Russell Foster mène actuellement des recherches sur les représentations culturelles et fictives de l'Europe dans la culture pop britannique avant et après le Brexit, sur l'héritage de l'Empire dans la politique britannique contemporaine et sur l'évolution de la relation entre l'identité et la politique au Royaume-Uni, dans l'UE et dans le monde.

Il offrira une conférence, organisée par le Centre Jean Monnet Montréal et le CÉRIUM, entièrement en anglais, dont voici le résumé :

The British Empire occupies an unclear role in British collective consciousness, with a limited consensus of historians arguing that barring a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Empire was largely ignored by the British population and absent from public discourse. However since Brexit, the Empire is a much larger element of popular discourse. Partly this is due to a resurgence, across Europe and the wider Western world, of calls for former colonial regimes to face up to their imperial pasts. Partly, and perhaps uniquely to the British, this is due to Brexit and post-2016 anxieties and ambitions surrounding Britain's future. This paper examines fraught debates on the nature and legacy of the British Empire, "Empire 2.0", and a new "Imperial Gothic", to illustrate how the Empire has become a site of projection for contemporary fears around isolationism, decline, and Britain's future role in an increasingly changing world.