Research Projects
Dr Shanti Graheli
Being Human Award, “Book Tales: Storytelling with Books between Text and Object”
Dr Shanti Graheli
Research Fellowship, “A comparative study of Italian and French Renaissance Books in Scotland”
Dr Jonathan Evans
University of Glasgow, with collaborator Dr Ting Guo, University of Liverpool
International counterculture in the 1970s: Glasgow and Hong Kong
This project will compare countercultural activities in Glasgow and Hong Kong in the 1970s and how they connect to practices of international solidarity.
Dr Rachel Douglas
"Archiving Creative Aftershocks of Disasters in Haiti"
This project foregrounds Haitians as unsung leaders of collaborative disaster-response activism involving inter-Haitian solidarity/mutual aid ‘youn ede lòt’ (one helps the others), ‘konbit’ (cooperative group work), and ‘rasanblaj’(gathering, reassembly); a key process of coming together after disasters as a survival/rebuilding tactic.
Dr Rachel Douglas
"Reimagining Haiti: Decolonial Visions"
Rewriting or rasanblaj (gathering/re-assembling in Haitian Kreyòl) is a fundamental process at the heart of Haitian-style culture and rebuilding. This project reorients Haitian studies around rasanblaj, testing its value as a methodological tool for interpreting Haitian culture and other cultures of the global South.
Dr Matthew Creasy (Critical Studies) and Dr Elisa Segnini (SMLC)
Dr Matthew Creasy (Critical Studies) and Dr Elisa Segnini (SMLC) will co-supervise two doctoral research projects: ‘Decadent Translations: translating for and in French and British Periodicals, 1880-1914. Corpora, Translators, and translational aesthetics’ and ‘Decadent communities: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Fiume, and Minor Transnationalisms.
This is the first doctoral network dedicated to decadence studies, addressing underexplored fields such as architecture, fashion, food, tourism, and immersive media. The programme offers tailored intersectoral training in collaboration with museums, archives, galleries, and other partners, reinforcing its scientific and social impact.
Dr Julia Hartley
‘Jane Dieulafoy’s Persia: Gender, Empire, and Archaeology in fin-de-siècle France’
The archaeologist, photographer, and writer Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916) worked at the intersection of nineteenth-century power structures. This the first project to bring together Dieulafoy’s expansive body of work on ancient Iran: fieldwork, 902 photographs, curatorial work for the Louvre and the 1889 Paris World Fair, non-fiction publications, historical novels, and a musical play created with Camille Saint-Saëns.
The project will result in a monograph, under contract with Edinburgh University Press’s ‘Studies in Ancient Persia’ series.
Dr Jonathan Evans (PI)
'Towards diversity, equality and sustainability in streaming: Translating British Media in Korea and Korean Media in the UK'
Tararà by Luigi Pirandello, adapted by Mario Gaziano and subtitled by Enza De Francisci and Ruggero Bianchin.
The performance of Tararà, based on ‘The Truth’, Cap and Bells, and The Rules of the Game by the Nobel-Prize winning playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), starring Giuseppe Gramaglia at the Circolo Empedocleo in Agrigento on the 28th June 2024, was part of the project, ‘Translating Pirandello in Agrigento: City of Culture (2025)’. This is a project led by Enza De Francisci (Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account in collaboration with Glasgow University, and generously supported by the Society for Italian Studies.
For more information, please see: Translating Pirandello in Agrigento: City of Culture (2025)
Deena Mohamed in Conversation with Professor Susan Bassnett: Translating Shubeik Lubeik
The event featured a conversation between graphic novelist Deena Mohamed and Professor Susan Bassnett about Mohamed’s award-winning graphic novel Shubeik Lubeik and her self-translation from Arabic to English. Mohamed explained how, due to a lack of translation offers, she undertook the task herself, navigating the challenges of translating Egyptian dialect and cultural nuances while maintaining the original voice.
A key decision was to keep the right-to-left reading format in the English edition, preserving the book’s Arabic origins. Mohamed also expanded the narrator’s role to provide cultural context and explain untranslatable phrases, balancing accessibility with authenticity.
Professor Susan Bassnett highlighted the often-overlooked labour of translators and the importance of the Women’s Translation Prize, which Shubeik Lubeik won in 2022. She praised the novel for challenging Orientalist stereotypes and elevating the graphic novel as a serious literary form.