Research group leader: Prof Diana Holmes

Cultural Studies is a broad, interdisciplinary academic field that includes the study of literature, film, music, media etc and the social and institutional frameworks that define and regulate these. It originated in the UK in the 1960s (the Centre for CS at Birmingham University, and key theorists Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie etc), though CS has always drawn on many non-anglophone theorists (Barthes, Bourdieu, Eco to name just three).  Cultural Studies challenged traditional ways of analysing culture purely in terms of its 'high' or elite forms, and extended serious analysis to those genres and cultural forms that mediate experience for and offer pleasure to the majority of people. In extending the definition of 'culture', CS also

(a) questions the traditional emphasis on the text itself as the sole locus of meaning, emphasising instead the complex role of the reader/ spectator in constructing meaning

(b) explores the relationship between cultural production/consumption, social identity and power (class, ethnicity, nation/region, gender, sexuality...)

In SMLC, much of the research we do could be classified as broadly 'Cultural Studies', but some of us work explicitly with issues of the popular, of reception and audiences, and of the political/ideological dimension of culture as outlined above. These colleagues form the CS Research Group, bringing together specialisms in poetry and resistance, theatre and performance, popular film and literary bestsellers, crime fiction, cyberculture and new media, women's experience and representation of war, postcolonial cultures, with an international focus that includes French, Italian, German and Austrian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Lusophone, Chinese, and Latin-American cultures.

Many of the SMLC colleagues whose projects have explicitly engaged with CS approaches and methodologies are also members of the Popular Cultures Research Network, established in 2005, which extends well beyond the SMLC to other schools and faculties of the University of Leeds and to a national and international membership. The PCRN - composed of 4 clusters: literary, film and TV, music, policy - develops CS's academic engagement with popular as well as or in relation to 'high' culture within different national, local, historical and linguistic contexts, promoting 'an open, pluralistic and evolving sense of what is meant by 'popular culture' and  affirming the need for dialogue between modern-languages disciplines and the well-established perspectives of Anglophone cultural studies.'