Our research is organised under two broad thematic strands out of which a diverse array of innovative projects emerge.
Place and Belonging builds on the Leverhulme-funded Devolved Voices project and our research activity in the area of Welsh Writing in English. This activity includes literary production in contemporary poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction as well as critical analysis, collaboration with relevant external stakeholders, and interdisciplinary enquiry. Researchers are working on the diverse ways in which literature and writing emerge out of/sits within real and imagined locations and raises questions of belonging. Such questions are understood variously in terms of memory, geographical rootedness/rootlessness, and real or imagined communities, including communities of interest and expertise, age, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.
Emotional Lives showcases innovation in areas pertaining to points of contact between STEMM/Social Sciences and diverse areas of critical and creative enquiry: literary history, textual production, memory studies, gender studies, life writing, and translation Researchers are working across critical and creative responses to an array of issues connected with inner and private lives, as well as the crossover between inner lives and the public sphere. Our sense of private and personal space, and the psychoanalytic theories and interpretations that underpin such readings, has prompted significant work examining the relationship between health, pain, and creativity. This thematic focus has been particularly successful in generating opportunities for dynamic public engagement and pathways to impact underpinned by diverse research activity: communicating physical and psychological pain; sustainable communities; agricultural, economic, and future security.
You can find out more about specific ongoing work via our projects videos.
