Principal Investigator: Luisa Maria Rodrigues Flora

The Modern Difference is a transdisciplinary research programme operating at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies) and created within the area of English Studies. Since it is a research programme that is also intended to intervene in society, it has been designed to reflect, (in)form and act upon the problem of the concepts of equality and difference, identity and otherness and their diverse mutual relations in our modernity, as well as to consider the conflicts originated by these problematic relations. In this first decade of the 21st century, still regarded as an outcome of the individualistic thought shaped throughout the modern age (a thought that in itself haunts individuals who question their own particularity), such (economic, political, social, cultural) problems are spread violently through multiple forms of power politics, filtered by the media, and by financial, industrial, scientific, educational and religious institutions, all of them served by the new technologies.

As objects of study, the programme gives emphasis to themes centred around such binary oppositions as humanist and scientific culture, gender and race, war and peace, which are materialized in multiple different linguistic expressions (namely the literary and the essayistic) and in diverse visual forms. The Modern Difference also bases its approach on the assumption that the problems of defining equality and difference, identity and otherness, as well as the conflicts triggered thereby, became established as objects of systematic analysis during the second half of the 18th century and are still with us nowadays.

Within this theoretical framework, several hypotheses are being tested through a corpus considered to be representative of the works which, since the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, have interacted in the British cultural scene, thus shaping the conditions of its encounters with other cultures. By analysing women’s discourses in colonial encounters in a predominantly patriarchal context, some expressions of the British Empire are problematised. From the vantage point of the early 21st century, the transformations of narrative fiction are revisited to consider the rendering (both through and within the texts) of public and private violence, of diverse metafictional crossroads and multiple intertextual dialogues. The works addressed in the corpus are formally very different and they also represent cultural documents – their range includes various discursive practices (poetry, drama, short fiction, essays, travel writing, biographical narratives, novels), as well as visual practices (architecture, painting, engravings, photography, cinema).

The Modern Difference has been engaged in publishing the results of its ongoing research work as well as helping to transform the research and teaching practices of those involved in the programme.