News

Feras Alkabani, Hester Barron, Joanna Callaghan, Tanya Kant and Mahon O'Brien were shortlisted in the Research Impact Awards.  

Medeni Fordham, Tiffany Murphy, Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf, Victoria Grace Walden and Jo Walton were shortlisted in the Research Culture Awards.  

Katherine Blackadder was named Professional Services Impact Champion at the Research Impact Awards.  

Ernesto Cabellos’ film Wändari received the Best Documentary Award at the OFFCINEDOC Film Festival in Spain. The film highlights the struggle of indigenous communities in the Amazon as they fight to protect their identity and territory. The trailer is available to watch on YouTube.

Hannah Field has received a 1.47 million Euro award from the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for an innovative five-year research project exploring rejections by copyright libraries. 

Liz James has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. 

Margaretta Jolly was named Academic Impact Champion at the Research Impact Awards. 

Gavin Mensah-Coker has been appointed Chair of the Black at Sussex programme. 

Katharina Rietzler has been awarded a $1500 travel grant from the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund at the Iowa Women’s Archives in Iowa City. The award will fund some of Katharina’s research on the history of women’s international thought, which is also supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2025. 

Martin Spinelli’s The Rez made it into the Guardian's Top 20 podcasts for kids for summer 24. 

Tom F. Wright won the Impact through Interdisciplinary Work category at the Research Impact Awards. 

Kat Addis has started a year-long monthly podcast about pastoral poetry - specifically, Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579) - featuring interviews with academics, farmers, artists, poets and many more. July’s episode featured our very own Andrew Hadfield, as well as some real live Sussex goats. The podcast is available on Spotify and most other podcast-able places.

Alice Eldridge’s work connecting people to nature through sound was part of the launch of Sussex Bay. The Sussex Bay Partnership encompasses 100 miles of Sussex waters from Chichester to Camber Sands. The University is an established partner, initially around the Kelp Restoration Project initiated in 2021, and the launch event in June 2024 connected the partnership with more Sussex research beyond marine conservation. 

Margaretta Jolly was on the panel for the Brighton Book Festival event Purpose and Profit, and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research sponsored the Putting People First event. 

Laura Kounine was interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials. 

Tom F. Wright will appear on BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts and ideas show In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg on Thursday 24 October at 9am, talking about the classic novel Little Women and its origins in nineteenth-century progressive thought. You can listen to the episode live or after broadcast

The MAH-based Speaking Citizens project run by Tom F. Wright (and former MAH post-doc Arlene Holmes-Henderson) hosted an event in Westminster on 7 October with the English Associationas part of the launch of the Oracy Education Commission, a major policy report that incorporates findings from the Speaking Citizens project. This report makes the case for a greater focus on speaking and listening in teaching in UK state schools, and its release was widely reported in the broadcast and print media. 

Feras Alkabani’s new monograph, Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire, has been published by Bloomsbury, and his chapter 'Marco: A Levantine Queer Encounter in London' has been published in The Routledge Handbook on Arab Cinema (edited by Noah Mellor). As an expert on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, Feras has contributed to Mark Griffin’s award-winning feature documentary, Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia?. The film is currently on a UK tour and will be screened at Sussex on Friday, 15 November 2024, before it is released on terrestrial TV and streaming services.

The Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University recently released to the public the findings of Anne-Marie Angelo’s archival research into Institute founder and namesake George Peabody’s historical involvement in transatlantic slavery. Historian Martha Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor at Johns Hopkins and director of the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project, wrote about Angelo’s findings.  

Alba Arias presented her research at the 2nd International Conference on the Asturian Language: Distinctiveness, Identity, and Officiality at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and at the 15th Linguistic Landscape Workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2024, she published articles in International Journal of Multilingualism, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of World Languages and Linguistic Landscape, and a book chapter in Redoing Linguistic Worlds: Unmaking Gender Binaries, Remaking Gender Pluralities. 

Piotr Cieplak’s edited collection Familiar Faces Photography, Memory, and Argentina's Disappeared was published by Goldsmiths/MIT press; his article about documentary filmmaking as research methodology was published in the Journal of the British Academy; and his new film and accompanying article ‘Smartphone film, memory’s connective turn and the aesthetics of embodiment in Do You Remember That Year? (2020)’ was published in Open Screens Journal. In October, he will talk about his new novel at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. 

Beatrice Fazi was invited to speak at the symposium Attending to Technology in a Time of Radical Change, organised by The Centre for Attention Studies at King's College London. She gave a talk entitled "Synthesis in Generative AI". 

Ambra Moroncini’s book chapter “Italian Renaissance Echoes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet” has been published in the multilingual and Open Access volume Il teatrotra Quattro and Seicento: studi in onore di Konrad Eisenbichler. Ambra also contributed to the Biennial Society for Italian Studies Conference at Royal Holloway as co-organiser, with Prof. Michelangelo Zaccarello (University of Pisa), of two Panels on “Ekphrasis in Italian Culture from Antiquity to the Digital Age”. 

Lynne Murphy’s book review of Rosemarie Ostler’s The United States of English was published in the TLS. Lynne gave the closing plenary (‘No Such Things as a Word’) at the annual conference for the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading. 

Micheál O'Connell presented at the Art/Law event, Action in ART/LAW - Praxis, Participation and Collaboration, in Belfast. Micheál has published the story of his artwork 'Car Parked', a feature of his 2023 exhibition, System Interference.

Katharina Rietzler has published the open-access article "Antagonizing: Reactionary Publics" as part of the forum Globalizing Publics in the American Historical Review. 

Justyna Robinson, Michael Gasiorek and Rhys Sandow published Labour’s Progressive Trade Policy: Consultations and policy formulation, Briefing Paper 81, UK Trade Policy Observatory, a day after the Labour manifesto was released. 

Charlotte Taylor’s co-edited book with Frazer Heritage, Analysing Representation: A Corpus and Discourse Textbook and her co-edited book with Stuart Dunmore and Karolina Rosiak, New Approaches to Language and Identity in Contexts of Migration and Diaspora were published by Routledge. She also gave a keynote at the University of Cardiff (on Nostalgia and migration discourse) and guest talks at the University of Pisa (on Failure & falsification), University of Murcia (on Researching migration discourses) and Manchester Metropolitan University (on The structural role of nostalgia in migration discourses). 

Lizzie Thynne's essay on 'Documentary and the question of knowledge: Ruthless Times, Songs of Care' focusing on a musical documentary by Susanna Helke has just come out in a themed issue of Academic Quarter published by Aalborg University (Denmark) (volume 27) entitled 'Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities' (open access). 

Utopia on the Tabletop (Ping Press, 2024), ed. Jo Lindsay Walton, explores the intersection of game studies and utopia studies, especially in relation to tabletop roleplaying games. "Utopia on the Tabletop is for anyone inspired by the power of storytelling, captivated by how serious play might tackle real-world issues, or intrigued by the impact the little systems of games might make on the big systems that define our world today."