People

The research centre includes a wide range of scholars from across the University, from Professors to PhD students. The Centre frequently hosts Visiting Fellows from all over the world, facilitating international collaboration and intellectual exchange. The current team has specific expertise and interest in race and postcolonial studies (the latter with a specific focus in South Asia). This is reflected in the events organised as well as the research undertaken by both staff and students.

Co-Directors

Associate Directors

Associated faculty

Associated PhD students

Georgie Carr
Georgie is a doctoral student studying the relationship between policing and the construction of "new town" built environments in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. She explores articulations between police filmmaking practices and town planning to explain the ways these areas were racialised and/or criminalised at the heights of national welfare provision and at the start of the neoliberal period. She is a staff writer for the film journal Another Gaze and writes long-form arts criticism for a range of publications. Pronouns: she/her.

Visit Georgie's website

Tom Cowin
Tom is a part-time Doctoral Researcher in International Relations. He locates his work at the intersection of Intellectual History, IR Theory and International Political Economy. His PhD research examines how the hegemonic classes in America undermined the challenge they faced from the Tea Party and Occupy in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. He deploys a combination of Big Data, Critical Discourse Analysis and Gramscian theoretical tools to do so. He particularly focuses on the senso comune of the American middle classes and the role of mediatised knowledge in the reproduction of Neoliberal power. Tom’s comes to Cultural Studies via Gramsci and Stuart Hall.

He is a member of the British International Studies Association, and the European International Studies Association.

Tom can be found tweeting about British and American politics: @cowin_t

Carolina Triana-Cuéllar
Carolina is a doctoral researcher in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the experiences of professional theatre artists following migration to the UK. Prior to the start of her PhD, Carolina worked as a cultural manager and creative producer in Colombia and Australia, in roles with a focus on social justice and equity in the arts. Carolina’s research interests lie at the intersection of migration, arts and heritage with a particular focus on questions of race, class and the politics of cultural production.

Find out more about Carolina

Mona Manjot Kaur Dhaliwal
Manjot is a PhD researcher looking at South Asian women, family histories, identity and South Asian women's poetry.  Her work integrates postcolonial theory, feminist theories and decolonial thought. She works as a doctoral tutor and community poetry workshop facilitator.

Tendai Lewis
Tendai is a local activist and PHD (cultural studies) student living and studying in Brighton, who focuses on exploring the impact of social constructions on our identities and lived experiences. Tendai's focus is exploring how embodied experiences are impacted by a myriad of intersecting power structures and intersecting forms of oppression. The relationship between race and culture has a direct impact on how marginalised peoples navigate their lives and identities. Tendai's research project is concerned with how colonial discourses permeate the societal and cultural composition of contemporary Britain, and how the cultural coding that exists impacts the embodied experiences of Black women in Britain. Using Black women living in contemporary Britain as their focus, Tendai aims to explore the relationship between race and desire asking: what is the cultural coding that exists around our sexual and romantic identities; and how does race impact these codes? 

Odi Okaka Oquosa 
Odi is a PhD researcher in the School of Education and Social Work. Odi is a multi-disciplinary artist, Indigenous healing teacher, Indigenous Priest, Social Scientist, Community Activist, Social Worker and a Scholar. His practice transcends many barriers and draws from his Igbo ‘Nigeria’ culture and spirituality as a healer – he reconceptualises identity, trauma, and belonging to convey the intersection between nature and the past. Odi's PHD research investigates the ‘public silence’ around the symbolism of the “dolphin” and other symbols like the Knight of St Michael and St George medal (KSMG) which depicts St George as a white man with his foot on the neck of a Black man with the body of a dragon, and the effects that these have on wellbeing. He is exploring the notion that imperialist overtures of monuments permeate the public psyche; simultaneously propagating racist dogmas and exacerbating deeply embodied trauma of communities still impacted by the legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Visit Odi's website

Manuela Salazar
Manuela holds degrees in Communications (BA at Universidade Federal do Paraná and Masters at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco) and is due to complete a PhD at the University of Sussex in 2022. Manuela is interested in multidisciplinary research and innovative methods in visual culture, cultural studies, art history and philosophy. Her thesis entitled "Cosy vibes: cosiness as an atmospheric aesthetic category" is supervised by Prof. Ben Highmore and Dr Ben Burbridge and has received a doctoral scholarship from Capes Foundation, Brazil's Ministry of Education institution for research and development. It investigates cosiness as a vernacular aesthetic category, exploring a series of methodological pathways to mobilise knowledge around cosiness and outline a constellation of associations and problematics, with a focus on the visual and perspectives from the English-speaking sphere of the Northern hemisphere.

Find out more about Manuela

Ecem Yucel
Ecem is a doctoral researcher in English who received her Master’s degree in English Literature at Brunel University London with detailed research on the end of postmodernism and conceptualising metamodern strategies in contemporary fiction. Ecem's primary research focus is to intensify the theory of metamodernism and encapsulate its aesthetics in contemporary Anglophone fiction. The principal emphasis is to utilise metamodernism as a structure of feeling rather than addressing it as a cultural paradigm to find a collective consensus language for post-postmodernism. She predominantly works on contemporary existence and consciousness, media and theoretical perspectives, and Artificial Intelligence philosophy. Ecem is interested in the concepts of perception of time, memory, existence and the self, and explores the creation of self in a digitalised society with a glimpse of the Beckettian perspective.

Find out more about Ecem

Research Associates

Dr Silvina Silva Aras
Silvina received her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex in 2022, where she has also worked as a Tutor of the Departments of History and Media. Her most recent research subject is about Racism and its colonial legacy in the postcolonial societies of Europe, analysed through a sensorial perspective and in an interdisciplinary manner.

Silvina's background is in History, in the area of African Studies in which she has worked and researched at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Ethnographic Museum (Buenos Aires), and also later in France at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales-EHESS in the old Centre d’ Études Africaines. Silvina worked and lived in African countries for several years, but she came back to finish her Doctorate at Sussex where she was supported and encouraged to work with a more transdisciplinary approach.

Silvina is also an artist and tries to incorporate her own illustrations in her research work.

Razan Ghazzawi
Razan Ghazzawi (they/she) is a pospoctoral fellow at the Forum Transegionale Studien in the academic year 2022/23. Currently they’re working on their first book project that rethinks the war on Syria from a queer of color perspective, focusing on checkpoint crossings, prison, and racialized migration.

They hold an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and the Body from the University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Balamand University in Lebanon. They also received their PhD in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Sussex, Brighton. In their thesis “Pedagogies of Everyday Queer Protests: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Violence in Syria and Lebanon 2011-2021,” they examine everyday queer and trans encounters at checkpoints, prisons, and queer asylum in the contexts of the “war on terror” and the “refugee crisis.”

They are a former prisoner from the Syrian state and an award winner of Frontline Defender in 2012.

Visiting Research Fellows

Professor Heikki Uimonen
Heikki Uimonen (PhD) holds a post of professor at the University of Eastern Finland. He is an ethnomusicologist and a docent on acoustic communication and soundscape studies at the Universities of Tampere and Eastern Finland and part-time musician.

Heikki has published over ninety articles, a monograph and edited anthologies on music consumption, radio music, compact cassettes and changing sonic environments. His research interests include sonic construction of place, mediated music, social use of music, transforming soundscapes and how all these intertwine.

Find out more about Heikki