New Routes, Old Roots

Please click on an image to find out more about the research and projects being led by our People.

  Jeannette Baxter is Director of New Routes, Old Roots. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literatures of exile and migration, literature and fascism, and literary and visual surrealisms especially in relation to histories of exile and historical conflict.

Dzifa Benson writes, performs, curates and coaches, and has also performed in conventional and devised theatre. Her practice embraces cross art forms and she regularly collaborates with visual artists and musicians. Occasionally, she performs as her alter ego, Sister Siren.

Sean Campbell is Reader in Media and Culture and Research Convenor in Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. He teaches in the area of popular culture and cultural theory and leads. His publications include Irish Blood, English Heart: Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England. Cork University Press, 2011.

Kayo Chingonyi was born in Mufulira, Zambia in 1987 and moved to Newcastle in the UK at the age of six. After going to school in London and reading English Literature at the University of Sheffield. In 2003 when he won the Poetry Society’s Rise Youth Slam Championship and now works as a writer and workshop leader.

Mick Gowar is a poet and author of children’s books, former co-Director of New Routes Old Roots: Literature of Migration and Exile and Senior Lecturer in Contextual Studies at the Cambridge School of Art, and University Teaching Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University.  He has written or edited more than 100 books for children.

Almir Kolzic is a Co-Founder and Co-Director of Counterpoints Arts. He has worked for over 12 years developing creative strategies for engaging with refugee and migrant experiences. His experiences include leading on the development of a national strategy and identity for Refugee Week UK; initiating the Simple Acts participatory programme; and developing Platforma – national arts and refugees networking project.

Eleni Konidari is a social researcher and educator. Her research interests focus on issues of social disadvantage and marginalisation looking for ways to bridge research with human and social rights advocacy. Eleni has a background in adult education and is passionate about the use of narratives in research, teaching and activism. Eleni and Dr Jeannette Baxter run together the ‘Story Circles’ project at New Routes in Norwich.

Mike Levy is a former teacher and journalist. A playwright, educational resource writer and partner in Keystage Arts and Heritage, he is currently embarked on a part-time PhD at ARU on the role of volunteers in the East of England during the refugee crises of the 1930s. Mike holds a fellowship in holocaust education from the Imperial War Museum, is an educator with Holocaust Education Trust and was awarded the ‘In Memoria’ medal by the Polish government for his play ‘Invisible Army’ about the wartime Polish exile army. For 15 years he was responsible for programming Cambridge City Council’s annual Holocaust Memorial Day. He is currently co-authoring a book on British rescuers and volunteers during the 1930s refugee crises. He has researched and helped create several history-based exhibitions and has written plays about historical subjects from Thomas Paine to local Merchant Navy veterans. He is currently planning a new online educational resource on the reception of refugees in the 1930s and 40s.

Dr. Helen Marshall is an award-winning author. Her first collection of fiction Hair Side, Flesh Side won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, and Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015. Her debut novel, Migration, was by Random House Canada in 2019. Much of her creative work is interested in concepts of borders, boundaries, travel and migration, as filtered through the lens of “weird” fiction.

Dr Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling author of TV tie-in novels based on franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. She is the author of a dozen science fiction novels, including the original SF novels The Baba Yaga and Star of the Sea. She is also the author of numerous audio dramas based on TV shows such as Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, produced by Big Finish, and performed by actors such as David Warner, Louise Jameson, Sheila Reid, John Finnemore, and others. She sold her first SF short story at the age of 19 to Doctor Who Magazine and, since then, her short fiction has been anthologised by Gardner Dozois, Farah Mendlesohn, and Ian Whates.

Farah Mendlesohn has served as President of the International Association of the Arts, Chair of the Science Fiction Foundation, Area Head for Programme for the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, and Project Manager of Exhibits for the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention.

Dr Vayu Naidu is a storyteller, dramatist, performer, workshop leader and scholar.  She gained a doctorate in Indian Performance Oral traditions and contemporary western theatre from Leeds University and has since published several plays, including There Comes a Karma, When, and Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas? In 2009 the Jaipur International Literature Festival featured her solo work Mischievous Maidens.

Lissa Paul, is Professor in the Department of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies at Brock University, Ontario Canada. Her research interests include children’s literature, literary theories; feminist theories; post-colonial discourse; cultural studies and diversity.  She is currently completing a biography of Eliza Fenwick.

Steve Pavey is a documentary photographer, applied anthropologist and contemplative activist, all of which come together in the vocation of cultivating a way to see, in order to bear witness to the world both as it is, and as it could be. His creative process is profoundly influenced by witnessing the lives of people living on the margins of empire.

Lucy Popescu is an author and journalist. She has worked with English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee and  is the co-editor of Another Sky, an anthology featuring the work of writers PEN has helped over the last 40 years. Her latest book, The Good Tourist, is about human rights and ethical travel. She also reviews theatre, writes for Tribune and has a monthly column in The Guardian Literary Review entitled ‘Silenced Voices’.

Sebastian Rasinger is Principal Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Deputy Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University. His research interests are the sociolinguistic and discourse analytic aspects of multilingualism, migration, and ethnic and cultural identities.

Michelle Sheehan is a Professor in Linguistics at Newcastle University. She teaches courses on the structure of English and other languages, language contact and change. Her research is focused on linguistic diversity and language change and she has a particular interest (at present) in new world varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. She is currently running a collaborative project with ARU undergraduates, Txuss Martín and Wisbech Museum on regional language(s) and immigration and finishing up a British Academy project on recent syntactic change in Brazilian Portuguese, with Sonia Cyrino (State University of Campinas).

Bronwen Walter is Professor Emerita of Irish Diaspora Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research focuses on Irish migration to Britain and the wider experiences of the Irish diaspora. Her current interests include multi-generational Irish identities in England, Newfoundland and New Zealand, and whiteness.

Tory Young is a Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has a longstanding interest in stories of migration and has published articles on modernist and contemporary literature.

Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota, USA. He has lectured and published on fairy tales and their social and political significance.  He is also an active storyteller and educationist.  He has recently published translations of the original 1815 edition of the Grimms Kinder- und      Hausmarchen.

Pina Santoro is an artist whose practice is mainly sculpture based, but still maintains her strong links with painting, textiles, sound, socially engaged practices and performance. Her concerns lie in Culture, Identity, Gender Politics, Folk Art, Immigrant Displacement and Feminism. She brings to light the frustrations and lived experiences as a second-generation immigrant female born in the UK. She is founder of ICAP project, receiving Arts Council Awards since 2014. Pina currently teaches on programmes at Kettles Yard, University of Cambridge.

Jennifer Dathan in a PhD researcher at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, where she is interested in experiences of displacement and heritage. She was formerly a researcher at Action on Armed Violence, where her research focused on the impacts of conflict and displacement. 

Maksi Kozinska is an activist, educator and writer. Her research is focused on heritage languages. She is a published author of language coursebooks for Polish heritage speakers in the UK (e.g., GCSE Polish Nowe Tematy, and Lekcje z Polskiego). Maksi works as an external subject expert to Ofqual, teaches Polish in Saturday supplementary schools, and works as an examiner for Polish language qualifications.

Kate Lightfoot’s research focuses on heritage languages in the UK and she has a particular interest in heritage French speakers’ experiences of learning their home language in a mainstream school setting.