Victoria Allen is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin in Anglistik, Cultural and Media Studies at CAU Kiel, Germany. Her work and research interests combine conjunctural analysis, critical theory, popular culture, gender and memory studies. She applies these interests and insights to her teaching British and Irish Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, specifically on music and football culture, exhibitions, urban- and landscape, and audio-visual media including adverts, social-media, music videos, films, and television series. Applications of this in Tyne- and Wearside popular culture can be read in Negotiating Northernness: Industrial Memory in North East England (forthcoming, MUP). Her current research project Caring, cultivating, culturing the land analyses the gendered engagement with landscape in popular Irish media and imagination.
PROJECT STATEMENT
Negotiating Northernness: Industrial Memory in North East England // Caring, cultivating, culturing the land: gendered landscape in popular irish media and imagination
Negotiating northernness: Industrial Memory in North East England gives insight into how the industrial heritage of coal mining and shipbuilding on Wearside and Tyneside are remembered in contemporary popular culture and how this industrial memory is used to negotiate a sense of northernness particular to the North East of England. In six case-study like chapters, this book offers a rich selection of material to illustrate and analyse these articulations of northernness and industrial memory in North East football culture, folk and indie music scenes and temporary exhibitions and culture-led regeneration projects. These case-studies on Wearside and Tyneside popular culture make a case to think the region as part of northern studies and contextualizes the North East of England as part of a current renegotiation of northernnes, offering a media and cultural studies approach to reading for Stuart Hall’s project of conjunctural analysis. Caring, cultivating, culturing the land: gendered landscape in popular Irish media and imagination is a cultural, literary, media, and spatial studies project in the field of Irish Studies and Popular Media and Cultural Studies focusing on gender and the rural landscape. Notions of access, power, ownership, and inclusion/exclusion are examined through the lens of gender and its relationship to land, specifically in the practices of care and cultivation of land. The project’s starting point focusses on cultural phenomena and popular cultural texts pertaining to the west of Ireland. These will then be included in narrative and creative interviews with local groups of women to ascertain and further reflect on the cultural meanings of rural sites, and references to such settings, in the local, lived, context.
Email: allen@anglistik.uni-kiel.de
