People
Prof Nina Glick Schiller, RICC Director
Nina Glick Schiller is the Director of the Cosmopolitan Cultures Institute and Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and Professor. She is an associate of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale Germany and a senior associate of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University of New Hampshire, USA. In her articles, chapters, reports and books Nina Glick Schiller has developed a comparative and historical perspective on migration, transnational and diasporic processes, and social relations. Her current research interests include the relationships between migrants and cities, the transnationality of cities, diasporic cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitan sociability. Glick Schiller's research has been conducted in Haiti, the United States, and Germany and she has worked with migrants from all regions of the globe. She is currently engaged in research projects in Manchester UK and Copenhagen, Denmark. She has also critiqued research paradigms and methodological nationalist orientations in migration, urban and health studies. Full profile.
Prof Jackie Stacey, RICC co-director
Jackie Stacey is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham (1992). Her work in RICC combines an interest in concepts of difference emerging from feminist and queer theory with debates about the place of film and mediating technologies in the imagined futures of globalised cultures. Building on the interdisciplinary work of Global Nature, Global Culture (co-authored with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury, Routledge, 2000) and The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Duke UP, 2010), she is interested in investigating the fantasy spaces of the new cosmopolitanism. Her approach is informed by an interest in psychoanalysis, cultural form and political change. At present, she is beginning work on a project on cosmopolitan cinemas. Full profile.
Prof Galin Tihanov, RICC co-director
Galin Tihanov is Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History; he holds doctorates from Sofia University (1996) and Oxford University (1998) and is Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. His work at RICC is focused on understanding the multiple genealogies of cosmopolitanism as a discursive formation since the eighteenth century; he also studies the role of comparative literature and the humanities in shaping notions of cosmopolitanism and transnational cultural values. In 2008 he initiated the RICC-ICLA symposium “Responding to Cosmopolitanism: The New Identities of Literary Theory”, and in 2008-2009, together with Gyan Prakash, a series of two Manchester-Princeton colloquia on the genealogies of cosmopolitanism. Among his forthcoming work is a volume, Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism, co-edited with David Adams and originating in a RICC conference under the same title convened by Tihanov and Adams in 2008. Full profile.
Dr Felicia Chan, RCUK Fellow
Having completed a BA Hons (English Literature) and an MA in English at the National University of Singapore, Felicia Chan completed her PhD in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham in 2007. She is jointly based in RICC and Screen Studies, and is co-founder of the Chinese Film Forum UK. Her research interests are eclectic, spanning cross-cultural cinema, film festival cultures, theories of intertextuality, diaspora and identity politics, and modernism and modernity in film, literature and culture. She is currently conducting ongoing research on the political and cultural economies of international film festivals, as well as working on co-authored projects on cosmopolitan cinema and British Chinese cinema. Full profile
Dr Gillian Evans, RCUK Fellow
Gillian studied social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies before completing her Master's and PhD degree in the Social Anthropology of Children and Child Development in the Centre for Child-Focused Anthropological Research (CFAR) at Brunel University. Beginning with a Temporary Lectureship at the University of Manchester in 2006, Gillian now holds a Research Council Fellowship here from 2007-2012 in the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). Full profile.
Dr Andrew Irving, RCUK Fellow
Andrew's past research explored how the world appears to people close to death, particularly with regard to the aesthetic appreciation of time, existence and otherness. Currently, he is developing four RCUK research projects in Uganda under the collective theme of rethinking media/reclaiming personhood Rethinking Media/Reclaiming Personhood that consider how socially marginalised persons can become included in community and society through different kinds of media and media practices. The projects use visual and other media to develop a longitudinal research programme that uses collaborative and narrative forms of self-representation and combines a number of explicit aims that centre on questions of research, representation, ethics and empowerment. They are designed to not only offer a better understanding of marginalised persons but also transform their social and existential circumstances and set up a different kind of social life. Full profile.
Dr Ewa Ochman, RCUK Fellow
Ewa is based jointly at RICC and Russian and East European Studies. She received her MA in Polish Language and Literature from The Jagiellonian University, Krakow and Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the European Studies Institute at The University of Salford in 2004. She was awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2005. Ewa's research interests are mainly focused on theories of social remembering, generational memory and trauma, population displacement, borderlands and ethnic minorities. Her current work at RICC explores re-examinations of the Polish past, which remains contentious, particularly in Poland's borderlands and among Polish diasporas - in Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. Full profile.
Dr Madeleine Reeves, RCUK Fellow
Madeleine is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on three key areas: the remaking of borders after socialism; the social and affective relations that sustain transnational migration, and the “everyday state” in Central Asia. She has a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MA from the University of Chicago, where she studied Russian and Soviet history. Her current research focuses on transnational labour migration between rural southern Kyrgyzstan and Moscow. She is also completing a book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation on everyday 'border work' in the Ferghana valley region of Central Asia. Full profile.
Dr Atreyee Sen, RCUK Fellow
Dr Atreyee Sen is RCUK Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures. She completed her doctoral dissertation (which won the 2002 Sutasoma Award for outstanding research from the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests and publications address issues of gender, childhood, urban violence, prisons and torture, and political anthropology, with a regional focus on South Asia. She is author of 'Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum' (2007) and co-editor (with Dr David Pratten) of 'Global Vigilantes: New Perspectives on Justice and Violence' (2008). Full profile.
Dr Adi Kuntsman, Leverhulme Fellow
Adi received her PhD from Lancaster University in 2007 and joined RICC in 2009 as Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow, continuing to Simon Research Fellowship (from February 2011). In her previous work, Adi examined the relations between nationalism, racism, queerness and migrant belonging in online social spaces. Her current project follows various websites and social networks and the ways they shape the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Addressing mediated horizons of violence, conflict and cosmopolitan anxieties, Adi's work maps the ways digital media can shape our affective responses to wars, dehumanisation and death. In particular, Adi explores the role of various Web 2.0 platforms in shifting forms of global and national citizenship, local and cosmopolitan identities, and the affective regimes of connectivity and hatred. Adi has published extensively on migration, nationalism, queer sexuality, racism and Internet cultures. Full profile.
Dr Heather Latimer, SSHRC Fellow
Heather received her PhD in 2010 from Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, Canada, and joined RICC as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research examines reproductive politics, literary and visual culture, and representations of citizenship. She has published on contemporary literature, reproduction, psychoanalysis, and feminist science studies. At present, she is beginning a project on the connections between fetal citizenship and refugee status. Full profile.