Creative Manchester appoints Deputy Director and new academic Research Leads
08 Sep 2025
The Creative Manchester research platform has appointed new academic research leads from The University of Manchester to oversee each of its key research themes. For the first time in its history, the research platform has also appointed a Deputy Director, supporting Platform Director, Professor John McAuliffe.
Since appointing its first research leads in 2022, Creative Manchester has continued to grow, nurturing exciting interdisciplinary research and convening research communities at The University of Manchester and the city region. The three research themes - Creative Industries and Innovation, Civic and Creative Futures and Creativity, Health and Wellbeing - continue to remain relevant and are expanding in line with the aspirations set out in Manchester 2035, The University of Manchester’s new 10-year strategy.
Creative Manchester Director, Professor John McAuliffe, said of the appointments: "We are delighted that the Creative Manchester academic leadership is being supported so well, and that our new three-year appointments, one from each Faculty, will strengthen our platform's skills across our three research themes in areas with strategic relevance to Manchester 2035. Manchester 2035 provides strategic direction for Creative Manchester, and its focus on interdisciplinary practices. It also aligns with our commitment to the values of a civic university and the work we have been developing with colleagues and external partners since 2021."
The newly appointed Deputy Director, Dr Constance Smith, will work closely with Director, Professor John McAuliffe, the broader Creative Manchester team and management board to develop and coordinate activity across three core research themes, with a focus on internal stakeholders, advancing and coordinating interdisciplinary research and cross-School working.
Dr Constance Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Humanities. Her research focus is the anthropology of architecture, time and urban change. She is interested in shifting landscapes of buildings, planning and infrastructure and how their materialities inflect ways of engaging with the past and anticipating the future.
Professor John McAuliffe commented: "We are delighted to announce the appointment of a Deputy Director, Dr Constance Smith, whose work as an anthropologist in the UK and internationally, has been previously supported by Creative Manchester. Dr Smith's extensive interdisciplinary work, and her experience of leading research projects with external partners and communities, will be vital to how we develop our networks at The University of Manchester, especially in relation to the growing amount of work we undertake with the University's cultural institutions."
The Research Theme Leads will work with the senior leadership team to further develop and help coordinate activity across their respective core research themes. They will convene and grow the Platform’s interdisciplinary research communities with both University and external partners, to address strategic opportunities.
Creative Manchester is pleased to announce that Dr Stephen Hicks has been re-appointed as Research Theme Lead for Creativity, Health and Wellbeing. Creative Manchester are also thrilled that Dr Riza Batista-Navarro will formally take up the Research Theme Lead role for Creative Industries and Innovation, following her work as maternity cover for former Research Lead Dr Claudia Henninger. Finally, Creative Manchester looks forward to welcoming Dr Anke Bernau to the academic team as Research Theme Lead for Civic and Creative Futures.
Dr Riza Batista-Navarro is a Senior Lecturer in Text Mining at the School of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Her research focusses on the development of natural language processing methods for information extraction, explainable text classification, machine reading comprehension and language modelling. She has led a number of inter-disciplinary text mining projects, in which she developed computational approaches together with collaborators from various domains such as biomedicine, biodiversity, sustainability and online safety.
Dr Stephen Hicks is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work (FBMH) and also a member of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. He has been the Creativity, Health and Wellbeing Research Lead for Creative Manchester since 2022 and has a professional background in child care/protection as a qualified and registered social worker. Steve has been involved in research projects on: LGBTQ parenting; social care and housing needs of older LGBTQ people; communities, neighbourhoods and belonging in modernist housing; and an interdisciplinary project on concerns about air quality/pollution and impact on local communities and environments. He has also been a volunteer in HIV/Aids services; homelessness support for young men and LGBTQ people; and LGBTQ adopters and foster-carers.
Dr Anke Bernau is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Culture at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Humanities. She has worked on a diverse range of topics, including female virginity, poetics, aesthetics, material culture and environmental humanities. She is particularly interested in recent work emerging out of Critical Plant Studies and is co-editing a special issue on 'Plant Temporalities', as well as a volume on the global cultural history of 'nature' in the Middle Ages.
Professor John McAuliffe reflects: "These appointments, now with greater workload allocation, showcase that we are supporting the implementation of M2035 and that our research focus may also contribute to supporting colleagues working to develop Teaching & Learning, Innovation and Social Responsibility projects: within the Creative Industries and Innovation theme, Dr Riza Batista-Navarro has a particular interest in CreaTech as well as the broader theme; likewise within Civic and Creative Futures, Dr Anke Bernau has great experience on sustainability and urban environment projects and we are delighted that Steve Hicks continues to lead on Creativity, Health and Wellbeing, convening and supporting collaborative interdisciplinary research in this key area."
Creative Manchester is looking forward to working with Drs Constance Smith, Stephen Hicks, Riza Batista-Navarro and Anke Bernau, and would like to extend a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Drs Claudia Henninger and Jenna Ashton for their important and impactful work as Research Theme Leads at Creative Manchester since 2022.