Creative Writing and Refugees
This project seeks to investigate a phenomenon which runs throughout the twentieth century – the desire to associate refugees with stories, and the compulsion by charities, organisations and other groups to ask refugees to tell those stories. This work can be hugely enriching for refugees and for the organisations and communities who work with them, but it can also be dangerously re-traumatising, opening old wounds that arts practitioners are often ill-equipped to deal with. The project asks why writing with refugees has always seemed like a useful and even therapeutic use of creative writing, as well as asking what checks and balances should be in place in order to ensure that this is a safe and responsible practice for all.
The Salon as Revolution: a History
This book project will explore the history of the literary salon in the twentieth century, looking at the parties and knees-ups which brought together some of modern literature’s most influential voices. The salon – far from dying out with Virginia Woolf and the “bloomberries’” – in fact shape-shifted across the century, yielding a range of scenes, movements and happenings from black power to spoken word…
Dr Katherine Cooper 