Dr Jessica Rapson

Education/Academic qualification

Doctor of Literature, English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London
2012

Biographical details

Jessica Rapson joined CMCI in September 2013. She has previously been a lecturer at Royal Holloway, London South Bank University and Goldsmiths College, where she completed her doctoral research. Jessica holds a BA (Hons) in Critical Fine Art Practice (University of Brighton) and an MA in Cultural Memory (The Institute of Modern Language Research, University of London).

Dr Rapson is the co-editor of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (de Gruyter 2014) and her monograph, Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (Berghahn 2015) examines a range of Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the United States, and associated mediation in literary and cultural texts. Jessica teaches on the optional modules Culture: Conflict, Diplomacy and International Relations and Cultural Memory. Her teaching practice is informed by creative and ambiguous pedagogical perspectives.

Research interests

Cultural Memory
Transcultural and Transnational Studies
Heritage, Tourism and Cultural Diplomacy
The Environment and Cultural Change

Jessica Rapson’s interdisciplinary research concerns the mediation and production of memory in culture, with a particular focus on the role of landscape, literature and the heritage sector. She has published widely on memory and commemorative landscapes. In addition to presenting her work in the UK, Europe, the United States, Brazil and Canada, she has co-organised several conferences and seminars, including Transcultural Memory (for the inauguration of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory at the Institute of Modern Language Research, London 2010), Education and Memory (IGRS, 2012) Memory and Restitution (American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, and University of Westminster, 2013). She is currently working on the collaborative research project The Natural History of Memory, funded by the University of Westminster, Ghent University and Maastricht University, which examines inscriptions of capitalism, violence and atrocity on landscape. Under the auspices of this project she is currently writing new material on tourism and representation of race at slave plantations in the American South.