Urban Culture Network

Staff research

Dr Karen Adler (History)

My current research, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Foundation, is for my book, France in Germany: A Social and Cultural History of Occupation. This explores the social and cultural history of the period after 1945 when France was one of the four allies that occupied Germany. I am particularly interested in the encounter between the various settled and transitory populations in the French Zone of Occupation in south-west Germany and its sector in northern Berlin.

This work builds on themes I developed in  Jews and Gender in Liberation France and in  Homes and Homecomings: Gendered Histories of Domesticity and Return. Here, I was interested in the intersection of ideas about nation, gender and race, and the meanings attached to home.

These questions also preoccupied me as editor of the journal  Gender & History, a position I held between 2004 and 2010. I continue to serve on its editorial board, and am a member of the editorial board of the journal  Genre et histoire.

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Professor Ross Balzaretti (History)

My main area of research is north western Italy in the earlier medieval period. I am about to publish a book on early medieval Milan with Brepols: The Lands of Saint Ambrose: Monks and Society in Early Medieval Milan. This monograph, which covers the period from the fifth to the eleventh centuries C.E., investigates the political, social and economic aspects of the transformation of the Roman world in one of its major centres. 

Its main theme is the role of monastic communities in this transformation. It shows how successive generations of monks helped to change the social organisation of the city and much of its hinterland, largely through their substantial dealings in property as recorded in one of the most important surviving collections of early medieval charters. The book complicates the existing view that Milan was transformed by a 'new' mercantile class. I have also done a lot of research into the medieval history of the small town of Varese, in eastern Liguria. 

I will be publishing an annotated translation of the earliest narrative history of the town (c. 1558 C.E.) and will, over the next few years, be writing a monograph on early medieval Liguria, which will include consideration of its urban development.

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Dr Hongwei Bao (Culture, Film and Media) 

I am a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham. I was trained in gender studies, cultural studies, and media and communication studies. I am interested in the sexual and emotional geographies of cities and the mediated dimensions of urban spaces. I ask the following questions: how are urban spaces gendered and sexualised? How are gay, lesbian, transgender and other marginalised gender and sexual identities produced through urban spaces, and how do these ‘queer spaces' interact with global, national, regional and local flows of ideologies, policy, economy, population and cultures? How do urban screens such as television, films, digital boards and other types of media (new media in particular) construct particular images, imaginations and experiences of cities? How do emotions and experiences shape urban spaces? 

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Dr Nick Baron (History) 

Most of my work is concerned to explore historical processes of interaction among 'space', 'populations' and 'power'. My approach is interdisciplinary: I draw on methods and theoretical perspectives from human geography, cultural studies, social anthropology, sociology, economics and political science. Although I primarily conduct my research on 20th-century Russian and East European history, much of my work is also comparative in approach.

Within this general problematic, I pursue the following overlapping and inter-related themes:

1. How the 'place' and 'displacement' of individuals or groups shapes the construction of social identities (national, regional, ethnic, gender, etc) and social practices.

2. How, conversely, individuals and groups constitute and contest their identities in space and through spatial practices (eg, through collective memory, commemoration and the popular use of history) in everyday life.

3. Spatial dimensions of imperial and state power; of nationalism and nation-building; of ethnic mobilisation, conflict and co-existence; of processes of political, social, economic and cultural transformation.

4. Technologies of spatial construction and regulation, both in terms of practice (eg, territorial and urban planning; regional policies; programmes of economic development; border settlement and enforcement; migration and mobility controls, etc) and in terms of discourse or representation (eg, historiography, geography, cartography, etc); and modes of popular or peripheral 'resistance' or 'subversion' to these technologies.

5. Representations of space in diverse contexts (eg, in cartography, film, graphic arts, architecture, town planning, etc) and the relationship of spatial representations with spatial practices of power and resistance and with the lived experience of space.

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Professor Mark Bradley (Classics and Archaeology) 

My main research interests are in the visual and intellectual culture of imperial Rome, and my work is particularly concerned with exploring cultural differences in perception, aesthetics and sensibilities. My monograph Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome was published by Cambridge University Press, and I am working on a separate project on dirt, pollution and taboo in pre-Christian Roman culture. I also have interests in the reception of the ancient world in modern European culture, and I am editor of Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (2010, Oxford University Press), a collection of essays examining the interactive relationship between classical ideas and British imperialism from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

As well as pursuing further research on each of these topics, I am also engaged in a long-term research project on the theme of pollution in pre-Christian Roman society, religion and culture, a topic on which I already have a number of articles. I am editor of a volume titled Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity (forthcoming 2012, Cambridge University Press), which is based on a conference held at the British School at Rome in June 2007. I am a member of the British School at Rome's Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters, and Editor of the Papers of the British School at Rome.

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Dr Lucy Bradnock (History of Art) 

My research is in American art post-1945, with a particular emphasis on the art and architecture of Los Angeles and Southern California. My work engages with the politics of representing the American city in art and visual culture, the use of junk in art, the modern vernacular in art and architecture, and spatial conceptions of Los Angeles and its peripheries within postmodern discourse.

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Professor Will Bowden (Classics and Archaeology) 

My research interests encompass the changing nature of urban centres during the Roman period in Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular emphasis on how urbanism and ideas of urbanism contributed to the formation and maintenance of identities. Much of my research has focused on the city in late antiquity, based in part around a long term research project at the city of Butrint in southern Albania. My current fieldwork is concentrated on the town of Venta Icenorum (modern Caistor St Edmund) in Norfolk. This is one of only three civitas capitals in Britain that do not have modern settlements overlying them, and offers the opportunity to study how a Roman regional centre developed and how it reflected the needs and aspirations of the local people (the Iceni) who, under Boudica, were famously hostile to Rome.

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Dr Ali Cheshmehzangi (Architecture and Built Environment, Ningbo Campus)

As well as being an academic, Ali is an architectural and urban designer with background in research, teaching and practice in Architecture, Urban Design, Landscape Design and Planning. With extensive training and research in Architecture and Urban Design (PhD, M.Arch, Dip UD, BA in Architecture), Ali is also very interested in undertaking multi-disciplinary research studies in other sectors in social sciences, such as, Socio-psychology, Human Geography, Cognitive Mapping and Socio-economic. 

In research months, Ali has been working on studies in Urban Ecology, Cultural Studies and Social Sustainability in Urbanism. He has worked on 70+ architectural (including architecture; urban design; master-planning; and landscape architecture) and design consultancy projects and has worked on both UK-based and international practice and research projects (Europe, Middle East and Eastern Asia). 

Ali’s recent research study explores the concept of urban identity and examines temporary use of public places and their influences on spatial inter-relations and socio-environmental values of cities. This research programme also looks at possibilities and design solutions for maximising the potential of public realms.

Ali’s other major interest is in the field of urban identity, sustainable urbanism, urban growth and rapid urbanisation. Current research work includes: ‘Vernacular Architecture and Design’, ‘Urban Growth Management’ and ‘Community Development’.

 
Dr Didem Ekici (Built Environment)

My research has focused on the garden city movement and organicism in early 20th-century Germany. I examine the first German garden city Hellerau (founded in 1908) as a utopian moment at the dawn of industrial capitalism, in which the founders firmly believed that they could shape mass culture into an organic whole. A parallel research direction has been the contemporary urban transformations in Post-wall Berlin, which culminated in two articles published in the Journal of Architectural Education and International Studies in Philosophy. I explored the commodification of public space and the representation of collective memory in urban renewal projects that were realised after the reunification of Germany. 

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Professor Paul Elliott (History at the University of Derby and University of Leicester) 

I am currently a lecturer in History at Derby University and also teach History at Leicester University. Between 2001 and 2007, I was research fellow in cultural and historical geography in the School of Geography at Nottingham University and am now a special lecturer. My research interests include 18th and 19th-century urban history, scientific and intellectual history and the history of education, and I would welcome contact with others with interests in these areas. This has included work on English urban scientific culture (The Derby Philosophers: Science and Culture in British Urban Society, 1750-1850 [Manchester University Press, forthcoming]) and 19th-century parks and arboretums (P. Elliott, C. Watkins, S. Daniels eds., 'Cultural and Historical Geographies of the Arboretum', special issue of Garden History [2007]). I have been on the editorial board of Urban History since 2001 for which I help to write the annual periodicals review.

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Dr Richard Goddard (History)

English medieval towns and their economies, small towns and urban failure and 15th-century urban and commercial decline in England. Other research interests include the study of medieval women, with particular reference to women and work in medieval England.

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Professor Simon Gosling (Geography) 

Simon is interested in understanding how weather and climate affect urban populations. Current research is investigating the impacts of heat waves on human health in urban areas, as well as the effects of climate on urban water resources. He is interested in understanding both present-day relationships between these factors and how they might change over the coming decades. 

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Professor Jonathan Hale (Built Environment) 

Research interests include: architectural theory and criticism; the philosophy of technology; the relationship between architecture and the body; and architectural exhibitions. He has published books, chapters in books, refereed articles and conference papers in these areas and has obtained grants from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the Arts Council and local industry. He also acts as research coordinator for the School’s Architectural History and Theory Group (AHTG). Current research projects include: "Anywhere", "Future Garden" and “Moving City – The Electronic Guidebook”, that takes these research themes out into the city via a mobile exhibition using digital technology.  

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Professor Sarah Hall (Geography) 

Sarah is an economic geographer whose research examines the circuits of knowledge, expertise and elites that shape the contemporary global service economy. Her work advances understandings of how such circuits are created, produced and legitimated in order to better understand the variegated nature of their geo-economic power.

These processes have been examined through three related research foci that centre on financial and related business service sectors.

  1. Cultural economy approaches to knowledge production, circulation and learning in the global economy (funding from ESRC, The Nuffield Foundation).
  2. The (re)production of contemporary economic elites (funding from the ESRC, The British Academy).
  3. Globalisation and advanced business services (funding from the ESRC, The British Academy).

Sarah was appointed an Editor of Geoforum in 2013 and in 2014 was awarded a British Academy Mid Career Fellowship.

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Dr Richard Hornsey (History)

I am a cultural historian of urban modernity, with a particular interest in 20th-century London. My monograph "The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Post-war London" (2010) examined the drive to reorder urban everyday life after the end of the Second World War and the impact this had on the behaviour and subjectivities of the city's queer men. I am now exploring various attempts made in interwar London to choreograph people's movements and patterns of attention - in effect, to bureaucratise how people engaged with and responded to the built environment. I am also interested in the history of urban mappings and the scripts they contained for encountering the city.

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Dr Spencer Jordan (English)

My research broadly breaks down into fiction and non fiction. Within fiction, I'm currently working on my second novel, provisionally entitled, Ship of Souls.

In terms of non-fiction, I am particularly interested in the role and function of creative writing within literary geography (and within that aspects of psychogeography). I've just finished a small project entitled  People's Journeys/Teithiau Pobl that looked at the interaction of creative writing, digital technology, and subjective conceptions of place and 'home'.

I'm also continuing to work on the transgressive epistemologies of digital and hypertextual fiction, building on my article, 'An Infinitude of Possible Worlds' (2014).

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Dr Chris King (Classics and Archaeology)

I am a specialist in late medieval and historical archaeology (the period from c. 1200 to 1800), with a particular interest in urban archaeology and the archaeology of standing buildings. My research interests focus on the study of domestic architecture and life within the household, the development of medieval and early modern urban landscapes, and the transformation of religious architecture in the period following the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.

I joined the Department as a Lecturer in 2011, having completed a PhD on late medieval and early modern urban houses in Norwich at the University of Reading (2006), followed by a period of four years at the University of Leicester as a Lecturer (2006-7) and as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2007-10), where I completed a research project entitled 'Voices of Dissent: The Cultural Landscapes of Urban Nonconformity 1580-1780'.

I am particularly interested in the development of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of medieval and post-medieval archaeology, bringing together the evidence of standing buildings, archaeological excavations, material culture and documentary sources to develop new understandings of the use and meaning of space and its implications for social relations and identities in this period of transition.

I am also Secretary of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology.

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Professor Stephen Legg (Geography)

Stephen Legg is a lecturer in cultural and historical geography. His research focuses on colonial India, taking 20th-century Delhi as the main case study. This has been explicated in his recent book Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007, Blackwell), which examined the residential, policing, and infrastructural environments of the new capital. His current work examines the regulation of prostitution in an international context, placing local debates in the context of recommendations from the League of Nations and other humanitarian groups. He also has a longstanding interest in Indian anti-colonial nationalism. 

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Dr Kean Lim (Geography)

Kean's current research is an extension of work conducted for his PhD dissertation at the University of British Columbia. The multi-sited project problematises the prevalent claim that a unidirectional, epochal change has occurred in the Chinese political economy after 1978. It emphasises instead a much more deeply sedimented, path-dependent pattern of development that is marked by significant (and enduring) forms of uneven economic-geographical development.

Half of the project comprises geographical-historical analysis of the extent to which regulatory logics of Mao Zedong era persist in the present, while the other half draws on field research on contemporary policy experimentation in "nationally strategic new areas" in Chongqing (in interior China) and the Pearl River Delta (southeastern China, adjacent to Hong Kong and Macau) to examine whether transformative change is possible. Work drawn from the project were awarded Best Essay Awards by the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Political Geography Specialty Group (New York, 2012) and Economic Geography Specialty Group (Tampa, 2014). The project was the recipient of the AAG Economic Geography Specialty Group Graduate Research Award (Los Angeles, 2013).

A part of this project has been published in the journals Progress in Human Geography (2014) and Economy & Society (2014).

 
Professor Helen Meller (History)

British and European urban history with an emphasis on cultural issues such as leisure and gender; on planning history and the introduction of planning ideas in European cities in the early twentieth century; and on the history of green open spaces in cities from the mid nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. Current research focuses on the history of green open spaces in European cities.  

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Dr Julia Merritt (History)

The social, religious and cultural history of early modern England, with particular reference to the history of London. Recent research explores themes ranging from the impact of the Reformation and the early development of the West End to the social history of the royal court, the competing use of space by different social groups, and the impact of plague and poverty. Current research is focused on two main areas: firstly, the relationship between religion and urban society--with regard to space, time and people; secondly, the social, cultural and spatial developments in the metropolis during the seventeenth century, especially the socio-economic impact of the gentry and aristocracy.  

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Dr Joe Merton (History)

My doctoral research addressed the emergence of a new 'white ethnic' identity politics in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It seeks to explain the emergence of a new and distinct political identity - the 'white ethnic' - for the mainly working class, third-generation descendants of European immigrants, and the reasons for its adoption by a range of actors and institutions from across the political spectrum. Yet this 'white ethnic moment' ultimately collapsed, imploding as a coherent political force by the 1980s. Thus my research sheds light not only on the strength of ethnic group mobilisation in an era of political division and uncertainty, but also explains how such mobilisation can also fail to establish a durable presence on the American political stage.

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Dr Paul Nathanail (Geography)

My research focuses on the themes of risk based contaminated land management and sustainable brownfield regeneration.

Having developed two tranches of Generic Assessment Criteria to inform generic quantitative risk assessment for use under both the planning regime and Part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, we have changed the way regulators and consultants tackle substances for which there is no published soil guideline value. We have also pioneered the use of contaminant bioavailability in regulatory risk assessment and written the relevant CIEH professional practice note.

 
Dr Nicole Porter (Architecture and Built Environment)

Dr Porter's interests, qualifications and experience span a range of built environment disciplines including landscape architecture, urban design and architecture. Following training at the University of Melbourne (PhD, M.Arch, Grad Cert L.Arch, BPD) Nicole taught landscape theory within the landscape programme at Melbourne. In 2008 Nicole was appointed as lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the University of Canberra, where she taught a number of design studios, with projects ranging from individual residential gardens through to urban interventions/installations, critical urban design scenarios and the design and management of National Park landscapes.

Her current role at the University of Nottingham includes undergraduate architecture studio teaching and research with a strong landscape and place making focus. Nicole has practised as an urban designer with the Australian Capital Territory, Canberra, where she engaged in master planning work and strategic policy research. Nicole led the production of the PIA award-winning Molonglo Valley Place making guide (2010). She is a Registered Landscape Architect with the AILA.

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Dr Neil Sinclair (Philosophy)

My primary research interests are in the philosophical understanding of moral talk, thought, discourse and action. I am particularly interested in the way in which moral discourse can be used to express attitudes for the purposes of interpersonal co-ordination and with what this tells us about the nature of moral disagreement, truth and argument. I also have interests in the areas of environmental ethics and bioethics.

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Dr Claire Taylor (History)

Southern French urban development c.1000 to c.1250, esp. in the northern Languedoc, specifically the development of established towns as commercial centres, the founding of new towns, tensions between clerics and urban elites, familial and confessional identity in castra and commercial towns, urban nobility, town fortifications, and the impact of the Albigensian Crusade and Inquisition on urban life. Other interests include early- and high-medieval Gascony and Aquitaine, in particular political development and religious heresy and social dissidence in these regions.

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Dr Sue C Townsend (History)

Arising from my study of the ‘overcoming modernity’ debates of the 1920s, my research interests have turned to Japanese urban and environmental history in the twentieth century. In particular I am working on a proposal for a project entitled Competing Visions of Urban Living: A comparative study of Birmingham, England and Nagoya, Japan from 1920 to the present day. The project will be collaborative and interdisciplinary, drawing on historical, philosophical and geographical perspectives in order to build bridges between Japanese and British understandings about the contested spaces occupied by man, technology and nature within the urban environment. My other research interests include: Japanese intellectual history of the 1920s and 30s and the importance of personality psychology in interpreting autobiographical writing.

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Professor Maiken Umbach (History)

I am a cultural historian with a particular interest in the role of the built environment in urban and civic identity politics in modern Europe. My monograph "German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism" (OUP, 2009) explored the city - from grand urban planning interventions to the microcosm of the bourgeois music chamber - as a site where a distinct new form of liberal politics took shape. It also deals with major organisations for the reform of urbanism, such as the German Werkbund. Related publications, such as my book "Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalisation and the Built Environment" (SUP 2005), focus on the built environment as a strategy whereby a 'sense of place' was written into the project of modernism (often to counter class-based political formations) in various sites in Europe and North America in the 20th century.

As part of a broader interest in the politics of regionalism, I have also written comparatively on the idea and physical shape of 'second cities' in Europe, with a particular emphasis on Spain (esp Barcelona) and Germany (esp Hamburg, Munich, Hagen).

My current work explores spatial imaginaries in National Socialist Germany and Francoist Spain. While not confined to the city (my co-author and I also explore experiential practices such as car driving, and modes of spatial representation such as amateur photography), the discourse about and the physical transformation of cities under both regimes remain central to our analysis of how the sense of place was reconfigured and politically mobilised under these dictatorships.

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Konstantinos Vlassopoulos (Classics)

My work focuses on the nature of urban communities, primarily in classical Athens. Given the complexity and diversity of the urban conglomeration of a cosmopolitan commercial, cultural and political centre like Athens, I examine the diverse networks and communities created by people of various legal, economic and social statuses (citizens, women, metics, slaves). My interest lies in particular in how urban space and the possibilities for social interaction it created allowed the emergence of a variety of communities that cut across the distinction of legal status, which were important for other aspects of political and social interaction in classical Athens.

 
Professor Richard Wrigley (Culture, Media and Visual Studies)

I have worked on aspects of French art and history in the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on writing on art in Paris (criticism, shop signs). I am currently developing a project on the origins of the flaneur, reconsidering the phenomenon of the pedestrian spectator and its political implications, and also tracing its exportation/assimilation abroad. I recently completed a study of attitudes to and representations of Rome ('Roman Fever'), which rethinks the Eternal city as a place of filth, infection, and crisis.

 

 

Urban Culture Network

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telephone: +44 (0) 115 95 15442
email: Jake.Hodder@nottingham.ac.uk