Research

All our members share an interest in innovative theoretical frameworks to examine mobilities in and of cultural texts. We work across periods and disciplines (literature, history and area studies, translation and intercultural communication); our collective work focuses on exploring and developing interdisciplinary perspectives.

Themes

Crossover themes and concepts include:

  • Cities and urban culture
  • Travel literature, travel in literature and transport history
  • Social and cultural networks
  • Transnationalism as theory and practice, and its limitations
  • Subversive material and virtual spaces and the imagination of alternative spaces
  • Disconnections and connections
  • Embodiment and the practice and politics of movement
  • Post-humanism
  • Text genres as agents and products of mobilities, encompassing the novel, travel writing, epistolary and life writing, and other fictional and nonfictional forms

These are deployed across and within historical and contemporary frameworks. Areas of specialism range from the Middle Ages to present day, covering periods including:

  • Mediaeval literature
  • Romanticism
  • Victorianism
  • Postmodernism
  • Postcolonial literatures
  • Global literatures

International partnerships

We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the at the University of Padua.

This partnership will foster research exchanges and transdisciplinary collaborations.

Highlighted publications

Gabriele Lazzari, New Global Realism. Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Charlotte Mathieson, 'Placing Dickens', in The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts, edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood. (Edinburgh, 2024).

Constance Bantman, 鈥楢 transnational radical print culture: French-language anarchist periodicals between London, Paris and the United States before 1914鈥, in B茅n茅dicte Deschamps and St茅phanie Pr茅vost (eds.), The Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in Modern Britain and the US (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Constance Bantman, Un premier exil libertaire. Les anarchistes fran莽ais 脿 Londres, 1880-1914. Montreuil, Libertalia, 2024.

Marion Wynne-Davies, Relocating the Sidney Women: Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth in London鈥 in The Lives and Afterlives of the Sidney Women, ed. Alison Findlay and Aur茅lie Griffin, Routledge. In press.

Marion Wynne-Davies, 鈥樷滱 Fortunate Journey Unto Troy鈥; gender and geography in Jane Lumley鈥檚 Iphigeneia鈥 in Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions, ed. Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell, Legenda. In press.

Lena Mattheis. 'Poetic Space: Mapping Out How Poetry Takes Place.' Literary Geographies 9.1 (2023): 34-49.

Constance Bantman, 鈥楢narchist Transnationalism鈥, in Marcel van der Linden (ed.), Cambridge History of Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 599-620.

Gabriele Lazzari, 鈥楶lace-Based Translingualism, Identity, and the Contemporary World Literary Space: Jhumpa Lahiri鈥檚 Turn to Italian,鈥 Comparative Literature Studies 60.2 (2023): 312-335.

Gabriele Lazzari, 'Methodologies of Blackness in Italy: Past, Present, and Futures,' Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe, edited by B.B. Blaagard, S. Marchetti, S. Ponzanesi, S. Bassi, University of Ca' Foscari Press, 2023, 57-73.

Lena Mattheis. 'Translocality in City Literature.' The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. Routledge, 2022. 479-489.

Constance Bantman and Pietro di Paola, 鈥楤anal and everyday (inter-)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s-1914鈥, Nations and Nationalism, 2022.

Constance Bantman and Charlotte Faucher, 鈥樷楩rench Lady Seeks鈥欌 finding work as a French governess in late Victorian and Edwardian England (1870鈥1914)鈥, Women鈥檚 History Review, 2022.

Lena Mattheis. Translocality in Contemporary City Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Constance Bantman, Jean Grave and the Networks of French Anarchism (1854-1939) (Palgrave, 2021).

Lena Mattheis and Jens Martin Gurr. "Superpositions: A Typology of Spatiotemporal Layerings in Buried Cities." Literary geographies 7.1 (2021): 5-22.

Doris Dippold and Marion Heron (eds.), Meaningful Teaching Interaction at the Internationalised University: Moving From Research to Impact (Routledge, 2021).

Carl Thompson, Katrina O'Loughlin, 脡adaoin Agnew, Betty Hagglund (eds.), Women's Travel Writings in India 1777鈥1854 (Routledge, 2020).

Research projects

Principal investigator: Dr Charlotte Mathieson

Start date:

End date:

Start date: 2021

End date: 2022

Principal investigator: Dr Donna McCormack

Start date: 2018

End date: 2021

Principal investigator: Dr Lucy Bell

Start date: 2017

End date: 2021

Find us

Address

School of Literature and Languages
麻豆视频
Guildford
Surrey
GU2 7XH