Dr Lucy Bond
Lucy Bond specialises in contemporary American literature and culture, memory, and trauma.
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 am course leader for the BA (Hons) English Literature.
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 is "Processing Memory: Heritage, Industry and Environmental Racism in the American Gulf States", a collaborative project with Dr Jessica Rapson (King's College London), generously funded by the BA/Leverhulme. This work asks how and why the heritage industry attempts to mask the connection between racial inequality and environmental destruction in the American Gulf states (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas). From sixteenth-century colonisation to contemporary industrialisation, the regional economy has traded upon the exploitation of racialised people and land. However, recent studies (Butler 2013; Jackson 2016) contend that this symbiotic relationship remains largely absent from official memory. Through site-based analysis of tourist attractions and interviews with local activist networks, we investigate the extent to which the heritage industry is implicated in negating past and present forms of environmental racism: examining the commemorative processes through which heritage sites romanticise histories of human and natural exploitation; critiquing their economic and symbolic ties to industrial sponsors and advocates, including petrochemical companies, sugar manufacturers, and the prison-industrial complex; and documenting alternative tourist practices that aim to render racial and environmental injustice culturally visible.
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.