Research

All our members share an interest in innovative theoretical frameworks to examine mobilities in and of cultural texts. We work across periods and disciplines (literature, history and area studies, translation and intercultural communication); our collective work focuses on exploring and developing interdisciplinary perspectives.

Themes

Crossover themes and concepts include:

Cities and urban culture
Travel literature, travel in literature and transport history
Social and cultural networks
Transnationalism as theory and practice, and its limitations
Subversive material and virtual spaces and the imagination of alternative spaces
Disconnections and connections
Embodiment and the practice and politics of movement
Post-humanism
Text genres as agents and products of mobilities, encompassing the novel, travel writing, epistolary and life writing, and other fictional and nonfictional forms

These are deployed across and within historical and contemporary frameworks. Areas of specialism range from the Middle Ages to present day, covering periods including:

Mediaeval literature
Romanticism
Victorianism
Postmodernism
Postcolonial literatures
Global literatures

International partnerships

We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities at the University of Padua.

This partnership will foster research exchanges and transdisciplinary collaborations.

Impact in conversation

Dr Doris Dippold talks about the impacts of her research on the internationalisation of higher education and the role of language in artificial intelligence.

Impact in Conversation: Dr Doris Dippold | University of Surrey

Highlighted publications

Gabriele Lazzari, New Global Realism. Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Charlotte Mathieson, 'Placing Dickens', in The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts, edited by Juliet John and Claire Wood. (Edinburgh, 2024).

Constance Bantman, ‘A transnational radical print culture: French-language anarchist periodicals between London, Paris and the United States before 1914’, in Bénédicte Deschamps and Stéphanie Prévost (eds.), The Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in Modern Britain and the US (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Constance Bantman, Un premier exil libertaire. Les anarchistes français à Londres, 1880-1914. Montreuil, Libertalia, 2024.

Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘Relocating the Sidney Women: Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth in London’ in The Lives and Afterlives of the Sidney Women, ed. Alison Findlay and Aurélie Griffin, Routledge. In press.

Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘”A Fortunate Journey Unto Troy”; gender and geography in Jane Lumley’s Iphigeneia’ in Performing Gender(s) Elsewhere: Shakespeare in Contemporary Alternative Spaces and Institutions, ed. Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell, Legenda. In press.

Lena Mattheis. 'Poetic Space: Mapping Out How Poetry Takes Place.' Literary Geographies 9.1 (2023): 34-49.

Constance Bantman, ‘Anarchist Transnationalism’, in Marcel van der Linden (ed.), Cambridge History of Socialism, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 599-620.

Gabriele Lazzari, ‘Place-Based Translingualism, Identity, and the Contemporary World Literary Space: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Turn to Italian,’ Comparative Literature Studies 60.2 (2023): 312-335.

Gabriele Lazzari, 'Methodologies of Blackness in Italy: Past, Present, and Futures,' Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe, edited by B.B. Blaagard, S. Marchetti, S. Ponzanesi, S. Bassi, University of Ca' Foscari Press, 2023, 57-73.

Lena Mattheis. 'Translocality in City Literature.' The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. Routledge, 2022. 479-489.

Constance Bantman and Pietro di Paola, ‘Banal and everyday (inter-)nationalism: French and Italian anarchist exiles in London, 1870s-1914’, Nations and Nationalism, 2022.

Constance Bantman and Charlotte Faucher, ‘‘French Lady Seeks’… finding work as a French governess in late Victorian and Edwardian England (1870–1914)’, Women’s History Review, 2022.

Lena Mattheis. Translocality in Contemporary City Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Constance Bantman, Jean Grave and the Networks of French Anarchism (1854-1939) (Palgrave, 2021).

Lena Mattheis and Jens Martin Gurr. "Superpositions: A Typology of Spatiotemporal Layerings in Buried Cities." Literary geographies 7.1 (2021): 5-22.

Doris Dippold and Marion Heron (eds.), Meaningful Teaching Interaction at the Internationalised University: Moving From Research to Impact (Routledge, 2021).

Carl Thompson, Katrina O'Loughlin, Éadaoin Agnew, Betty Hagglund (eds.), Women's Travel Writings in India 1777–1854 (Routledge, 2020).