Christina Horvath

I completed my PhD at Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and lectured at the universities of Montreal, Toronto and Oxford Brookes before joining the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies in September 2015. 

Research

The central topic of my research is the figure of the city, both as a space of encounter between cultures and a locus of political power and literary legitimacy. I have published widely on urban literature before turning towards the representation of disadvantaged communities in media-political discourses as well as film and literature. I am interested in contemporary urban culture, migration, diaspora, disadvantaged urban communities including French banlieues and Brazilian favelas, globalisation and cosmopolitanism. In 2012, I co-founded Banlieue Network and ran a two-year AHRC-funded project which involved organising several workshops, conferences, summer schools and a touring exhibition promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and fighting stigmatisation in vulnerable urban areas.

My current research, informed by social sciences, political philosophy, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, continues to be related to urban experiences. It is articulated around three main axes:

 The first axe is anchored in the disciplines of literature and cultural studies and aims to extend my existent expertise in French urban literature into a comparative approach which focuses on the representation of French banlieues, Brazilian favelas and informal settlements in Mexico. 

The second axe uses funding from RISE H2020 to develop the concept and the methodology of co-creation from an interdisciplinary perspective in collaboration with academic partners in Oxford, Mexico City and and Rio de Janeiro and NGOs based in Brussels, Berlin and Paris.  In this 4-year prject (2017-2020) I am leading a interdisciplinary team of researchers from UofBath (from the departments of Health, SPS, PoLIS and Education) with the aim to explore how territorial stigmatisation can be challenged by methods harnessing creativity and promoting collaborations between artists, researchers and stakeholders living and working in disadvantaged communities.

Finally, the third axe explores how CO-Creation can be disseminated and applied to the benefit of local stakeholders in the South-West (Bath-Bristol area). It involves developing a network of local practitioners and fostering new collaborations with heritage professionals including Bristol Museums, the American Museum, Beckford’s Tower, and Dyrham Park as well as and community centres and art galleries (Knowle West Community Centre, 44AD) and other practitioners who can use co-creation methodologies to engage with local communities, in particular in the field of the history and memory of slavery.  

I contribute to French Studies units throughout the BA (Hons) Modern Languages and European Studies programme, including final year units on the banlieue and postcolonial France, and to the Euromasters program with a unit on Cultures of Globalisation.

I supervise research projects in the following areas 

• French and Francophone literature
• The city in contemporary literature, film and art
• Contemporary French culture, society and politics
• Postcolonial ethnic minorities
• Migration, communities, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, otherness
• Memory and identity in the Francophone world
• Postcolonial and cultural studies