Research Round-up: Good News from the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities
Posted on behalf of: Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities
Last updated: Tuesday, 16 September 2025
A celebration of recent research activity and successes of Media, Arts and Humanities researchers.
Formerly the 'Good News' section of the Research Newsletter, the Research Round-up is a regular feature within the Media, Arts and Humanities Institute and a space to celebrate each other's successes.
If you'd like your good news included in the next Research Round-up, email us at MAH-research@sussex.ac.uk.
To catch up on previous news, read the July Research Round-up.
Awards, recognition and funding
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Katharina Rietzler will be a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International Relations Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Autumn Term of 2025. While at the Department, she will collaborate with colleagues in the Theory/Area/History cluster.
External engagement
- Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden has responded to the BBC article ‘BBC reveals web of spammers profiting from AI Holocaust images’ with her blog on the Landecker Digital Memory Lab website ‘Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised about #AI #Auschwitz, and What We Can Do About It ’.
- Justyna Robinson appeared on BBC Berkshire (listen on BBC Sounds from 3.48) and BBC Oxford, following news that fewer students are studying French and German A levels. She talked about the advantages of learning another language, both for employability and intellectual abilities, with brain scans of bilinguals showing benefits for cognitive tasks.
- David Tal appeared on LBC to discuss the UN Security Council meeting on the conflict in Gaza. He said that plans presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remain quite vague and described the situation – including a failure to get aid to Gaza – as an outcome of the Israeli government's incompetence, rather than a deliberate policy of starvation. On 30 August, he appeared on LBC to discuss how Israeli authorities had urged Gazans to move south, as the IDF planned to directly attack on the ground in Gaza City.
- Dan Williams is quoted in The Irish Times article ‘Awareness of bias is the best defence against misinformation’, pointing out that misinformation is a weaponised term, cited by polarised sides to discredit opposing views, and warns that values and ideology informs research on this subject.
- Hope Wolf’s work as guest curator of the Sussex Modernism exhibition at the Towner Gallery was discussed in a review of the exhibition by the Museums Association. Shedding new light on regional art, Hope noted that, far from expressing cultural backwardness, "provincialism" can be seen as a positive stance of separateness and opposition to central government and pervading class structures.
- Tom Wright was invited for an extended interview on David Runciman's history of ideas podcast Past, Present and Future series on 'Bad Political Ideas' to talk about his research on the history of 'charisma'. Tom also appeared in all four episodes of BBC Radio 4's new documentary series New York 1925. Tom was interviewed about the political campaign of notoriously scandal-ridden Democrat mayoral hopeful Jimmy Walker, alongside David Remnick, Margo Jefferson and others. This marks Tom's seventh appearance on BBC Radio 4 in the last year.
- The Coast is Queer has been featured in The Argus as the UK’s largest Queer literary festival celebrating LGBTQ+ writing. It is returning to the ACCA in October, featuring workshops, performances, panels, and headline appearances from leading writers. This year’s programme includes a new Queer Heritage Hub at the University of Sussex Library, as well as events in association with Black at Sussex. We Love Brighton’s ‘Guide To The Coast Is Queer Festival’ provided further details, and it was featured in Marie Claire's best literary book festivals this autumn.
New work and publications
- Thomas Austin’s article ‘Black and white in colour: looking across race in Spike Lee’s Clockers and Summer of Sam’ has been published in New Review of Film and Television Studies.
- Evelyn Ficarra, Tim Hopkins, and Chris Kiefer with Elizabeth Jochum of Aalborg University are pleased to announce the publication in May 2025 of a book chapter entitled 'Towards Embodied AI: Design Approaches for Robots in Opera' in Cultural Technologies: Robots and Artificial Intelligence in the Performing Arts (Routledge). The chapter outlines research issues explored by the Robot Opera / AI Perform! project at Sussex which has been running since 2017, with performance research events in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2024. The project is led by Evelyn Ficarra and Tim Hopkins within the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (CROMT) and over the years has involved a host of collaborators from Sussex, including Chris Kiefer, Ed Hughes, Alice Eldridge, Joe Watson, Carol Watts, Andy Philippides, Phil Husbands, Ron Chrisley, Catalina Balan, Steve Symons, Max Worgan, Kat Sinclair and Shu Yang, with support from the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and with HEIF and Knowledge Exchange funds from the research departments of MAH and Engineering & Informatics.
- Jacob Norris’ co-edited anthology with Zahid Pranjol, We Are Still Here: An anthology of resilience, grief, and unshattered hope from Gaza’s university studentshas been published by Daraja Press.
- Rob Sharp withCara Courage and Georgia Walters has launched the new project REFUGE: Codifying Refugee Participation on REFRAME, which draws together participatory approaches to forced displacement in UK Galleries, Museums, Academia and Activism. Stemming from AHRC-funded research, it explores how civic and cultural institutions can foster meaningful participation, voice, and recognition in a context where official support is shrinking. Rob was interviewed by Museums Journal about the online resource, saying that the guidelines aim to help cultural organisations build trust, share power and integrate lived experience meaningfully into decision-making.
- Johan Adam Warodell, Research Associate, has published 'Rewilding Animal Studies: Biodiversity Bias in Modernist Fiction and Criticism' in Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman.
- Clive Webb has published the article 'The Hitlers in the United States' in History Today. The article details how African-American activists and black newspapers drew parallels between Jim Crow laws in the U.S. and Nazi persecution of Jews, using these comparisons to critique domestic racism and push for civil rights.
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