News
The David Bruce Centre welcomes postdoctoral fellows
In September 2026, the DBC was delighted to welcome Dr. Tionne Parris and Dr. Hannah Smith as 2-year postdoctoral research fellows.
Dr Tionne Alliyah Parris is an award-winning historian specialising in African American and Black British history, with particular interest in Black transnational activism, surveillance, and the global circulation of Black radical thought in the 20th century.
Her current project, 'A Tricky Business: Black Internationalism and the Architecture of Anglo-American Surveillance, 1933–1976' examines how Black internationalism shaped intelligence cooperation, government policy, and diplomatic relations between Britain and the United States, reconstructing the networks through which security knowledge was produced and shared across the Atlantic world.
Dr Hannah Smith is a Research Fellow at the David Bruce Centre for the Study of the Americas at Keele University, where she is producing a monograph investigating Wedgwood’s connections to race-based enslavement, and its legacies, in the United States. Hannah’s PhD, titled ‘Staffordshire and Enslavement: a county’s connections to a colonial past’, explored the ways in which an inland region of the United Kingdom was linked to race-based enslavement. This included the role of women, connections via the British government, relationships with the apprenticeship system in the British Caribbean, and the benefit Josiah Wedgwood gained from enslavement.
Her research now seeks to expand on Wedgwood’s (the Staffordshire based pottery company) relationship to enslavement in the United States through the commercial relationship between the company and enslavers, the way in which Wedgwood’s ware formed an element of enslaved peoples lived experiences, and the continued interaction between Wedgwood and the legacies of enslavement in the twentieth century.
Keele PGR delivers paper in Glasgow
On 20 October, 2026, Lily Martin, a PhD student in English Literature, gave a paper to the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies in Glasgow as part of our ongoing PGR exchange programme. The title of her paper was, "‘A gilded void’: Occupying the American Grand Hotel in Modern Literature".
Abstract:
The American grand hotel is one of the pre-eminent sites of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, capturing the period’s rapid urban transformation and technological innovation. Writing in The American Scene (1907), Henry James grasps ‘the truth that the present is more and more the day of the hotel’, uniquely expressing the ‘American spirit’. Fluctuating between the private and public, stasis and mobility, and ephemerality and permanence, bringing together individuals from different nationalities, classes, races, genders, ages, and sexualities, hotels provide ample inspiration for the period’s literature. This paper considers the luxury hotels located in urban centres that populate the early twentieth-century texts of Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes. As temporary sites of escape, refuge, and transformation, they provide opportunities to move across class, racial, and gender boundaries. However, extended periods of grand hotel living seemingly produce physically and socially unfit figures. This paper asks how circulating bodies in literary representations of American hotels were employed as a way of situating debates about gender, race, class, and national identity.
