and material culture–led workshops aimed at providing participants with a set of tools for their own practice. Participants worked on existing course materials or on new ideas in ‘developing ideas’ sessions incorporated into the workshops. There was a final session dedicated to discussing practical strategies for sharing resources and sources of potential funding.

Final Programme

Thursday 27 April: Texts & Material Culture

12-1pm: Arrivals

1-2pm: How to teach with medieval architecture (Jenny Alexander)

2-3pm: Developing ideas session

3-4pm: How to use collaborative transcription and editing (Laura Morreale)

4-5pm: Developing ideas session

5-6pm: How to grow our community—a discussion led by Grapevine charity

6-7pm: Networking, with drinks reception

7pm: Dinner on campus

Friday 28 April: Visual Culture & Interdisciplinary Work

9-10am: Arrivals

10-11am: How to teach with medieval images (Debra Strickland)

11am-12pm: Developing ideas session

12-1pm: How to approach interdisciplinary work (Liam Lewis and Harriet Jean Evans)

1-2pm: Lunch

2-3pm: How to teach with medieval mapping (Marianne O’Doherty)

3-4pm: Developing ideas session

7pm: Performance at St Mary's Guildhall of ‘Silence’ by Rachel Rose Reid, followed by an after-show talk at 9pm.

Saturday 29 April: Performance

10-11.30am: Storytelling Workshop with Rachel Rose Reid

11.30am-12pm: Break

12-1pm: How to teach with storytelling (Daisy Black and Jane Bonsall)

1-2pm: Lunch

2-3pm: How to teach with medieval song (Emma Dillon)

3-4pm: Developing ideas session

4-5pm: How to foster cross-institutional support and sharing of resources—discussion led by Emma Campbell

Outcomes

The planned outcomes of the event were all met or surpassed. These can be summarised as follows:

New teaching resources and approaches. Participants left the workshops equipped with new materials and methodologies for teaching medieval French literature culture immediately usable in their own institutional contexts. Where possible, sessions were recorded. These are currently being edited and will be made available online, so others can use them.

We had numerous messages of thanks from participants after the event. For instance, a senior colleague emailed to say how generative the workshops had been for her: ‘My huge thanks to you and Liam, and your amazing speakers. It was a really fab few days. I feel really regenerated.’ Another colleague highlighted the value of the event for sharing ideas: ‘A huge thank you to you both for such a welcoming, inspiring event. It was the most innovative and exciting conference I have been to for a long time. Because of covid it has been a while since I have had a chance to meet and share ideas with colleagues outside my immediate circle, so this was very much welcome.’

Strategies for collaborative working and resource sharing. The workshops enabled colleagues to explore practical strategies for sharing resources and expertise across institutions. The final session built on this by discussing actions for developing resources and possible platforms for cross-institutional collaboration. Emma Campbell is currently planning a follow-up meeting this summer to take these actions forward.

One of our speakers emailed after the workshops to say she had already started to work with other participants: ‘Since the event I’ve already got a little team of people to work on that Mandeville manuscript I showed and am also talking to Daisy about some kind of map-based public engagement project. It’s been not just brilliant for teaching ideas but also for research collaborations. I’d love to find out about any more events run with / by this group.’

Another speaker emphasised the importance of the interdisciplinary exchanges: ‘Just a note of warmest thanks for a truly wonderful couple of days. I had the best time!!! I absolutely loved the workshops on storytelling as well as the magical performance of Silence. And it was such a lovely context for me to share ideas about teaching and also about the MUSLIVE project. I learnt so much from the conversations. Moreover, it was such an engaged and welcoming gathering -- I was so glad to be there. So many, many congratulations on convening such a marvellous event. I know, too, how much work went into this, both with the logistics and also building such a brilliant programme. Thank you.’

One mid-career colleague highlighted the importance of the networking that took place, as well as the pedagogical benefits of the workshops: ‘What a fantastic occasion the teaching workshop was! It was wonderful to see so many colleagues, and to meet new ones. I found it a truly inspirational moment, and it came at just the right time as I reflect on the relationship between teaching and research in my future work. Well done!’

Future funding bids. We anticipate future funding bids to facilitate collaborations with community partners. Additional funding plans to support cross-institutional sharing of resources are under discussion (see above).

Professional development. Participants of all career stages were able to learn new skills and integrate those into teaching plans.

Community engagement. The workshops included a session co-led by Grapevine charity. There was also a public performance of a medieval text at Coventry’s Guildhall, a public after-show discussion, and a storytelling workshop accessible to the public.

HRC funding covered the cost of inviting external speakers to campus, as well as some of the cost of admin support for the event. In addition, the HRC Visiting Speakers Fund enabled us to host an overseas presenter, Laura Morreale, who would otherwise have been unable to attend. We are grateful to the HRC for generously increasing the VSF award to cover unexpected price increases in Dr Morreale’s flights.

Emma Campbell

Liam Lewis

25 May 2023