European Identities

Dario Castiglione has published on issues of European citizenship and political identity. He was also involved in the first EU-funded project explicitly addressing the issue of European Citizenship (TSER Network on European Citizenship: EURCIT).

Sally Faulkner’s research focuses on European film and television, especially the representation of gendered, political and class identities on-screen, and the cultures that created them off-screen. She is PI of an AHRC project on gender and leadership in the Spanish and Portuguese audiovisual industries, focussing on the opportunities and restrictions yielded by the change from dictatorship to democracy, through transition and revolution, in the 1970s

Danielle Hipkins’ work focusses on European audiences, and specifically Italian audiences, as they watch film and television screens on which regional, national and transnational narratives coincide. Most recently, as PI on an AHRC-funded project with the Università La Sapienza in Rome, A Girls’-Eye View: Girlhood on the Italian screen since the 1950s  A Girls' Eye View (exeter.ac.uk), she is examining how young women and girls mediate their gender identities in relation to these overlapping discourses.

Oliver James has researched EU citizens' rights when living in a member state other than their own. Bureaucratic discrimination can undermine the operation of these rights. Working with colleagues in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, the research team has found that some nationalities and those with fluent language of the host country are positively discriminated over citizens with broken language skills. Potential discriminatory behaviour of public administrators is similar to behaviour of the general population, suggesting that working for the public sector does not insulate against these possibilities.

Ekaterina Kolpinskaya’s research focuses on the effects of religion on Euroscepticism in Britain, and how they are moderated by national identity, attitudes to immigration, social conservatism, economic and political ideologies.

James Mark researches European identity in global context, addressing the Eurocentrism of much work on identity, and focussing on Europe as contested co-construction. Currently, he is particularly interested in questions of the evolution of European identity with the collapse of western European Empires.

Aidan Power is interested in the colonial undercurrents of early European integration and identity discourses and their implications for the EU’s modern-day trade and border control policies.

Claudio Radaelli carries out research on the effect of moral emotions on narratives that consolidate identities, and their effect on public policies. This research is funded by the Horizon program, project MORES (2024-2026), blending ethnographic and quantitative methods.

Florian Stoeckel past research analyses the drivers and implications of a collective European identity. For instance, he examined whether and how social interactions between Erasmus students contribute to a collective European identity. Florian is also interested in the role of citizens’ political identities – national and European – for European solidarity.

Christopher Thorpe’s work focusses on the significance of cultural representation as a site for exploring (national) identity formation and (national) cultural inter-relations and interchange. His recent monograph on representations of Italy and the Italians in English and British culture from the Renaissance to the present day, seeks to go beyond the limits of orthodox social-scientific accounts of cultural representation as a terrain on which to observe the negative and intertwining effects of power and representations of the cultural other.

Sanja Vico has studied Serbian diaspora in London, their identities and social media practices.