1. Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures
  2. School of Languages, Cultures and Societies
  3. Research and innovation
  4. Cultures and Societies
  5. Gender
  6. Our research and impact

Our research and impact

Gender research in LCS can be broadly categorised in a number of main areas:

Women’s writing and film-making Several projects have focused specifically on female authors, for example in France (Holmes; Atack; Fell; Brown-Grant; Lozier), Germany (Summers, Finch), Italy (Sulis, Santovetti), Latin America (Pitman), Brazil (Dennison), Japan (Hayter), and the classical world (May)

Gender and sexuality Researchers also explore the way different cultures and societies have understood and represented queer identities alongside gendered identities both in the past and in the present (Finch, Cleminson, Hayter, Wheeler)

Women’s history We have for example expertise in women in medieval history (Brown-Grant), women and warfare (Fell, Sharp), nineteenth and twentieth-century women’s movements and feminism (Fell, Sharp, Holmes, Atack),  women, language and cyberspace in Iran (Golzard), women and Buddhism (Seeger), and women and Islam (Bora)

Masculinity Colleagues also research social, cultural and political constructions of masculinity, for example male heroism in the classical world (Stafford), and political, scientific and cultural histories of masculinity and homosexuality in Spain and Portugal (Cleminson)

Impact and engagement

Oliva Santovetti (Italian) has organised events around the well-known Italian author Elena Ferrante, whose novels are published in 39 countries, and have sold one million of copies in the US and more than 300,000 in Britain. In 2016 Santovetti organised a sold-out public debate and brief talks by an international panel of professionals, including Ferrante’s translator, her UK publisher, a Times Literary Supplement commissioning editor and Italian expert in order to ask why Ferrante has become such a global success.

The event was co-hosted by the LivItaly: Bringing Italian Culture to Yorkshire public engagement project, the Centre for World Literatures and the Centre for Translation Studies. Santovetti has also discussed her research on Ferrante in a podcast broadcast in the US, as well as in other media outlets.

Research projects

We lead and collaborate on a range of funded research projects within the school, as well as initiatives which bring groups of interdisciplinary researchers within and beyond the University together:

Academic team

Margaret Atack
Fozia Bora
Alison Fell
Helen Finch
Irena Hayter
Di Holmes
Regine May
Ingrid Sharp
Duncan Wheeler

Sexuality:

Ros Brown-Grant
Richard Cleminson
Irena Hayter
Emma Stafford
Duncan Wheeler

Obscenity and Pornography:

Richard Cleminson
Claire Lozier