Donor human milk banks are expanding around the world at an exponential rate, which is directly linked to global increases in premature births. The importance of human milk for prematurely born infants has been extensively identified, even among the recent social scientific work that has questioned the efficacy of human milk and health considerations. In addition, research also shows that a significant percentage of these mothers, at least initially, experience lactation problems. Europe is taking a leadership role in expansion of human milk banks, although issues associated with alcohol consumption and maternal donations are a concern for clinicians and health care staff, given the increasing problems associated with drinking among women of childbearing age. Europe with the highest alcohol per capita consumption rates in the world, makes these issues particularly immediate. The United Kingdom (UK) with its long history and current global leadership role is an ideal place to study these considerations which will inform these larger issues of human milk for the prematurely born infant. A leader in this century old intervention, supporting not only one of the oldest hospital based banks in Europe, but also an important cross-border collaborations on the island of Ireland, along with a research based national bank in Scotland, each representing different cases contributing significantly to the re-birth of the medical control of human milk. The UK is poised to offer the world vital information regarding donor human milk banking, maternal bodies and ‘trust’, an important sociological social theoretical concept which will be used to frame the triangulated data collected for this project (including interviews, archival data, and ethnographic information). Supporting an excellent experienced female researcher to return to the academy following a maternity/career break, this project directly supports women and science in society. MUIMME is an old Irish word for wet-nurse.

My research aims to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on contemporary Black women artists in the US & the UK. It will pose a polemical formulation of Black feminist literature and visual arts of the 1980s and 90s in light of postcolonial scholarship. These two decades saw a flowering of talent of Black British and American women: in the US they are described as Black Women’s Renaissance and in the UK as Black Arts Movement. Both movements came to fruition in the aftermath of civil rights and feminist struggles of black people in the US and UK. This project will investigate how the work of African American and Black British female artists reflected interaction and intersection of cultural nationalism and black feminism. It will demonstrate that feminist narratives and artworks of that period, usually not associated with black cultural nationalism, played a pivotal role in the continuation of indigenous cultural politics of Black cultural nationalism, which came to being in the 1960s and 70s in the US. During that period African American art strove to validate black culture as a culture possessing its own ideas and forms of aesthetic expression. The cause of BCN was propelled through the veneration of Black values, sensibilities, symbols, and rituals, which, as this project will argue, became also central to the identity politics of the artists of Black Women Renaissance and Black Arts Movement in the decades that followed. My project will demonstrate that this strategy of validating black culture, which was so empowering in the 1960s and 70s, ultimately turned to be counter-productive for the goals of black feminism, as it created a limited number of positions from which black women’s subjectivity could be articulated. UCLan with its world-class researchers in transatlantic studies (i.e. Prof. Rice) and Black Arts and black feminism (i.e. Prof. Lubaina Himid, a founder of Black Arts Movement) provides an ideal host institution.

The interdisciplinary research explores the ways transnational autobiographies by black authors address different forms of black mobility in the Americas during the Age of Revolutions and its aftermath until the onset of the US American Civil War (1760-1860). During that time, large parts of the Americas gained their independence from the European colonial powers. Simultaneously, black-authored narrative texts emerged in the region. Among them, autobiographies played a key role as vehicles of asserting black selfhood and participating in societal discourses. Four major types of black life narratives developed at the time: slave narratives, Indian captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, and memoirs-as-travelogues. In all of them different form of (im)mobility played a defining role in shaping black identities and experiences. The research is the first of its kind to study transnational black autobiographies from across the Americas in the Age of Revolutions with a focus the (voluntary or enforced) spatial, socio-cultural, and narrative mobilities of black people. Its objective is to produce a series of scholarly essays, to be subsequently joined into the first comprehensive study on the subject. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological approaches of Inter-American, Black Atlantic, Mobility, and Autobiography Studies, the project closes a gap in the scholarship of the Americas and the Atlantic world. Due to the aesthetic innovation and societal relevance of autobiography in the region from 1760-1860, the research will be based on a literary analysis of the major types of black Inter-American life writing of the era. In so doing, it will not only chart black contributions to autobiography but also advance the theoretical study of the genre. Home to the renowned Institute of Black Atlantic Research and its world-class scholars of the Early Black Americas and Black Atlantic (Prof Rice, Dr Hoermann, Dr Saxon), UCLAN provides an ideal host institution.