Centres, networks and clusters

Find out more about the work of the centres, networks and clusters the American Studies department are involved in.

Book cover of medieval picture

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library

Bringing together experts from The University of Manchester Library and the Faculty of Humanities.
Woman looking at books in The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre

The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre

The centre offers outstanding resources for research in African American history and culture.
Lady with red hair in provocative pose

Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture (CSSC)

The CSSC is the first research facility in the UK to focus exclusively on the interrelationships of sexuality, gender, culture, and history.
Painting of woman lying down

Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages

CIDRAL organises events around particular themes in order to facilitate debate across a range of diverse topics.
Jeanette Winterson (professor of new writing) in a field

Centre for New Writing

Established and award-winning writers teach fiction and poetry as well as hosting Literature Live events and publishing the online journal, The Manchester Review.

 

Research interests

As a programme we have particular research strengths in the following areas: 

  • African-American History and Culture
  • Mass Media, Popular Culture, and the Culture Industries
  • Gender and Sexuality in the modern United States
  • The American South
  • History of Sport, Leisure and Work
  • Long Nineteenth Century US Culture
  • Food Studies

Academic staff research interests 

  • David Brown - The historical development of slavery; race and whiteness in North America; the American South (particularly the history of non-slaveholding whites); the American Civil War (especially in an Atlantic context).
  • J Michelle Coghlan - 19th and early 20th Century American literature and culture; transatlantic print and visual culture in the long nineteenth century; radical memory and protest culture from the Paris Commune to Occupy Wall Street; food studies.
  • Andrew Fearnley - Concepts of race and the history of racial thought; African American intellectual history; the history of medicine (especially psychiatry); histories of modern sport, especially the cultures of spectatorship.
  • Douglas Field - Twentieth-century African American literature and culture; African-American intellectual history; Trans-Atlantic American literature and culture; Beat Writing.
  • Molly Geidel - 20th and 21st Century US culture, US imperialism, post-WWII modernization and development, social movements in the Americas, gender and sexuality, film, popular music
  • Peter Knight - Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture; conspiracy theories; the Kennedy assassination; the culture of the market; the history of capitalism.
  • Monica Pearl - Twentieth-century American literature and film; cultural representations of AIDS (especially in relation to sexuality); the development of personal and cultural identities through narrative; the work of mourning, primarily in late twentieth-century American culture.
  • Eithne Quinn - African American popular culture; American race politics in film and culture; American cultural industries from 1965 to the present; hip-hop culture; rap music and criminal cases; popular culture and climate change risk communication; popular culture and social change.
  • Ian Scott - Hollywood screenwriting and film history; the representations of politics and political institutions on film; the history, politics and visual representation of California; the social, cultural and historic links in football culture between the United States and Britain.
  • Natalie Zacek - Early American history; social and political culture among early white settlements; the history of thoroughbred horse-racing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America; popular memory, public history, and popular culture in relation to the plantations in the American South and the Caribbean.
  • Dr Gordon Fraser - The study of nineteenth-century literature, print culture, and the history of science.