An interdisciplinary research collective
Reading the afterlives of empire.
The Empires Collective is an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers and academics that examines the legacies of imperialism through a critical-theoretical lens using multimedia formats. We are literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists, and philologists.
As a group we use a multiplicity of digital artefacts to explore the connection between culture and colonialism. Via blogs, podcasts, video games and discussion forums, we spotlight the sociopolitical and historical forms imperialism took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, laying bare its links to the contemporary moment.
What we work on
Seven strands, one question
We are literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists and philologists. What holds the work together is not a period or a canon but a question: what did imperialism make, and what is it still making?
Diasporic crime fiction
Detective writing as colonial history in disguise — who is permitted to investigate, whose crimes are legible, and what the whodunit does with the nation. The subject of the first Empire Sleuths episode.
Identity and masculinity in Arabic fiction
How imperial encounter is written into gendered selfhood, and how Arabic literary form carries and resists it.
Digital infrastructures
The pipes, archives and platforms that now mediate cultural memory — and the older asymmetries they quietly reproduce.
Film strips and visual culture
Projection, circulation and the colonial image: what was shown, to whom, and on what apparatus.
Queer lives
Sexuality and its archives under and after empire, including what the record was built not to hold.
Memory and affect
Literary history as a history of feeling — how modern South Asian and global modernist writing holds loss, belonging and aftermath.
Periodical research
The nineteenth- and twentieth-century press as the infrastructure of empire: serial fiction, reprint networks and the making of a reading public.
Mailing list
New episodes, new artefacts
An occasional letter: when an episode goes out, when something new appears in the gallery, and what the collective is reading. No more often than there is something to say.
Trouble with the embed? Subscribe at empirescollective.substack.com.
Working on something adjacent?
The collective is growing. If your research touches ours — or you would like to appear on the podcast, or build something with us — write in.