Lucy Bond

I joined the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster as a Teaching and Research Fellow in 2012. Prior to this appointment, I taught and studied in a variety of institutional environments in the UK and US. I hold a First Class degree in English (BA Hons) from the University of Cambridge (2005), an MA in Cultural Memory from the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in the School of Advanced Study (2008), and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Goldsmiths, University of London (2012). I received research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for my Masters and doctoral study. In 2010, I was a British Research Council Fellow at the John W Kluge Center, Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

My teaching and research interests focus upon contemporary American literature and culture; cultural memory; 9/11; the Holocaust; trauma; the Anthropocene and environmental memory.

I have taught and convened undergraduate and postgraduate courses in literature and cultural memory at Westminster, Goldsmiths, the School of Advanced Study, and the University of London International Programme.

I am module leader for a number of undergraduate topics, including: the first-year module, Introduction to Arts and Culture, which examines the relationship between visual arts and written narrative from a variety of historical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives; the second-year module, Reading the American Dream, which charts the evolution of American literature and culture from 1620 to the present; the third-year module, Uses of Memory, which considers the thematic and structural concerns that inform the literary representation of the past in contemporary British and American literature; and the final-year Extended Essay, which allows students to engage in a piece of sustained independent research and writing on a topic of their choice.

Since joining Westminster in 2012, I have also lectured on the third year module Other Worlds: Fantastic Narratives', which studies the evolution of utopian and dystopian literature since the Renaissance. I have previously been module leader for the third year special paper, American Fiction After 9/11, which analysed the ways the American novel has responded to the seminal events of the twenty-first century, from the attacks of September 11, to the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the global recession, to Deepwater Horizon. I have designed and taught Masters units on Transcultural Memory and the Literary Novel for the modules Institutions and Histories in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, and Reading Contemporary Culture: Politics and Prizes on the MA in English Literature. I have also supervised dissertations on the MA in Cultural and Critical Studies.

My previous research focused on the politics and culture of memory in twenty-first-century America. My PhD (Retracing Rupture: Remembering 9/11 in Theory and Practice) investigated the representation of 9/11 in material culture, scholarly criticism, political discourse, and juridical practice, arguing that the convergence of these discourses engendered a hegemonic and homogenised culture of memory in the years following the attacks. Publications proceeding from this project include: 'Compromised Critique: a metacritical analysis of American studies after 9/11', which was published in Journal of American Studies (2011); and 'Intersections or Misdirections? Problematising crossroads of memory in the commemoration of 9/11', in Culture, Theory and Critique (2012). My monograph, Frames of Memory After 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) marks the culmination of this research.

My current research, "In Living Memory", examines the biopolitics of American memorial culture, critiquing the ways in which transmedial and transdisciplinary forms of commemorative practice and theory construct, perpetuate, or challenge inequitable hierarchies of life, across human and non-human domains. This work builds upon my interest in environmental memory and violence, which forms the basis of a cross-institutional initiative with Dr Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths) and Dr Jessica Rapson (King's College London). The Natural History of Memory project is a collaborative research network involving London universities and international partners, which aims to interrogate the interconnection of human and natural disaster. Since 2014, the network has hosted events in London, Ghent, and Maastricht, and the next colloquium, on "culture, memory and extinction", will take place at the Natural History Museum in December 2015.

Previous collaborative projects have allowed me to explore my interest in the global properties of memory. In 2014, I published The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, (Walter de Gruyter, co-edited with Jessica Rapson), which examines the ways in which memory work problematises and exceeds the borders of the nation. I have recently completed work on a second edited volume, Memory Unbound (co-edited with Professor Stef Craps and Dr Pieter Vermeulen, Berghahn 2016), which examines new trajectories in memory studies in four distinct - yet related - areas (the transmedial, the transgenerational, the transdisciplinary, and the transcultural). I am currently co-authoring (with Stef Craps) the Routledge New Critical Idiom guide to Trauma.

Finally, I am a founding partner (with Richard Crownshaw, Jessica Rapson, and Professor Anna Reading) of the London Cultural Memory Consortium, and a partner of Mnemonics, the international network for memory studies - a collaborative initiative for graduate education in memory studies between the Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies, the Flemish Memory Studies Network, the London Cultural Memory Consortium, the Swedish Memory Studies Network, and programmes at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), and Columbia University (USA, associate partner). In 2015, the annual Mnemonics summer school was held in London, and co-hosted by Westminster, King's College London, and Goldsmiths.