Cultures Past and Present

This theme concerns the production and representation of culture beyond the anglophone world. We interpret cultures broadly, working across diverse media to explore both historical and contemporary cultures and the interactions between them. We work with literary, material, visual, digital and cinematic cultures, encompassing local, national and transnational perspectives on their elite, popular, social, political, subcultural and queer dimensions. We write new histories foregrounding underrepresented and marginalised narratives, explore the role of the arts in producing and representing culture, and investigate the reworking of cultural motifs across media, periods and places.

Examples: National and transnational performance and reception, remapping world cinemas and literatures, cultures of reading, the intangible cultural heritage of Tibet, Classical reception studies.

The Hercules Project (Emma Stafford)

The Hercules Project has explored the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – in western culture from the end of antiquity to the present day. Two conferences at Leeds (2013 and 2017) brought together scholars from a range of disciplines, along with several visual- and performing-arts practitioners, the discussion subsequently feeding into four edited volumes published in Brill’s Metaforms series. Encompassing over 70 chapters in total, each of the volumes – Herakles Inside and Outside the Church (2020), The Exemplary Hercules (2020), The Modern Hercules (2020) and Hercules Performed (2024) – consists of case-studies considering a particular work or theme in detail, exploring the hero’s transformations of identity and significance in a wide range of media, including literature, visual arts, film, theatre and music.

The project reached out to a wider audience via two major public engagement initiatives. The international touring exhibition (2015-16) was based on the work of contemporary New Zealand artist Marian Maguire, whose series of prints The Labours of Herakles superimposes an ancient Greek image of Herakles onto nineteenth-century New Zealand landscapes, wittily casting the hero as a European colonist. In each of five venues (Leeds, Cambridge, Munich, Würzburg and Mariemont) the prints were juxtaposed with artefacts from the local collection to create a different narrative. Tim Benjamin’s oratorio Herakles, based on the ‘Choice of Hercules’ story, was premiered in Todmorden in 2017, a film version being launched at the second Leeds conference.

The project was supported by an AHRC Networking grant (2016-2018), with contributions also from the Classical Association, the Hellenic Society, the Institute of Classical Studies, and the University of Leeds.  Details of all the project’s activities can be found on its website.

Tibetan Sustainable Heritage Initiative (Tim Thurston)

The Tibetan Sustainable Heritage Initiative aims to understand the processes of cultural endangerment and cultural sustainability through attention to Tibetan communities in China. In addition to traditional ethnographic research methods to assess the current vitality of different traditions, we are developing new tools to collaboratively document intangible cultural traditions and co-create ways of making Tibetan cultural knowledge relevant to local communities in the twenty-first century. TaSHI is currently funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

Kafkaesque Cinema (Angelos Koutsourakis)

Professor Angelos Koutsourakis’ latest research project Kafkaesque Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024) is the outcome of a 24-months AHRC leadership fellowship (2020-2022) and an 18-months Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for experienced researchers (2022-2024). Taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges’ point that Kafka has modified our conception of past and future artists, and André Bazin’s suggestion that literary concepts and styles can exceed authors and “novels from which they emanate”, this project proposes a comprehensive examination of Kafkaesque Cinema in order to understand it as part of a transnational cinematic tradition rooted in Kafka’s critique of modernity, which, however, extends beyond the Bohemian author’s work and his historical experiences. Drawing on a range of disciplines in the Humanities including film, literary, and theatre studies, critical theory, and history, Kafkaesque Cinema analyses case studies from Australia, Argentina, Belgium, Chile, mainland China, Cuba, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland, USA, and the former USSR to deliver a crucial re-evaluation of the Kafkaesque as a critical category in film studies.

During the project, Angelos collaborated with the Leeds International Film festival and curated a series of films placed under the category of the Kafkaesque and led post-screening Q&As with other invited scholars.

Audience engagement with Elena Ferrante’s storyworld. Consuming fiction in a convergence culture (Olivia Santovetti, Laura Lucia Rossi, Alessio Baldini)

This is the first project to study systematically how ordinary readers and TV audiences respond to and engage with the storyworld created by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. We take Ferrante’s storyworld as a case study to investigate how readers and TV audiences consume fiction in a convergence culture (Jenkins 2006). Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014) were one of the biggest global literary sensations of the last decade (Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend tops the 2024 New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century). Using computational and digital methods we are collecting and comparing the responses reported by social media users on specialised platforms such as Goodreads and IMdB, in order to foreground the voices of ordinary readers and TV audiences who have contributed to consolidate Ferrante’s success.

Thanks to the funding we received (internally from the LCS Key Topics Project scheme and the LCS Symposia/Conference scheme, and externally from The Italianist journal) we were able to put Leeds on the digital humanities research map both nationally and internationally by establishing a collaboration with two digital humanities experts (Giovanni Pietro Vitali from University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines-University Paris-Saclay and Simone Rebora from University of Verona) which led to: 1) the LCS Digital Humanities Symposium: Consuming Fiction and a Convergence Culture (5 June 2025) which presented international case studies and fostered an interdisciplinary discussion on reception, cultural consumption and digital humanities; 2) two digital humanities workshops (6 June 2025) where specific digital skills were put in practice (a) From Manual Annotation to Machine Learning and b) Data Reading and Visualization; these workshops, open only to University of Leeds members, were oversubscribed and attended by PGRs and staff from LCS, Language Centre, Media, English and History); 3) a co-authored REF-able article entitled ‘Distant reading Elena Ferrante’s reviews on Goodreads’ to be submitted to MLR.

The Epitomes project (Paul White)

Hernando Colón (1489-1539) employed a team of ‘sumistas’ to read every book in his immense library and to compose a Latin epitome distilling the contents of each one. The newly identified Libro de los Epitomes – the fair copy annotated and corrected by Colón himself – contains almost 2000 of these Latin summaries, including summaries of the content of printed editions and manuscripts now lost to the world. It offers nothing less than a cross-section of the entire early modern book world: centrally, the expanding Greco-Roman canon, works of philosophy, theology, religious controversy and devotion, liturgy and sermons, works of humanist literature, pedagogy, and scholarship, works of medicine, law, mathematics, astronomy and music; but also a sampling of the vast hinterland of cheap print, going beyond the elite products of ancient, medieval and early modern intellectual culture.

Alongside colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge, Granada and Leeds, Paul White is working on a full published edition of the Book of Epitomes, complete with text, translation and introductory essays. This edition will open up new insights into our understanding of early modern cultures of reading, since the epitomes register a direct response to each text alongside a record of contemporary receptions of it. Crucially, paratexts – commentaries and translations, as well as adaptations, anthologies and florilegia, handbooks, etc. – were as a matter of policy each given separately numbered epitomes. The Book of Epitomes thus does more than to function as a repository of established knowledge, a record of the substantive content of the works that constituted the ‘tradition’; it charts the ever-evolving paratexts, the heteronomous texts, the instruments a receiving culture uses to store, access and cross-reference information, and to organize, process, and transmit knowledge.

New histories of the First and Second World War (Ingrid Sharp, Nina Wardleworth, Corinne Painter, Helen Finch, Stuart Taberner, Anne Buckley)  

Scholars within LCS are at the forefront of a shift towards exploring underrepresented and marginalised narratives and broadening the scope of historical inquiry into the First and Second World Wars. Their ethical and inclusive approach emphasises the importance of integrating academic research and public engagement. 

Anne Buckley investigates the experiences of German prisoners of war in the UK during the First World War. Her work with Craven Museum and the publication of a translated book of first-hand accounts provide new insights into the legacy of captivity and contribute to a nuanced understanding of wartime internment. Buckley’s extensive public engagement work includes talks, exhibitions, films, newspaper articles, and TV appearances - this work has had significant impact globally and locally. 

Helen Finch examines the representation of the Holocaust in German literature, queer identity, and memory studies. Her research addresses the shifting power dynamics in Holocaust literature and translations and explores how queer memory contributes to resilience. Finch’s recent publications and projects, including a monograph on German-Jewish life writing and a special issue on queer experiences in the Holocaust, underline her commitment to inclusivity and the critical examination of marginalized voices. 

Corinne Painter researches the First and Second World Wars, focusing on revolutionary and antifascist political activists. She uncovers power dynamics by examining marginalised figures through historical and contemporary lenses. Projects, such as “Ways of Knowing” and “Commemoration, Conflict and Conscience,” highlight lesser-known stories of women's activism and the impact of conflict on collective memory. Painter’s work emphasizes the importance of integrating academic research with public engagement. 

Ingrid Sharp examines gender dynamics in wartime and post-war revolutions, focusing on women’s transnational anti-war activism during and after World War I. Her projects, including ‘Women’s Organisations and Female Activists’ and ‘Gender and the German Revolution: Writing Women into the History of the Kiel Uprising, November 1918’ investigate how crises catalyse societal change and how post-conflict periods can redefine gender norms.  

Stuart Taberner’s research explores the global implications of historical narratives, the transnational circulation of Holocaust memory and its impact on contemporary human rights discourses. Taberner leads an AHRC Major Research Project on Rethinking Holocaust Literature: Contexts, Canons, Circulations. This project brings together an international team of more than 40 researchers to reevaluate Holocaust Literature across a range of Jewish and non-Jewish languages and geographies. 

Nina Wardleworth explores the marginalization of colonial subjects in the French Resistance during World War II. Her current project, “Combattants et résistants coloniaux pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale”, which includes collaboration on an exhibition at the Mémorial du Mont Valérien, seeks to amplify the contributions of colonial fighters and challenge prevailing historical narratives.