I work on the international and economic history of modern China, and on the role of Asia in global governance. My doctoral research is on China and international organisations in the mid-20th century.

Dr Rachel Bryan

BA, MA, MPhil, PhD
Quondam Fellow since 2024

I work on and teach British and American literature of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My particular research interest concerns the writing of ‘aftermath’: literary texts that express the unique and challenging perspectives on selfhood and identity, personal and national history, made available to those who have lived through and beyond times of profound societal change. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

My first book, Twentieth Century Literature and the Aftermath of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2024), offers a long-overdue reconceptualization of the impact of modern mechanised warfare on the literary imagination. It does this by shedding light on a group of modern writers whose interest lay less in the shattering of faith and form that invigorated high modernist experimentation, than in those counterfactual modes of resistance deployed by individuals and nations in response to war and mass violence. Focusing on works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as case studies, the book offers an innovative study of the attention paid to such reparative, stabilising impulses in post-war writings from across the last century. In order fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and literary art, it contends, we must remain attentive to the subtly innovative qualities of texts whose modernity lies in their acknowledgement of the draw felt towards, and contested ethics of, consolatory counterfactuals.

I am currently working on two research projects. The first is co-editing (with Greg Zacharias) Henry James’s novel The Other House (1896) for The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The second is an interdisciplinary research project exploring the writing of extra-legal guilt. Focusing on those dangerous feelings of collective and inherited guilt that Hannah Arendt described as ‘metaphorical’ in nature, my second monograph will explore how writers from across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries sought to critique, supplement, or to uphold the assumptions about personhood, responsibility and culpability enshrined in legal discourse.

Dr Karolina Watroba

BA, MSt, DPhil
Quondam Fellow from 2024

Photo credit: Dan Paton

Dr Anne Wolf

BSc, MPhil, DPhil
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow since 2019

Dr Kyle Pratt

BS, MS, PhD
Quondam Fellow since 2023

Dr John Merrington

BA (Hons), MSt, MSc, DPhil
Examination Fellow since 2018

See my faculty web page for further details about my research. 

Contact

Professor Christina Riggs

Chair in the History of Visual Culture, Department of History, Durham University
BA, MA, DPhil
Quondam Fellow since 2020

I am a historian of photography, visual art, and museum and heritage practices. My research considers how photography developed in tandem with industrialization, colonial and imperial expansion (especially in North Africa and the Middle East), and ideas of heritage preservation. I view photographic archives and museum collections not as dead legacies of these pasts, but as living expressions of them which, as historians, we have a responsibility to analyze, evaluate, and confront.

Professor Gavin Salam

BA, PhD, FRS
Senior Research Fellow since 2018

My research centres on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD, the theory of quarks and gluons) and how to use it in order to advance our understanding of the fundamental particles and interactions of the universe.

My work is mostly directed towards high-energy particle colliders, notably the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, with applications in studies of the Higgs boson, searches for new particles, precision measurements of fundamental constants and studies of heavy-ion collisions.

Professor Santanu Das

PhD
Senior Research Fellow since 2019

I work on early twentieth-century literature and culture, and am especially interested in the relationship between experience, writing and emotion in times of conflict. My first book examined the role of the senses, particularly touch, in First World War experience and literature, while my recent work has focussed on the colonial dimensions of war culture and memory through an expanded notion of the 'archive' - artefacts, photographs, paintings, rumours, folksongs and sound-recordings, as well as testimonial, political and literary writings. Having just completed a monograph on India and First World War culture, I am about to begin work on two projects: the Oxford Book of Colonial Writings of the First World War and a monograph on the experience and imaginings of sea-voyages in a global context, from Victorian times to now.

Professor Lucia Prauscello

MA, PhD
Senior Research Fellow since 2018
Subscribe to