Research

Involving colleagues in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at LLC, the Centre brings together researchers from across the University of Edinburgh working on research related to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Centre (which was formerly called the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies) brings together around 70 researchers across the University of Edinburgh. Within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, members span a range of disciplines in Celtic and Scottish Studies, English and Scottish Literature, European Languages and Cultures, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian Studies.

This Centre was established in 1995 to promote francophone Belgian studies, including through the teaching of francophone Belgian literature on university courses. Its activities include seminars, conferences, publications, writing competitions, film screenings and other cultural events.

Bringing together specialists in the fields of anglophone and francophone diasporas, this international network is unique in comparing the various diasporic communities’ responses to issues of identity, belonging and relocation in the specific contexts of British/French and Canadian immigration policies.

Growing out of conversations started in a group on Emotionally Distressing Research, this is a forum for researchers experiencing the ‘pressure on thinking’ from the ethical dilemmas their research gives rise to. Involving researchers from across the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, including the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), it embeds ethical reflection in research culture and collaboration.

This group brings together researchers working with artists’ moving image, experimental cinema and radical filmmaking that seeks to engage with the complexities of our times. Open to staff and postgraduate students from across the University, its LLC membership includes researchers from Film, Exhibition and Curation, European Languages and Cultures, and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. As well as offering a supportive environment to discuss work-in-progress, the group facilitates knowledge exchange with practitioners and public audiences through film screenings, in-conversation events and other activities.

Initially funded by an AHRC Research Network Grant (2015-2017), this collaborative network led by Professor Marion Schmid brings together an international team of researchers and artists from France, Belgium, Austria, Romania, and the UK to forge new directions in the study of cinematic intermediality. Its particular focus is the ways in which the moving image is shaped and revitalised by artistic cross-fertilisation.

Led by Professor Marion Schmid and Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce, this research strand interrogates the theory and practice of ‘intermediality’, that is, the interrelationships between different art forms and their signification. With a particular focus on events, several jointly organised with Meiji University in Tokyo, the strand brings together academics, research students and practitioners to foster exchange and initiate new collaborative projects.

Based in European Languages and Cultures in LLC, this research strand explores the interplay between violence and language in various historical and cultural contexts and from different disciplinary perspectives (including literary and linguistic studies, translation, and memory studies).

Founded in 2010, and funded for a period of 12 years, the Centre’s mission was to advance knowledge in the field of Russian language studies and to foster a broader understanding of Russia through research, academic training and knowledge exchange.

Las aventuras de la China Iron is a feminist, queer and postcolonial re-telling of the epic 19th century Argentinian poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro. It was originally written in Spanish by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and published in 2017. Beginning in 2018, the book was translated into English by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh, and published by Charco Press in 2019 as The Adventures of China Iron. The following year, this translation was one of six books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020.

The project to bring the novel to English-speaking audiences exemplifies how translation is often both critical research and original creative practice. Successfully engaging with an original text steeped in Argentinian history and culture relied heavily on the researchers’ expertise in nineteenth-, twentieth century and contemporary literature from Argentina. In addition to capturing the quality, tone and sensorial richness of Cabezón Cámara’s writing, additional challenges included translating passages of metrical poetry. In shortlisting the title, the International Booker Prize judges drew attention to its demonstration of translation as iterative collaboration, which they felt made it exceptional linguistically.

David Rizzio (1533-1566), musician and courtier, is a highly romanticised historical figure. He has long been represented in the Scottish arts for his close relationship with Mary Queen of Scots, his murder at the hands of her husband and other Protestant lords, and his association with the religious conflicts that marked the Scottish Reformation. Despite his fame, neither his political and cultural role nor his artistic influence have been studied in any scholarly detail. Through a series of workshops, Dr Emanuela Patti is aiming to fill this gap, providing the first comprehensive account of Rizzio’s life, career and impact.

The project brings together experts from multiple disciplines, including History, Divinity, History of Art, Italian, Scottish Literature, and Music. As well as uncovering the political role Rizzio played in religious conflict, it looks at his personal relationships with Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley and how they affected the dynamics of the 16th century Scottish Court. It also looks at Rizzio's artistic contribution to Scottish literature and music, including how he has been appropriated and fictionalised in literature, cinema, music and theatre. Working with schools, libraries and museums, the project asks what this legacy tells us about the cultural interpretation of Scottish history across time.

United Nations figures indicate that one in three women will experience Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in their lifetime, exacerbated by factors such as the social effects of COVID-19 and the refugee crisis in Europe. Professor Charlotte Bosseaux has been funded to consider the ways in which the voices of GBV survivors are translated, including in audiovisual personal narratives. The project is a collaboration with Saheliya, a Scottish-based charity supporting survivors, the filmmaker Ling Lee, and language professionals recruited via the specialist company Screen Language. The collaboration is practice-based, with one of its principal outputs being a suite of versions of a multilingual documentary using different translation techniques, including voiceover and various types of subtitling. 

Through screenings, both online and in person, audiences are being asked to assess the different versions of the film, Surviving Translation, on the basis of whether the techniques have done justice to survivors' voices. In and through the film, the researchers have also explored how interpreters and translators feel about their work. As well as the film itself, the project has delivered good practice guidelines for translators, translation companies, filmmakers and charities, including on how to work together effectively on sensitive material. In this way, the project addresses the ethics of translation, and the emotional demands it places on the various parties involved. 

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): January 2022 to July 2023

LLC team: Professor Charlotte Bosseaux (Principal Investigator)

Italian Great War literature is an extraordinarily diverse corpus in terms of genres, agents, and ideological backgrounds. Fatherland as Motherland was one of the first research projects to explore the conflict’s gendered nature, especially the interplay between nationalism and gender. The project combined methodologies from literary studies, political history, and gender and cultural studies to examine both fiction and non-fiction, including diaries, letters and memoirs. It excavated the layered site of invention of Italian Great War literature, interpreting between the lines of its various conflicting masculine discourses and representations.

Fatherland as Motherland studied the female icon of the motherland in Italian Great War literature by analysing its unstable symbolic contents and rhetorical features and comparing them with nationalist propaganda. It proposed a new interpretation of the exploitation of the literature in fascist nationalist culture by analysing edited collections of war writings published in the 1920s and 30s. Overall, the project marked the centenary of World War I by fostering a better understanding of the gendered character of modern nationalism and its cultural roots against the backdrop of European integration. Findings were published in the 2020 book 'Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War: History, Representations and Memory', and shared in various papers and talks.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world saw transnational mobility of Russian speakers on an unprecedented scale. The UK has experienced a dramatic growth of Russian-speaking migrants and a rapid development of Russophone communities and border-spanning cultural activities – from art galleries, costume balls and festivals to hundreds of schools, clubs, restaurants and internet sites.

Combining a discursive studies approach with globalisation theories, the Global Russians project develops a new paradigm to explore the construction, articulation and commodification of ‘global Russian’ identity and its community-building potential. By examining the apparently high level of Russian cultural engagement in the UK, the project's findings aim to deepen our understanding of ‘community’ itself.

Global Russians is part of the multi-university Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community Consortium.

The Holocaust is known through translation: survivors’ voices have come down to us through translation, or in languages other than their first. Particularly raw and difficult is the experience of testifying in court, in the face of the accused and under public scrutiny. How are Victims' Voices Heard? explores the work of translators and interpreters in the trial of 22 former SS Auschwitz personnel in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s. Including the voices of dozens of witnesses, speaking 10 different languages, this event had a profound impact on public understanding of the Holocaust in Germany and beyond.

How are Victims' Voices Heard? involves a series of archival research trips in which Professor Peter Davies is engaging with key sources and archive specialists. Working towards a monograph, he is exploring interpreters' professional practice and ethical self-understanding during the Frankfurt trial, showing how these affected the ways in which victims’ voices were heard in and beyond the courtroom. The research asks vital questions about how victims of genocide can make their voices heard in legal systems. It has the potential to transform the way we understand the legal processes by which perpetrators are brought to justice and the crucial role of translation in defining public perceptions of the survivor experience.

Latin American Indigenous filmmaking is often deemed too artisan, unrefined and difficult for 'global' audiences to grasp. Building on existing work with the Latin American Coordinating Council for Indigenous Film and Media (CLACPI), Indigenous Cinematics brings together diverse disciplines and communities of practice to recentre its significance. The project engages with issues of authorship, language diversity, audiovisual translation and ownership. Through the production of new work on the art and act of making film in Indigenous Latin America, it aims to influence perceptions of film's role in reflecting cultural diversity, and facilitate access to a more mixed ecology of film form.

In 2020, four films were translated, subtitled and screened at the Smithsonian Institution's Mother Tongue Film Festival in Washington DC. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project supported four Indigenous filmmakers and producers in virtual residencies - a way for them to share, exchange, debate, build and develop new film projects. The Edinburgh-based screenwriter and filmmaker Armando Bautista García produced resources exploring the art of creative production in the Mixtec language, with his text translated into English by Gustavo Herrera Taboada (PhD candidate in Film Studies). In 2023, the project entered a new phase with the support of the British Academy, involving a series of podcasts to accompany and enrich a book by Charlotte Gleghorn.

The Islay Life Explorer (ÌLE) is a web-based portal to a unique collection of thematically layered data on the Inner Hebridean island of Islay off Scotland’s west coast. The project developed out of research into Viking settlement in Islay which established the nature and extent of Norse-native interaction on the island during the Viking Age. The initial research collated and analysed an extensive body of linguistic, environmental, archaeological, historical and cartographic material, including place-names, family histories and cultural heritage from sources including the Islay Cultural Database. ÌLE makes this material freely and digitally accessible for personal use.

The ÌLE searchable map shows local historic sites and features, as well as a family history of people who once lived on Islay and the places associated with them. Recently updated, the interface was developed in collaboration with the School of Geosciences, ​​​​​including postgraduate students on the Geographical Information Science programme, and informed by activities with Islay school and community groups. In addition to ÌLE, outputs from the original research include the monograph, 'The Vikings in Islay: The Place of Names in Hebridean Settlement History'. A systematic review of around 240 of the island's farm and nature names, this was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's 'Research Book of the Year' award 2016.

In the last decade, particularly among feminist scholars, there has been growing interest in early modern women’s cultural, literary and political agency. This body of work is designed not merely to (re)shape our collective memory and imaginary, but also to challenge deeply ingrained paradigms about knowledge production. Building on her AHRC-funded project of 2010/11, Women's Spaces, Bodies and Voices, Dr Séverine Genieys-Kirk has been working with partners including the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and L’Institut français d’Ecosse on learning to see the power of women. Since 2016, the project has comprised a series of ‘cultural encounters’ between past and present, unlocking disciplinary differences and opening a new field of cross-cultural and transmedial investigation.

In 2016, a three-day conference on ‘Recovering Women’s Past: New epistemologies, new ventures’ brought together 35 international experts to explore the power of women in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the present. Associated events included an exhibition, a guided tour of ‘The Subject and Me’ - Alice Neel’s first solo show in Scotland, a screening of the documentary MARCH, a public panel event, and a facilitated playwrights’ discussion. Since then, the project has held workshops and film screenings on female writers from the early modern period, including Mme de La Fayette and Mme de Villedieu. It has also hosted a two-day meeting of an EU Working Group, focusing on mapping the digital future of European Women Writers before 1900.

Funded by the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) Research Fund and Impact Fund

LLC team: Dr Séverine Genieys-Kirk (Principal Investigator)

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian film director, poet, writer, political commentator and public intellectual, particularly known for his socially critical, stylistically unorthodox films from the 1960s and early 1970s. To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, Italian Studies at University of Edinburgh and the Italian Institute of Culture in Edinburgh held a programme of research-led events on Pasolini and the Classics, supported by the Society for Italian Studies.

The Pasolini 100 series focused on the intensive and extensive relations Pasolini had with other cultural figures, offering a unique entry point to his oeuvre. "The Classics" ranged from authors of the world literary tradition, to cultural icons of cinema, the visual and performative arts. Each event cast light on how these relations originated and have been articulated across Pasolini’s work and beyond. With this approach, the series encouraged a reflection on forms of cultural reception, appropriation, and dialogue between Pasolini and the classics, as well as an analysis of the transmedia and transnational processes generated in these interplays.

Nicolás Guillén Landrián was one of only three Afro-Cuban directors active at the Cuban national film institute (ICAIC) in its first decade. Nephew of a revolutionary poet, and son on an attorney who advocated for Camagüey sugar workers, his 35mm film classics include the notoriously-censored Coffea arábiga (1968), which ironized the Havana greenbelt urban agricultural project, unearthing its racialized undertones. After leaving Cuba for the US, Guillén Landrián filmed his final and only audiovisual work in exile, Inside Downtown (2001), a portrait of artists and poets of his generation, including the cult Afro-Cuban poet, Esteban Luis Cárdenas.

In 2020, in conjunction with the Havana Glasgow and Africa in Motion film festivals, Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs and Dr Raquel Ribeiro screened these two works together with a 2013 film by Julio Ramos and Raydel Araoz featuring extensive interviews with Guillén Landrián’s widow, the painter Gretel Alfonso. The accompanying panel discussion, streamed live online, featured the researchers in conversation with Julio Ramos. The Memory in Progress project also created a video archive of testimonials from Cuban intellectuals, curators and artists on the meaning of Nicolás Guillén Landrián for the history of Cuban film and future generations of Cuban filmmakers. In 2021, Jessica Gordon-Burroughs was awarded Best Essay in Latin American Visual Culture Studies by the Latin American Studies Association for “The Pixelated Afterlife of Nicolás Guillén Landrián” which looks in particular at Inside Downtown.

Funded by the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) Impact Fund

LLC Team: Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Dr Raquel Ribeiro

This body of interdisciplinary work spans culture, identity, and politics to consider questions of representation, inclusion, and power. Across multiple projects, Dr Leanne Dawson examines film and screen studies, literature, theatre, performance art, archives, and festivals across European, Asian, and North American cultures. Work on representation on page, stage, and screen focuses on working-class and LGBTQI+ identities, the latter taking in themes of 'passing', and queer femininities, among others. Having a profound impact beyond academia, the research also explores queer spaces and the people who use them, including film festivals and archives, and on improving accessibility, equality, diversity, and inclusion in the arts.

Most of the work is textual analysis, although Dawson’s other methodologies include qualitative and quantitative approaches, and historical analyses in order to theorise gender, sexuality, and class/socio-economic position. In addition to finalising a monograph on queer identities on the German screen from the 1930s to the present day, she is currently researching an AHRC-funded monograph (Poor Queers), which explores the intersection of LGBTQI+ and working-class identities on British screens, a project which will also lead to a range of other publications, including best practice documents.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Creative Scotland, Arts Council England, Goethe Institut, British Council, DAAD, and British Film Institute.

LLC team: Dr Leanne Dawson (Principal Investigator)

Restless Earth examined German-language literature about the Second World War to look at how non-Jewish writers approached the topic of the Holocaust atrocities committed outside concentration camps and prisons. The history of face-to-face mass killing by the German armed forces on the Eastern Front has remained marginal to collective understandings of the Holocaust until relatively recently but this project looked at how this and similar phenomena have been acknowledged in literary texts since the war, albeit not often explicitly.

The project involved a three-day conference in August 2021 on Germany’s historical and contemporary perspective on Eastern Europe, asking among other questions how the East’s construction as an exotic, vast and violent space has contributed to the side-lining of certain aspects of Holocaust history in German popular discourse. Dr Jenny Watson’s first paper on the research, looking at Romanian German Literature in particular, was published in The Modern Language Review in 2021.

Building on Laura Bradley’s earlier AHRC-funded project on theatre censorship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) 1961-1990, Who’s Watching Who? marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The public engagement project involved award-winning dramatist Peter Arnott writing a play, Ensemble, based on the research, and sharing this creative process with audiences. The relationship between film, research and audience was traced by film-maker, academic and project co-designer, Susan Kemp, in the 2016 documentary Writing Ensemble. The project was developed in partnership with Playwrights' Studio, Scotland, which connects playwrights with audiences and encourages critical discussion about playwriting.

Who’s Watching Who? comprised 13 events in four UK cities, including rehearsed readings of the play-in-progress and screenings of the film. The project website showcased archival and contemporary resources, including a blog by playwright Peter Arnott. Through this extensive engagement, audiences reported learning more about how GDR censorship functioned, the psychology of surveillance, the ethics of playwriting and research, and the complexities and possibilities of verbatim theatre. A collaborative symposium promoted awareness of opportunities for collaboration between theatre practitioners and the Higher Education sector.

Whose Voice is it Anyway? is a series of themed events delving into translation practices. Organised by Professor Charlotte Bosseaux, and held in collaboration with the European Commission, the research-led events bring together academics, students, professional translators, and their audiences. To date, the University of Edinburgh has hosted four events in the Whose Voice… series, variously supported by the Institut Français and Goethe-Institut. As well as talks and panel discussions, the events have featured writers in conversation with their translators.

Each Whose Voice… event deals with a different theme or set of challenges in translation. The first highlighted the importance of voice in many different settings, from interpreting to translating, acting to writing. The second focused on what happens to the voices of women in translation and interpreting, covering territory as diverse as interpreting for the victims of gender-based-violence, translating mommy blogs, and Dalit literature. The third was an evening dedicated to the translation of emotions, with a particular focus on the role of translators and translation when conveying trauma. The most recent event in the series reflected on ethical challenges in a translation and interpreting context drawing on recent research projects and practitioners' experiences.

Since the mid-20th century, Peruvian women nonfiction filmmakers have been giving voice to the country's disenfranchised populations in documentaries that entwine individual and collective traumas. Currently, they are fostering a thriving nonfiction audio-visual scene with transmedia characteristics and global linkages. Despite the artistic and social impact of this body of work, it has hovered under the historiographic radar. By applying feminist and decolonising frameworks and methodologies to the study of Women’s Nonfiction Filmmaking in Peru, this project seeks to foreground women’s work and resignify Peruvian – and Latin American – film history.

Using active research tools, Dr Isabel Seguí combines oral histories, personal archives and interviews to uncover the hidden and complex scenarios of Peruvian women’s filmmaking and complete a picture of women’s creative involvement in filmmaking at different stages. The project’s interconnected outputs include an academic publication, public engagement, and archive digitalisation, the latter involving the development of an online hub of primary and secondary source documents.