London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Dr. Olena Lytovka has a PhD in British Literature from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin (Poland). She is the author of The Uncanny House in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction published by Peter Lang Publishing House and the editor of The Place of Memory and Memory of Place published by IRF Press. Olena is particularly interested in European modernist literature, time and space representations in fiction, psychoanalysis and feminist literary criticism. She was an Erasmus intern at the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland (2013) and an Erasmus exchange student at Middlesex University in London (2015). Olena was part of German-Polish-Ukrainian oral history projects: Krasne – Junction Station for Post-War Replacements in Krasne, Ukraine (2012) and Memory and Oblivion: Forced Displacements during and after World War II in Jugów, Poland (2010). Her papers were published in Psychoanalysis: Philosophy, Art and Clinic, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2015), The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present, Routlege (2015), Leitura Flutuante – Revista do Centro de Estudos em Semiótica e Psicanálise, Sao Paulo (2012), Visión del Mundo y Texto, University of Granada (2011) and other books and journals.

Dr. Konrad Gunesch is Associate Professor of International Education and Linguistics in the College of Media and Mass Communication at the American University in the Emirates in Dubai. Before his PhD in Education, Language and Cultural Studies from the University of Bath in England, he obtained German undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Law before British and French Master’s degrees in European Politics.

As part of his degrees, he completed studies in seven European countries, and then studied languages in Canada, China and Arabia, before working as a Researcher in departments of Education, Anthropology, Sociology and English in Britain and Hong Kong, and finally as Professor of Global Business in Panama. On that basis, he has taught over 50 courses in Cultural, Liberal, Social, Legal and Ethical Studies, Communication, and Global Business.

The interdisciplinary nature of his education and work continues in his research, with publications and presentations in language learning, cultural identity, global tourism, and sustainable development. A recent focus of his publications and speaking engagements is in media studies, especially the linguistic and cultural identity dimensions of mainstream films, their feminist roles and responsibilities, and their potential for education and inspiration.

Dr. Anna Hamling is a Full Professor in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She is the author of four books on the comparative studies of LN Tolstoy’s and Miguel de Unamuno’s religious writings: Introducción a un estudio comparativo entre Miguel de Unamuno y León Tolstoi (Madrid, 2001), Tolstoy, Unamuno and Their Religious Essays. An Introduction. The Yearning for True Faith (Saarbrucken, 2010); Религиозные Воззрения Льва Толстого у Mигеля де Унамуно. Попытка сопоставления (OCR Bookshelf, 2016); Poglady Religijne Lwa Tolstoja i Miguela de Unamuno (Torun, 2017). She has written over fifty diverse articles and encyclopaedia entries covering Spanish and Latin American Women Writers and Artists; Dance and Music (tango, flamenco and Polish folk dances); Icons and Shrines of Black Madonnas; and the concept of non-violence (Gandhi and Khan).

Dr. Konstantinos D. Karatzas has a PhD in Modern History from the University of Zaragoza in Spain (2017). He is specialized in American history with a particular interest in African American history and political and racial violence. His work focuses on the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race War, the Civil Rights Movement, the interpretation of violence and race in the United States along with the examination of massive memory, areas that has also explored during his MA studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He has received the first-ever scholarship for doctoral studies in American History by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY).

In 2016 and 2017, Konstantinos has been a guest scholar at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, the University of Alcala, Spain, the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland and has presented in international conferences in Europe and the United States. Among others, he organized and chaired the panels: “African American History: Aspects of Racism and Violence”, at the 2016 EAAS International Conference in Romania.

He is the guest editor of the 2017 and 2018 special issues on violence of the European Journal of American Culture (EJAC). He is the head of the Economic History department at the Institute of International Economic Relations (IDOS) based in Athens, Greece. During the 2017 summer, Konstantinos had been a visiting scholar at the Universities of South Florida, Florida-Gainesville and Central Florida where he explored the racial history of Florida.

Dr. Aleksandra Tryniecka has a PhD from Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. Her PhD thesis concerns the female characters in the selected Victorian and neo-Victorian novels. During her studies, she was a trainee at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Currently she is a volunteer in London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and a Research Fellow in Athens Institute for Education and Research. While carrying out her research, she had a possibility and pleasure to work in several international teams. She is especially interested in the Brontë sisters’ and Oscar Wilde’s writings. In 2017 she illustrated the poetry volume Full Stop published by IRF Press. Aleksandra is also a co-editor of Crossing Borders: Gender and Culture, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. In her free time she writes poetry in order to accommodate her life with appropriate words.

Dr Elena Nistor is a graduate of the English Department, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, and teaches English at the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest. Between April 2015 and April 2016 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

She is also a translator and an essayist, and a member of the Romanian Association of Literary Translators (ArtLit), the Royal Society of Literature (UK), the Literary London Society (UK), and the Association of Adaptation Studies (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK). Her thematic research areas include: contemporary British poetry; poetics and literary criticism; British and American culture and civilisation; gender studies; post-postmodern theories; translation from/into English (literature, particularly poetry).

Elena’s main publications include Sultry Summer Jottings. 111 Poems, a bilingual anthology for which she received the 2009 LiterArt-XXI Translation Prize from the International Association of Romanian Writers and Artists, and ‘A Blossom of Words in a Dusty Ray of Light’: Contemporary British Women Poets (1950-2005) based on her PhD thesis that received the summa cum laude distinction from the English Department of the University of Bucharest. She is currently working on two studies: one about images of London in contemporary British women’s poetry, and the other about the representations of Senate House London in British and American cinema.

Dr. Melahat Kucukarslan Emiroglu holds Bachelor, MS and PhD degrees in Interior Architecture. She was an Assistant Professor at BAU/Istanbul teaching courses on Design Semiotics, Multi-functional and Complex Interiors, Participatory Design, Introduction to Interior (Architecture) and Design, Environmental and Human Factors, Current Design Approaches at undergraduate and graduate levels. Mel(ahat) ran several Interior Architectural Design and Furniture Design studios. She is the author of the book ‘Airport Interiors: Intercultural Communication Space Versus Non-place’ (2012). She participated in several workshops, thesis dissertation panels, academic committees of international conferences, etc. Her research interests included design semiotics, spatial memory, environmental psychology, participatory design; and currently intertwining concepts of interior design and agroecology. She joined VTech School of Design (USA) as Adjunct Instructor in Interior Design Program in August 2022 and continues as Visiting Associate Professor in the same school.

Dr. Annabel Kay Ruiz holds a PhD in Language, Literature, Culture, and their Applications from the University of Valencia (Spain). Her multidisciplinary PhD thesis focused on digital self-representation through a gendered lens and involved a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of online autobiographical narratives using Sentiment Analysis tools. She also has an MA in Linguistics from the University of Brighton (UK).

She is passionate about interdisciplinary research and instruction, and co-organised the “Interdisciplinarity, Languages and ICT” international conference in conjunction with the IULMA Research Group (Spain). She has served on scientific committees for the University of Valencia’s English and German Department and chaired/presented at events organised by Tampere University (Finland), University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the University of Gdańsk (Poland), Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia) and several of the “Valencia/Napoli Colloquiums on Gender & Translation” (Spain), among others.

For the past ten years, she has taught classes relating to literary analysis, composition, and research skills at Florida State University’s International Program in Valencia (Spain). While lecturing at Spain’s National Distance Education University (UNED), she taught subjects about American and British culture, history, literature, and geography. She has also served as a Postgraduate Dissertation Director for the Official Master’s Degree in Editorial Translation at the Valencian International University (VIU). In 2023, she received an award from the University of Valencia for her translation from Catalan into English of the works of Joan Fuster.

She is a Cambridge English Speaking Examiner and English/Spanish editor for DeepL GmbH’s Linguee dictionary. She is the author of “Discussing Values while Developing Pronunciation: Digital Fables with Lower Secondary” (TEYLT Worldwide. ISSN 2520-2596) and editor of the e-book “Play, Masks and Make-believe: Ritual Representations” (Interdisciplinary Discourses).

Dr. Emma Domínguez-Rué graduated in English at the University of Lleida (Catalonia) and studied an MA in English Literature at Swansea University (UK). Her PhD dissertation was published in 2011 with the title Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women: Invalidism as Metaphor in the Fiction of Ellen Glasgow (Berlin: Logos Verlag). Aside from American Studies, she has also worked on ageing studies, narratives of disease, contemporary detective fiction, and Victorian and Gothic fiction under a feminist perspective. She is currently Associate Professor and Serra-Hunter Fellow in the Department of English and Degree Coordinator for English Studies at the University of Lleida. She has so far edited two volumes in collaboration with LCIR: Critical Dialogues in the Medical Humanities (Cambridge Scholars, 2019) and Beyond Identities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender (Interdisciplinary Discourses, 2021).

Dr. Gabriele Biotti is a film theorist and a multidisciplinary researcher. He obtained a PhD degree in Film Aesthetics at Lille3 University (Doctoral School “Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société”), jointly with the University of Siena, his scholarly areas are Film Studies, Memory Studies, Historiography and the Anthropology of Representations. His PhD thesis is a research work on the anachronism in cinema and on the essay film practice.

Gabriele has explored questions of film aesthetics, film history writing, epistemology of history of film theories, memory practices and forms of memory telling and writing. He has published books and articles on film aesthetics, film styles and the relationships between film form and the practice of history writing and memory telling. Some of his publications are about the cinema of David Lynch, Samuel Beckett’s films for television, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, the cinema of Edgar Reitz, the cinema of Chris Marker, Giuseppe Bertolucci’s nonfictional works and Cesare Zavattini’s idea of cinema and the audiovisual.

Dr. Biotti has given courses of “Teorie e Tecniche del Linguaggio Cinematografico” and “Metodologia della Critica Cinematografica” at the University of Siena, where he has also given seminars and lectures for the courses of “Storia delle Teorie del Film” and “Storia e Critica del Cinema”, with seminars on New German Cinema, film aesthetics and the epistemology of history, film and experience and a lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. His focus has been on a group of films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Michael Haneke, Alexander Kluge, Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker, Wim Wenders and Stanley Kubrick.

Gabriele has presented papers in conferences such as the International Film Studies Conference (Udine), Avanca Cinema Conference (Avanca, Portugal), the Festival “Jeunes chercheurs dans la cité” (Brussels), the III International Conference on Myth Criticism (Madrid), the Arts in Society Conference (London), the “Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time” Conference (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research) and the “International Conference on Film Studies: Identity, Projection and the Other” (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research). In 2018 he created and co-organized the “Play, Masks and Make-Believe” Conference (London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research). Currently he is developing a research project on ritual processes of remembering through the analysis of Uruguayan documentary cinema.

Mr. Elmer de Vos is an Event Co-ordinator at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. He is a trained Audiovisual All-round Technician and Stagehand. Elmer has a degree in Tourism Management from Inholland University of Applied Sciences Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he also studied hospitality management and destination development. Before joining the LCIR, Elmer was a Corporate Communications and Public Affairs intern at NBTC Holland Marketing and graduation intern at the Press and Strategic Development department of Rotterdam Partners. His final product-based dissertation was focussed on cultural tourism and the cultural tourist of Rotterdam.

Dr Réa de Matas holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, awarded at Manchester Metropolitan University, MIRIAD. Her current research in Cultural Studies focuses on the ‘sensory turn’ which she applies to festival culture, heritage and tradition. Her interdisciplinary background allows her to examine and assess ideas and concepts from multiple perspectives in order to bring together disciplinary perspectives in cohesive and well-articulated outcomes.

Her research interests include sensory autoethnography, sense phenomenology, education, crafting and music, informal leisure, labour and working bodies (arts, cultural and creative industries), craftwork and apprenticeships, Caribbean and diaspora history and heritage, migration, hegemony, identity, attunement and the cultural politics of making and remaking culture and building nationalism and patriotism.

Dr Gianluca Sardi is a Senior Lecturer at the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. He graduated in Law and has a PhD in Processes Law Harmonization between History and System from the University of Teramo. After having won the “Meet Italian Scientists” contest organized by the Italian Embassy in London, he conducted research on the actuality of John Locke’s thought at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Gianluca obtained several national and international grants and published articles on cultural crimes and migration, the conflict between liberty and security and the actuality of the works of John Locke on tolerance.

His main research and teaching is focussed on Comparative Constitutional Law, Public Law, EU Law, Administrative Law and Legal Philosophy.

Dr. Deborah Kelley-Galin has a PhD in Art History from the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Her multidisciplinary PhD thesis focused on how traditional cultural arts and imagery may be interpreted as embedded mnemonic devices. Deborah is also an archaeological illustrator who specializes in studies of the prehistoric rock art of the American southwest. Her illustrations are included in numerous permanent museum exhibits including those of the Canyons of the Ancients Museum in Dolores, Colorado and the Mesa Verde Museum in Mesa Verde National Park. In addition, Deborah is an inventor who works within the field of low-density polyethylene plastic recycling.

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

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