Media

Unexpected Journeys: Challenging Conventions
Inaugural lecture given 11 February 2026.

This joint inaugural lecture from Professor Clare Wright and Professor Rasha Soliman (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) celebrated two unexpected academic journeys in language education. The lecture aimed to inspire language educators, researchers, and students to embrace the nature of language variation and change, putting effective communication at the heart of the university's purpose for teaching languages in today's globalised world.

Clare talks about how a career that started in parliamentary politics and international business remained rooted in curiosity about the purpose of higher education for a changing world. She explains how this lifelong passion then brought her into academic life, highlighting three ways in which her research and academic leadership - in second language fluency, educational technology, and internationalisation - challenge conventional expectations of language education, seeking instead to create universities as spaces where all students feel they belong and thrive, and which reframe how we understand successful multilingual communication in diverse contexts.

Rasha shares an unexpected academic journey that intertwines achievements in education, research, scholarship, and leadership, challenging conventional perceptions of language education in general and of Arabic pedagogy in particular. Arabic, with its rich linguistic diversity, has long posed challenges for educators accustomed to viewing language as a fixed entity governed by rigid sociolinguistic norms. Drawing on her own upbringing alongside key projects and leadership experiences, Rasha shares insights that underscore the importance of rethinking established boundaries and embracing variation as a pedagogical strength.

History is not ours: Collaboration, expertise, and history making beyond the academy
Inaugural lecture given 3 December 2025.

Who is a historian – and who is denied this status? This event considered the place of universities in history-making today, reimagining the role of collaboration and thinking about how to resist structures which prioritise the academic and academic knowledge over other forms of expertise.

This inaugural lecture involved a talk from Laura King, Professor of Collaborative History, and a roundtable with guests Professor Fozia Bora (School of Languages, Societies and Cultures, University of Leeds), Ellie Harrison (artist and director, Polite Rebellion) and Susan Pitter (cultural heritage producer and Director of Out of Many People).

Language diversity and social (in)justice
Inaugural lecture given 12 November 2025.

In this lecture Professor Julia Snell articulates the different ways in which linguistic injustice manifests in education – from dialect discrimination to deficit thinking about the language and abilities of underprivileged children – and reflects on the consequences for teachers and pupils. Drawing on research conducted over 20 years, she challenges the view that working class children’s language falls short of middle-class ‘standards’ and interrogates the notion that modifying children’s speech will lead to educational success and social mobility. In closing, she shares her vision for futures of linguistic justice, concerned with creating schools where diverse language repertoires are sustained, where deficit thinking is challenged, and where all students (regardless of background) have access to academically productive classroom dialogue.

Watch your language! A linguist‘s tale of education, science and scholarship
Inaugural lecture given 7 May 2025

Professor Sascha Stollhans (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) reflects on his academic journey to date sharing his thoughts and ideas about language and the importance of linguistics in language education, language science and language scholarship.

Origin Stories Reimagined: From Chaos to Craft
Inaugural lecture given 7 May 2025.

Professor Christiana Gregoriou (School of English) focuses on origin stories, including her own academic origin story and her recent research project, Memoirs of a POW.

In her inaugural lecture, Professor Gregoriou reflects on nearly 30 years of academic experience as a student, teacher, and researcher of English and stylistics, with a particular focus on crime fiction. In her talk, she explores how language-based theories are used to analyse and understand this popular genre, highlighting themes of boundary-breaking, identity-seeking, and hero-making along the way. Through the lens of her own life, she connects her academic journey to the British colonization of Cyprus, her grandfather’s WWII experiences as a British Army prisoner of war, and the memoirs he left behind. This personal exploration touches on language, migration, and the search for meaning amidst chaos. The lecture includes a theatrical monologue from her grandfather’s memoir, the dramatization offering a glimpse into the lives of prisoners of war, and the nature and significance of life writing. Timed to coincide with the week of the 80th anniversary of VE-Day commemorated by Professor Gregoriou’s IAA project, this inaugural event also celebrates the ethnic diversity of this veteran community.

Language and Legitimation In Higher Education
Inaugural lecture given 20 November 2024.

Professor Alex Ding and Professor Bee Bond’s (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) joint inaugural lecture draws on their scholarship and professional practices to outline the challenges (and the successes) in making language visible and valued in higher education. In doing so they stress the importance of legitimising the practices of university language educators.

The inaugural is structured around the trope of language and language educators as pharmakon: a remedy, cure, charm, poison, and drug. Pharmakon mirrors their own intrinsic ambivalence about (their) roles and practices as language educators in the fields of English for Academic Purposes and higher education more broadly.

Pharmakon, however, also suggests language and language educators as potent and full of potential and they argue that this potential and potency needs to be recognised more fully and, most importantly, governed by an ethics that strives to reduce the gap from the real to the ideal for the benefit of the whole university community.

Changing the Script: Women as History Makers
Inaugural given 23 October 2024.

Professor Kate Dossett's (School of History) inaugural featured a conversation with Nicole Butler, Dr Laura King, Dr Claire Martin and Dr Olivia Wright.

This talk considers the history of women who built archives and forged creative new ways to become history makers. Reflecting on the history of the institutions that shaped her own learning experiences as a young white woman researching Black women’s history in predominantly male, white History departments in the early 2000s and, in conversation with some of the brilliant women she has worked with, we’ll explore how, together, we can change the script which positions those marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and class on the sidelines of history.

Image: Jacky Fleming, from The Trouble with Women, reproduced with permission.

Now You See Us
Inaugural lecture given 16 October 2024.

Professor Alison Peirse's (School of Media and Communication) lecture explores what it means to be a feminist scholar of horror film, and how we might think through the history of women filmmakers who have chosen to work in this most disreputable of genres.

Hotpots and cold spots: English speakers learning other languages
Inaugural lecture given 12 June 2024.

This inaugural lecture concentrates on four projects from Becky’s academic journey – from the University of Nagoya to the University of Leeds, via York St John University – all related to the learning and teaching of languages other than English by English speakers. She reflects on connections between these four projects and how they are inspiring her to be more inclusive in her work in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds.

'No(Wo)man's Land: Writing history at the intersections of gender & WW1
Inaugural lecture given 10 June 2024.

In this inaugural, Professor Jessica Meyer (School of History) explores the expansion of the contribution of women to the field of First World War Studies as it has developed both in academic scholarship and public perception of the war. She considers the ways in which the developing field of the history of masculinities has helped to shape knowledge and understanding of both men’s and women’s experiences of war, and how the gender history of the war intersects with histories of medicine and popular culture, as well as military history. I will ask what role the centenary played in driving and disseminating such work, but also the barriers that emerged to communicating complex ideas about gender history to wider audiences and how these might be overcome in future.

She discusses the intersecting communities of female scholarship – historians, archivists, cultural critics, administrators – whose work has shaped her own over the past two decades. In doing so, she shows how war studies, and First World War studies in particular, has developed as a particularly fruitful interdisciplinary space for the cultivation of understanding of gender history and feminist historical practice.

Image: Field Marshal Lord John French inspects the Glasgow Battalion, Women's Volunteer Reserve, ca. 1915. Image copyright Imperial War Museum, item Q108005. Used under non-commercial license.

Words Change States: The Public Poet
Inaugural lecture given 2 May 2024.

The School of English, the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, and the National Poetry Centre presented this inaugural lecture-performance ‘Words Change States: The Public Poet’ in Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall in the School of Music. She was introduced by UK Poet Laureate Professor Simon Armitage (University of Leeds) and Dr Adam Hanna (University College Cork). A copy of Campanello’s poetry-object MOTHERBABYHOME held by the Brotherton Special Collections was exhibited in the Sheppard Room at the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, curated by Professor Fiona Becket and Jon Gilbert.

Drawing upon her engagement with visionary poetics from the medieval period to the present, Kimberly articulated the many ways poets address and challenge the public and language itself. She performed from significant examples of her work, including ‘Moving Nowhere Here’, her long poem about her experience of Young Onset Parkinson’s, MOTHERBABYHOME about the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, and work-in-progress that engages with Dante, dialect, translation, and her Italian American background in Elkhart, Indiana. Across all her writing, Kimberly’s abiding preoccupation is with the power of language to ‘change states’ in all senses of the phrase – changing our understandings of the law and the State, changing our emotional-physical-spiritual-intellectual states, and changing its own state as each word shifts and morphs with every use and encounter. This lecture-performance illuminated Kimberly’s approaches to the practice of poetry, alongside the vital questions of living as an ‘I’ and an ‘Us’ that poetry uniquely explores and remembers.

Image credit: Abi Curtis

Arts and (in)justice: performing harm and repair
Inaugural lecture given on 9 April 2024.

What is it like to study political and social change from afar while refusing a prevalent white nostalgia or resisting left melancholy?

The talk will consider three areas that have punctuated my career: performance, resistance and desire. Drawing on almost twenty years of socially engaged practice, the talk will touch on key moments in my understanding of justice, including working as an artist in prisons in South Africa and the UK and reflecting on collaborative work with young activists (Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba and ImaginingOtherwise with Changing the Story).

Holocaust memory, queer memory: tracing ghosts and hope in German Literature
Inaugural Lecture given on 20 March 2024

This inaugural lecture looks at how queer memory and memory of the Holocaust have haunted German literature since 1945. I talk about writings by German-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, including memoirs by self-identified gay survivors. I also discuss other contemporary writers in the German language, from the celebrated W. G. Sebald to emerging young novelists, whose work engages both memory of traumatic pasts and queer themes. I’ll discuss why German literature continues to be haunted by violent pasts – and what queer ways of writing and remembering might teach us about how we might seek to build a less violent future, despite resurgent fascism and a climate emergency. Inspired by my own family history I hope to show that stories of different marginalised groups need not be in competition. Instead, German literature tells us, they can create a common memory and a future of solidarity.

Some of the questions I’ll be looking at are: Which voices are marginalised in creating knowledge and stories about the Holocaust, particularly in Germany and Austria? What role does the history of emotions play in creating knowledge about marginalised individuals? How did German-Jewish survivors testify to the experience of being gay during the Holocaust? And how does contemporary literature use queer ways of storytelling to negotiate the memory of the Holocaust and other traumatic pasts?

Image credit: Statue of Roger Casement, by Mark Richards FRSS, at Dún Laoghaire Baths, Dublin. Taken by Helen Finch, 28.12.2023

Labours of Love: the Feminist Work of Doing Women’s Film History
Inaugural lecture given on 28 February 2024.

This talk argues that doing women’s film history transforms understanding of film culture whilst being a feminist film historian shapes the wellbeing of the discipline and wider academic community. Doing women’s film history demands persistence, hard work and a certain amount of bloody-mindedness.

Established explanatory frameworks are difficult to shift, evidencing women’s film labour is hard-won, and feminism falls in and out of favour with students, funders and institutions.

Notwithstanding these challenges, I argue that doing women’s film history is a necessary, political act that can radically transform our understanding of film cultures.

In this talk, I will do three things.

First, I will summarise some of my contributions to the field of film history, most notably centring labour history in the British film industry by reconceptualising work.

Then, I will situate my research in the much bigger picture of women-led feminist film scholarship, acknowledging the people, places and concepts which have nurtured me intellectually. I do this to bring a diverse and divergent range of voices to the fore.

Finally, I will talk about the affective dimensions of my research and scholarship – the ‘why I do what I do’ bit – and how temerity has enabled me to do not only women’s film history but also much-needed citizenship work in the academy.

Ultimately, I argue for an understanding of women’s film history as both a feminist methodology and a way of being in the world, one that is essential to the well-being of the discipline and the academy.

'Pinter, Pensions, Artaud and the Absurd'
Inaugural lecture given on 23 February 2024

Professor Mark Taylor-Batty (School of English) discusses the recurrent preoccupations of his career in theatre scholarship and beyond.

This lecture surveys aspects of Mark’s scholarly output and draws links across that activity with a focus on how the artists he has researched and written about have foregrounded, critiqued and challenged cultural orthodoxies and structuring social narratives. From Harold Pinter’s forensic analyses of the strata of political power to Antonin Artaud’s appeal to erase all of culture and start anew with theatre as the catalyst—and with a brief nod toward Mark’s work as a pensions negotiator—the lecture will seek to join some dots between disparate activities in an engaging manner.

The lecture coincides with the publication and launch of Mark’s new translation and edition of Artaud’s essay collection ‘The Theatre and Its Double’. This is the first new translation into English of this canonical text in over 50 years. The edition contains an introduction that places the text in its cultural contexts, and a curated selection of correspondence, essays, and interviews from between 1930 and 1938 that outline Artaud’s ambitions to establish a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, as well as an appendix of early draft manuscripts, and numerous footnotes that address translation complications and detail the known and putative sources that Artaud was working with.

Scenography as Material Thinking
Inaugural lecture given on 27 April 2023.

Adaptation as directorial process: Contemporary approaches to the Greek classics and Musical Theatre
Inaugural lecture given 7 September 2023.

Professor Rodosthenous outlines his 26-year academic journey which oscillates between Adaptation and Composed Theatre, focusing on musicalisation, composition and improvisation. He explores this journey through his practice-based work which travelled to the State Theatre of Cyprus (TH.O.C.), the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, Pafos 2017 European Capital of Culture, the Maison de l’Unesco in Paris and toured from Canada to Germany. Professor Rodosthenous explores his directorial practice in relation to verbatim material and how his studies in music composition have shaped the way he teaches and directs. Finally, he investigates how the transformative mise-en-scène can provide a playfulness and creative freedom within a structure during the creative process.

End Diversity: Race, Media and Reparative Justice
Inaugural lecture given 25 October 2023.

This talk is a call to end 'diversity', especially as it is mobilised in media. It refers to diversity as a formal form of policy-based around fixing the lack of racial representation within a sector, but also as a language that shapes how society understands and responds to racial inequalities.

Its argument is not that diversity as a practice is failing to adequately address racial inequalities inside and outside media. Rather, it argues that the mobilisation of diversity is in fact how the most privileged in society appear inclusive in a way that keeps their status and position intact.

Drawing from over a decade of empirical research and a lifetime of consuming media, I argue that the super-diversity that we encounter on our screens today, far from something to celebrate, not just hides, but helps reproduce the racial and social hierarchies that persist in our society today. In response, the presentation argues for replacing ‘diversity' with a more radical language of reparative justice.

A Lifetime of Failure
Inaugural lecture given 17 March 2023

Professor Leila Jancovich (School of Performance and Cultural Industries) reflects on how she fell into the cultural sector almost by accident and how the subsequent failure to make the difference she wanted to, in her professional life, has shaped her research ever since. Professor Jancovich discusses her key insights from the past ten years of researching cultural participation, before introducing findings from her new open access book, Failures in Cultural Participation co-written with Professor David Stevenson and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

How many languages do you speak? Contributions of linguistics to psychology, language intervention, covid recovery, and early years education policy
Inaugural lecture given 8 February 2023.

In this lecture Professor Davies reviews the contribution of linguistics to diverse fields including cognitive and developmental psychology, early years education, speech and language therapy, and its role in reducing socioeconomic inequalities. Using interdisciplinary approaches, and by attempting to integrate theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and data, She shows how she has sought to bring the clearest and most compelling findings to those who can put them to practical use.

She focusses on two main areas: experimental pragmatics, which has provided many of the methods and techniques for her work; and early language development, which has (among other applications) allowed her to publicly highlight the impact of COVID-19 on the youngest members of society. With thanks to a host of wonderful collaborators, practitioners, mentors, students, and several hundred toddlers and their families, Professor Davies presents some of the highlights and lessons learned from my research career to date.

Every Hand an Adventure: Making Meaning in Medieval Manuscripts
Inaugural lecture given 11 May 2023.

This inaugural lecture sets out to make sense of the unfinished or damaged copies of French literary texts and compilations that have come down to us from the Middle Ages and beyond. Through the lens of game and play, Professor Cayley offers a reading of such serendipitous textual survivors across the material context of their incredible journeys in manuscript books, rolls, fragments, and early printed copies. She also reflects on the significance of medieval texts, and how pioneering digital methods are revealing new meanings and insights, generating yet more possibilities for interpreting these incredible artefacts.

Science and Religion from the Ground Up
Inaugural lecture given 25 April 2025.

In his inaugural lecture, Professor Jon Topham (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science) explored the deep connections between science, religion, and publishing in the nineteenth century. Drawn from his widely-acclaimed book, Reading the Book of Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2022), as well as other landmark publications across the history of science, Professor Topham's inaugural lecture also served as the keynote address for the 2025 Postgraduate Conference of the British Society for the History of Science.

Embodying values, telling stories: ancient Greek culture and its legacy
Inaugural lecture given 6 December 2022

In this lecture Professor Stafford looked back over 30 years’ study of ancient Greek culture and its post-classical reception.  Her approach has always drawn on a wide variety of textual and visual media, with careful consideration of the relationship between word and image, in an attempt to get at the experience of the woman, child, resident-alien and slave in the street – as well as that of the elite citizen man.  Emma's interests fall into two major areas: the expression of social values and other intangible concepts in human (usually female) form, particularly the concept/goddess Nemesis; and the transmission of Greek myth, especially the myriad stories associated with the hero Herakles (Hercules to the Romans).  This lecture aimed to show that both areas, while well worth studying for their intrinsic interest, have had a pervasive influence on later cultures, and are still in evidence today.  A third area of interest, in ancient Greek sexuality, is particular to its time and place, but still has something to contribute to modern debates.

‘Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa’
Inaugural lecture given 28 October 2021

The inaugural lecture is loosely based on his 2021 published book co-authored with Professor Ezra Chitando, Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa. The lecture explores how African thinkers, writers, activists, and artists contribute to the re-imagination of sexuality and Christianity in contemporary Africa, and how they debunk monolithic narratives of "African homophobia" and "religious homophobia", thus opening up queer African futures.

‘The Family in African History’
Inaugural lecture given December 2019

In recent years politicians across Africa have increasingly focused on family values and familial breakdown. Yet many researchers have questioned the validity or unity of the family as an analytical concept within African Societies. This lecture will tells the long history of the family, in order to explain both its growing political relevance and the enduring questions it raises for scholars. From the era of slavery, through the colonial crises around marriage and childhood, to the postcolonial challenges brought by HIV and rapid population growth, the family has been shaped by political and social conflict, even as its precision definition has been repeatedly challenged.

‘Theology in the Fabric of a Secular University: Of Friends and Professors’
Inaugural lecture given in December 2019

In the lecture Professor Muers offers a theological account of why the secular university matters, and how theology works within it.

‘Invisible Women? Analysing Gender and Media’
Inaugural lecture given October 2019.

Bodies matter, and women's bodies are particularly charged sites of meaning in popular media cultures. Images of women populate media culture but work by female film and TV producers is often unacknowledged. In what manner is women's visibility in the media legible or permissible? Neither binary nor straightforward, this lecture argues that gender is a vital frame for media history and analysis.

‘Why I Love Studying the Bible even though (and because) it's Perverse’
Inaugural lecture given in October 2019

In this inaugural lecture Professor Stiebert discusses her chequered and international career learning and teaching about Hebrew language and biblical studies. Her lecture focuses especially on biblical texts that surprised her - not least on account of their graphic nature. Her concluding remarks focus on the responsibilities of professors and on academic integrity.

‘Who cares about journalism? Facts and the aestheticized public in an irrational era’
Inaugural lecture given in October 2018.

What is the point of journalism in our digital, irrational age?
As a profession devoted to the pursuit of facts, does journalism have a purpose amidst the torrent of seemingly irrational political events?
And how should we as scholars and journalists working both inside and outside universities attempt to study the news?
In this public lecture, Professor C.W. Anderson explored the relationship between the digital transformation of journalism and democratic life.
He discussed journalistic authority, the history of data journalism and the emerging aesthetics of the digital public sphere.

‘A Young Democracy? Youth and the Spanish Transition’
Inaugural lecture given in October 2018.

Following General Franco’s death, Spain embarked on a journey to become a fully-fledged democracy. This was facilitated by the relative youth of the Spanish population, many of whom had no direct memories of the Civil War. In 1982, the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Party, amongst the youngest of any major European party, rode into government with the slogan ‘Por el cambio’. In many respects a golden age for young Spaniards, they were also frequently victim to unemployment and drug addiction, two of the major challenges to face the population in the 1980s. In this lecture, I explore how and why a greater sensitivity to demographics and generational affiliations might nuance understandings of Spain’s young democracy.

‘Leonard Matlovich: Gay Rights Hero?’
Inaugural Lecture given February 2018.

In 1975 Leonard Matlovich, a decorated Vietnam Veteran and Air Force Sergeant, came out publicly in order to challenge the U.S. military’s blanket ban on gay service personnel. Championed enthusiastically by influential figures in the gay rights movement, the Matlovich campaign caused profound discomfort to many LGBT activists who had energetically opposed the Vietnam War, and seen gay liberation as part of a wider struggle to challenge U.S. imperialism and militarism, and radically re-make American society.
This lecture will considered Matlovich’s contribution to the struggle for LGBT equality, and reflected on what his emergence as a ‘gay rights hero’ tells us about the wider movement.

‘“Pilgrims here, as you are”: thinking with Dante, now’
Inaugural Lecture given November 2017.

At the opening of Dante’s Purgatorio, as they find themselves on the shore of Mount Purgatory, Dante and Virgil are approached by a group of newly arrived, bewildered souls, who ask them for directions. Virgil responds that, though the souls might believe they have knowledge of the place, “Noi siam peregrin come voi siete” [we are pilgrims here, as you are] (Purg. II, 63). In this lecture Professor Treherne took this moment as a starting point to think, with Dante, through some of the central questions which occupy him in his Commedia: on knowledge, vernacular language, and what it means to recognise and flourish with other human beings. He showed that Dante, read with proper attention to his historical context, can continue to speak to us in rich ways today.

‘Adjusting our expectations of bilingual children’
Inaugural Lecture given November 2017.

For most of the last century, bilingual children in primary school were relatively rare. In recent decades the school environment has changed enormously. Now a quarter of all children attending primary school are bilingual. The consequences of this profound change to the educational environment are not known, either in terms of the demands it places on school resources, or on how bilinguals can be assessed fairly when they lag in English proficiency.

In this lecture, Professor De Cat looked at a recent Yorkshire-based study of 5-7 year olds that collected some of the evidence we need to start answering questions about the role and performance of bilingual children in British classrooms today. We need to understand the size and nature of the gap (in English proficiency) between bilingual and monolingual children in order to address specific educational needs. Can we predict the size of that gap from the amount of experience in the home language? Are different aspects of English proficiency affected in the same way? Does bilingualism confer a cognitive advantage, as has been claimed in the media?

'Women and Film Culture in contemporary Brazil'
Inaugural Lecture given in November 2017.

Professor Dennison’s talk took as its focus the shifting modes of women's filmmaking and film production in Brazil in the 21st century. These shifts were traced against the backdrop of first of all the Workers Party-related agenda of greater engagement with so-called women's issues, and the kind of narratives that have been produced by the "Workers Party Project". Professor Dennison considered the recent (post 2016) filmmaking scene. As Eliane Brum has argued, the impeachment of Brazil's first female president Dilma Rousseff demonstrated that Brazil is undergoing a major crisis of identity. To address this question professor Dennison explored the extent to which this this crisis played out in recent films by or dealing primarily with women. The work of a number of filmmakers, including Maria Augusta Ramos, Anna Muylaert and Kleber Mendonça Filho were used as examples throughout the lecture.

'The Present Mirrored in the Past: Why Interpreting Medieval Monasticism Matters'
Inaugural Lecture given December 2016.

This lecture explored how, since the 19th century, the history of European Latin monasticism has been interpreted by historians, archaeologists and art historians in a way that reflected the changing concerns of contemporary society. Professor Jamroziak also explained how her own current work on late medieval Cistercian monasticism attempts to move away from the past paradigm and show how monastic history continues to reflect the present and its concerns.

'Slave Rebellions or Actions of War? Understanding West African Armed Resistance in Bahia and Cuba, 1807-1844'
Inaugural Lecture given March 2016.

In his lecture, Manuel examined how a series of historical events that occurred in West Africa from the mid-1790s - including Afonja's rebellion, the Owu wars, the Fulani-led jihad, and the migrations to Egbaland - had an impact upon life in cities and plantations in Bahia, Brazil and western Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth century. Why did these two geographical areas serve as the theatre for the uprising of the Nagos, the Lucumis, and other West African men and women? To understand why these two areas followed such similar social patterns it is essential to look across the Atlantic and to centre the focus on the African side of the story. The lecture also raised the broader issue of how American, Latin American and Caribbean historians can make a better use of African history and historical sources to illuminate their subjects of study.

Growing Through Questions: Practice, Reflection and Scholarship
This inaugural lecture reflects on Chiara's journey from teaching Italian as a second language to exploring how languages, and learning more broadly, take shape within higher education. At its core is a commitment to scholarship rooted in practice: the conviction that rigorous reflection on our teaching, how students learn, how we assess, and how curricula are designed, constitutes a vital form of academic inquiry. The opportunity to interrogate and theorise my own practice has been both intellectually generative and professionally transformative. Over time, it has become equally central to my work to create spaces in which colleagues can engage in, and be recognised for, their own pedagogic scholarship.

Chiara's early research in Second Language Acquisition examined learner progression, error, and the developmental processes shaping language learning in higher education. This led to broader considerations of curriculum coherence and assessment, including engagement with the CEFR, approached critically and pragmatically as a tool to support clarity, progression, and dialogue across contexts.

Collaboration with postgraduate research teaching assistants has further deepened this trajectory, prompting reflection on how pedagogic expertise is formed, valued, and renewed within academic communities. Through Chiara's LITE Fellowship and subsequent leadership roles, she has sought to connect individual inquiry with collective culture, fostering inclusive scholarly environments in which reflection, dialogue, and educational research are integral to the intellectual life of the university.

In her most recent project, West Yorkshire’s Contemporary Italian Diaspora, this commitment, where teaching, scholarship, and research inform one another, remains central.