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Isabel Story

Senior Lecturer

Nottingham School of Art & Design

Role

Dr Story teaches about the socio-political context of key developments in global visual communication. She runs the Level 5 and Level 6 contextual modules in the BA Hons Illustration degree as well as teaching across Level 6 BA Hons Graphic Design degree.

Dr Story welcomes enquires from those who are interested in doing a PhD, including practice-based PhDs, in topics related to visual communication. More information can be found via the NTU Doctoral School.

Dr Story is currently supervising PhDs on Northern Irish Artist-led collectives, archiving Tehran's protests, functional aesthetics, and meme environments.

Career overview

Isabel Story has a BA Joint Honours in Spanish in Russian (Nottingham, 2010), and MPhil in Russian Studies (Cambridge, 2011), and a PhD in Latin American Studies (2017), exploring the Soviet-Cuban cultural relationship. She has taught at the University of Nottingham and the University of Bristol  before joining NTU. She has also worked in publishing and educational consultancy, and is a Fellow of the  Higher Education Authority.

Research areas

Isabel's research explores cultural diplomacy, soft power, visual culture, memory, heritage, and international cultural exchange during and after the Cold War. She is an expert on Cuba, Cuban-Soviet relations, and the ways in which visual communication, intangible cultural heritage, oral history, and material culture shape political identities and collective memory. Her work focuses particularly on Cuba, the Soviet Union/Russia, East Germany, and Latin America, combining approaches from visual communication, cultural studies, history, memory studies, and area studies. She is particularly interested in community-engaged, collaborative, equitable research.
She is the author of The Soviet Influence on Cuban Culture, 1961-1987: When the Soviets Came to Stay and has published on Cuban cultural policy, cultural diplomacy, cultural cooperation, revolutionary citizenship, Cuban-Soviet and Cuban-GDR relations, and the role of culture in international relations.
Her current research 'Cuba's Rebel East' is focused on conducting oral history interviews with individuals who fought in Cuba's 1956-1958 insurrection. This project is in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, and colleagues in Cuba.

External activity

Dr Story is on the advisory board of the Cuba Research Forum, and has helped organize international conferences with the centre and the University of Havana. She is also a member of the Special Interest Group ‘América Latina y los Balcanes: vínculos culturales y sociales’ which is supported through a strategic alliance between the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales and the Centro Iberoamericano at Novi Sad University (Serbia).

She has collaborated with Havana-based studio CartelON, and worked with Cuban-American artist Glexis Novoa.

Sponsors and collaborators

Isabel has  worked with the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, the Cinemateca de Cuba, CartelON, and the Cuban Ministry of culture on projects focusing on the protection and promotion of cultural practices which form part of Cuba’s cultural heritage.

Publications

Forthcoming:

Isabel is co-editing a book exploring the position and role of Crime Fiction in Communism with Dr Carlos Uxo (Monash University) for Bloomsbury.  (Under contract)

Published:

Story, Isabel. 2024. 'A Cinematic Calling Card: Preludio 11 and Cuban-GDR cultural dialogue'. Studies in World Cinema, Vol. 4. No., 1-22 https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-bja10040

Story, Isabel and Gallardo-Saborido, Emilio. 2022. ‘Mit sozialistischem Gruβ/Con saludos fraternales: intercambio cultural entre Cuba y la RDA’ in Las relaciones culturales entre América Latina y los países socialistas europeos durante la Guerra Fría. Novi Sad: CLACSO and CIBAM. 215-232

Story, Isabel. 2021. ‘Cuba-Russia Cooperation: The History of Fraternal Disaster Management Collaboration’ in Climate Change and Disaster Preparedness in Cuba: Adaptation and Management. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Emily Kirk, Isabel Story and Anna Clayfield (eds). 2021. Climate Change and Disaster Preparedness in Cuba: Adaptation and Management. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Story, Isabel. 2020 'Cuban cultural heritage: a rebel past for a revolutionary nation', International Journal of Heritage Studies, 26:2, 218-220, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2019.1652924

Story, Isabel. 2019. When the Soviets Came to Stay: the Soviet Influence on Cuban Culture, 1961-1987. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Story, Isabel. Emily Kirk and Anna Clayfield (eds). 2018. Cuba’s forgotten decade: how the 1970s shaped the Revolution. Lanham: Lexington Books. ISBN: 978-1-4985-6873-9

Story, Isabel. 2018. “Utopian cultural construction: Cuban cultural organisation in the 1970s” in Cuba’s forgotten decade: how the 1970s shaped the Revolution. Ed. by Isabel Story, Emily Kirk and Anna Clayfield. Lanham: Lexington Books. ISBN: 978-1-4985-6873-9

Story, Isabel and Emily J. Kirk. 24 April 2018. ‘From the Castros to Cuba’s new president Miguel Díaz-Canel: continuity or change?’ LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog. [Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/04/24/from-the-castros-to-cubas-new-president-miguel-diaz-canel-continuity-or-change/ ]

Story, Isabel. 2018. “Debating the Revolution. The evolving role of the visual arts in Cuba” in Journal of Languages, Texts and Society, Vol.1, No. 2 https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/languagestextssociety/lts-journal.aspx ISSN:  2517-648X

Story, Isabel. 2018. (Translator) Fernando Martinez Heredia, “The Origins of Cuban Socialism” in Rethinking the Past in Cuba (Ed. Tony Kapcia). London: ILAS ISBN: 9781908857415

See all of Isabel Story's publications...

Course(s) I teach on

  • Image by Ursjasvi Gandhi, BA Illustration

    COURSE

    Illustration - BA (Hons)

    Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwich

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/ug/ba-hons-illustration

  • Bento Box company branding

    COURSE

    Graphic Design - BA (Hons)

    Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwich

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/ug/ba-hons-graphic-design

17 - Partnerships For The Goals Badge