Research area

Digital Cultural and Creative Research Network

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Where creativity meets innovation 

The Digital Cultural Creative (DCC) Research Network brings together academics from a variety of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences and health sciences.

The DCC Research Network brings together academics from across the University with strategic external partners to share ideas and develop exciting, ambitious, interdisciplinary collaborations that align with major external funding schemes.

Our members

Academic staff members working in the DCC Research Network come from a range of disciplines. 

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Lecturer, Essex Law School
Research interests: Communications Law; Intellectual Property Law and Asset Management; Cyber-obscenity; Media Ethics and Media Regulation
Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies
Research interests: Modernity in Latin America; Visual culture; Space and politics; Memory politics; Human-nature relations; Water, hydraulics, liquid ecologies in the arts; Environmental aesthetics; Photography; Digital culture; Contemporary visual production in Latin America; VENEZUELA RESEARCH NETWORK. With Dr. Penélope Plaza (University of Reading), Dr. Rebecca Jarman (University of Leeds).
Professor, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: women's suffrage; literature and history; archival studies; theatre history; First World War in literature; science fiction; animal studies; autobiography; Ellen Terry; Edith Craig; family history; Literature and Law; literature and place
Lecturer, Essex Law School
Research interests: Public International Law; International Criminal Law; International Law applicable to Information and Communication Technologies, and in Cyberspace; International Humanitarian Law
Lecturer, Essex Law School
Research interests: Consumer law; Financial consumer law
Professor, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: documentary; media practice and theory (creative practice / PaR); amateur cinema; gender and ethnicity in US literature, film, television; island representations; Oceania and the Pacific in film and photography; postcolonial cinemas
Senior Lecturer, Essex Law School
Research interests: Criminal Law; Data protection; Criminal procedure/human rights; French Law/Comparative Law; Cybercrime and cybersecurity
Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: Immersive Performance and Participation; Devising and Contemporary Performance-making; Experimental Neuroscience, Selfhood, Embodiment and Body Transfer Illusions in Performance; Science-art Interdisciplinarity; Intermediality, Interactivity, New Technologies and the Digital Humanities; Theatre in the Dark; Theatre Directing; Applied performance, affect and wellbeing
Acting Faculty Dean Research (Arts and Humanities) - Professor (R), Essex Law School
Research interests: Copyright Law and Policy; Law and the Arts; Legal Challenges of AI, Big Data and Blockchain Technology; Personality Rights, Data Protection, and Information Privacy; Internet Law, and Digital Regulation; Trade Mark and Unfair Competition Law
Professor, East 15 Acting School
Professor, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: literature and film; comparative media and transmedia; adaptation and translation; technology and digital media; book history and history of reading; interspecies communication and eco-translation; extinction studies and climate fiction
Professor, Essex Law School
Research interests: International Humanitarian Law / Law of Armed Conflict; Conduct of Hostilities; Military Occupation; New Military and Law Enforcement Technologies, including Cyber Operations, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Human Enhancement; The Use of Force by States; Self-Defence; the UN Collective Security Framework; Counter-Terrorism.
Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: Chinese and East-Asian Theatre; World and Global Theatres and Literatures; Postdramatic Theatres; Modernism/Postmodernism in drama and literature; Post-war British theatre and theatres in Europe; Contemporary Theatre Practices (directing and producing); Dramaturgy and Playwriting (PaR and Creative practices); Comparative Drama and Literature; Gender Studies and Women's writing
Professor, Essex Law School - Human Rights Centre
Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Professor, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS)
Research interests: Romantic period; Walter Scott; Charles Lamb; Scottish literature; Ballads and folk literature; Late 18th Century British and American literature; 19th century British and American literature; Charles Brockden Brown; Periodicals and magazines; Transatlantic studies 18th and 19th century literature; Ecocriticism; Borders and cultural encounters; Environmental literature; Romanticism
Faculty Dean Postgraduate (Humanities) - Senior Lecturer (R), School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies
Research interests: Britain and France, ca 1600-1800; Digital History; Medicine and Science; Supernatural; Body; Gender History; Food
Senior Lecturer, School of Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies
Research interests: Spectatorship; Histories of modernism; Exhibition design and curation; The relationship between art and politics; The use of digital technologies in museums and galleries; Intersections between pre-modern and modern art
Professor, Essex Law School
Research interests: UK, EU and global consumer and contract law; commercial law; services of general interest; unfair terms and practices law; quality and safety of goods and services; financial services; digital content law
Digtial Humanities image of a lightbulb on blackboard
The Digital Humanities at Essex

The Digital Humanities, a subset of the DCC Research Network, is a creative community of researchers and teachers within the Faculty of Humanities who use technology to understand what it means to be human.

Find out more

Faculty of Social Sciences

Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Algorithmic Power; Web Scraping; Text Mining; Digital Cultures; Software Studies; Hacker Subcultures; The Dark Web; Science and Technology Studies; Computational Social Science
Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Critical theory; Historical sociology; Working-class heritage; Sociology of the media and modern culture; Intellectual history of ethical socialism and cultural criticism; Governmentality studies; Sociology of religion; Cultural policy studies
Professor, EBS - Management and Marketing
Professor, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Crime and the Media; Cultural and Social Geography; Popular Music and Sociological Thinking; Punishment and Human Rights; Sociology of Imprisonment; Visual Sociology; Youth Culture
Lecturer, Department of Language and Linguistics
Research interests: Language Attitudes; Sociolinguistics; Language Variation and Change; Sociophonetics
Lecturer, Department of Language and Linguistics
Research interests: Cinema in Portuguese; World cinema; Portuguese language; Language teaching; Internet stardom and fandom; Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL); AI (Artificial Inteligence) & language learning/teaching
Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Economic Sociology; Consumer Culture; New Media; Social Theory; STS
Lecturer, Department of Language and Linguistics
Research interests: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL); Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL); Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL); Digital Game-based Language Learning (DGBLL); Second Language Learning/Teaching/Assessment in Virtual and Augmented Reality Contexts
Lecturer, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Science and Technology Studies; Neuroscience and Society; Dual Use; Responsible Research and Innovation; Medical Anthropology
Professor, EBS - Management and Marketing
Professor, Department of Sociology
Research interests: Consumption and Commercial Cultures; Advertising and Market Devices; Cultural Studies; Television and the Natural World; Cultures of nature and human-animal relations

Faculty of Science and Health

Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Online and Adaptive Methods for AI and ML; Health Informatics; Computational Intelligence applied to Brain Sciences; Computer Vision and Machine Perception; Deep and Transfer Learning; Reasoning and Modeling Systems in Diagnosis and Prognosis; Natural-language understanding; Generative AI; Soft Computing; Human Machine Interaction
Lecturer, Department of Psychology
Research interests: Improving subjective well-being through the identification of happiness-enhancing activities; The Darker Side of Seeing Others Kindness
Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Problem solving with collective intelligence and distributed human tasking (crowdsourcing/human computation); Citizen science through games, gamification and games-with-a-purpose; Computer vision in 3D modelled environments
Reader, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Computer vision; virtual and augmented reality; genetic programming; remote sensing; unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs)
Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Brain-computer interfacing; Machine learning; Signal processing; Functional neural connectivity; EEG; fNIRS; fMRI; Motor control; Motor rehabilitation; Brain stimulation
Executive Dean (Science and Health) - Professor (R), School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Multi-agent systems and autonomous adaptive systems; Data exploration analysing and modelling complex data Big data analysis and modelling of structured and unstructured data; Machine learning modelling opponents learning behaviours from data; Reasoning and analytics over multiple streams of data Internet of Things (IoT) reasoning and analytics; Individual and collective user profiles profile adaptation contextualised profiles; Recommender systems collaborative filtering reputation systems; complex systems modelling dynamics of financial systems and markets; Market mechanisms negotiation protocols strategic interaction supply chain management; Semantic matching resource search cloud computing resource allocation; Trust in agent societies trust mechanisms trust in decision making; Formal theories of agents and multi-agent systems BDI agents; Cognitive agents knowledge and belief self-reference; Software engineering methodologies for agents and multi-agent systems; Social dynamics regulation of agent societies roles and power institutions; Self-organisation team formation; Serious games for education and learning collaborative learning
Lecturer, Department of Psychology
Reader, Department of Psychology
Research interests: Visual cognition; Perception of pictures and videos; Eye movements; Cognitive neuropsychology
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Machine learning and artificial intelligence; Computer vision and robotics; Brain-computer interfaces; Multimodal human-machine interaction; Intelligent data and text mining; Signal processing; Pattern recognition; (See also staff research interests by category)
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Computational Intelligence (Fuzzy Logic,Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation ); Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Lecturer, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Immersive Technology (XR, AR, VR, MR); Gamification & Serious Gaming; Game Design; Interactive Design UI/UX
Lecturer, Department of Psychology
Research interests: Human values; Stereotypes and prejudice; Political psychology; Working from home/remote work; Cross-cultural research; Similarities
Reader, Department of Psychology
Research interests: Sense of Agency; Metacognition; Action Understanding; Multisensory Integration
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: URLLC Use case; 6G Communications; Massive MIMO; Physical Layer Network Coding; Machine Learning for Communication; 5G/Beyond 5G
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Brain-computer interfaces; Neural prostheses and neuromuscular electrical stimulation; Bioelectronics; Rehabilitation engineering; Myoelectric operation of artificial limbs and robotic devices; Biomedical signal analysis; Computational neuroscience; Sensori-motor neurophysiology; Affective computing; Intelligent systems, both artificial and natural; Mathematical modelling of muscle and nerve
Professor, Department of Psychology
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: Network coding; Multimedia communications; Information-centric networks; Joint source and channel coding; Semantic Communications; Machine learning for communications; Caching Networks; Multimedia Signal Processing
Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology
Research interests: Boredom; Nostalgia; Economic psychology; Entropy
Professor, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE)
Research interests: High-capacity optical network systems; semiconductor laser characteristics; broadband optical receiver design; optical transmission; local access architectures based on arrayed waveguide gratings; video compression
Get in touch
Dr Michael Tymkiw
Rosemary Klich