Dr Uschi Klein’s research examines photography as a vital mode of cultural resistance in communist Romania (1947–1989) and across Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Grounded in an interdisciplinary, trauma‑informed methodology that draws on memory studies, resistance politics and visual culture, her work centres on private photographic archives and the practices of little‑known or overlooked photographers. Through these materials, she investigates the everyday negotiations, interventions and socio‑cultural dynamics that shaped life under communist regimes. Her research contributes to broader efforts to decolonise the Western photographic canon by foregrounding marginalised, under‑represented and previously obscured perspectives, thereby expanding and diversifying the historical understanding of photographic practice.

 

Uschi co-led the Visual Culture, History and Memory strand at the Centre for Memory, Narrative, Histories, until the Centre's closure in 2023.

 

 

Dr Uschi Klein welcomes PhD proposals in the broad fields of photographic histories and practices, visual and material culture, memory studies, migration studies, resistance politics and marginalised communities. She is particularly, though not exclusively, interested in supervising research that investigates the lived experiences shaped by totalitarian systems in Eastern Europe. She encourages projects that engage critically with under‑represented perspectives, draw on innovative (visual) methodological approaches and contribute to widening and diversifying the understanding of visual and cultural histories.

 

 

Dr Uschi Klein studied Media Studies and Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she worked as a media advisor in the charity sector until 2010. After relocating to London in 2010, Uschi returned to Higher Education to complete her MA in Photography (with Distinction) at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her critical engagement with the charity sector, particularly its use of imagery, shaped her doctoral research, culminating in her PhD thesis, Seeing self and world: everyday photographic practices of young male adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder, completed at the University of Brighton in 2017.

In 2020, Uschi began her research examining everyday photography as a form of cultural resistance during Romania's communist era. She was awarded two small international research grants, the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund Research Grant (2020) and the 10x10 Research Grant on Photobook History (2021), which enabled her to carry out initial archival research in Bucharest, Romania and resulted in an open-access publication. Since 2022, Uschi has curated several photography exhibitions in Romania and Stockholm as creative and public-facing outputs of her research.

 

Dr Uschi Klein has been a module leader for a range of UG and PGR modules at UoB since 2017. In that capacity, Uschi has designed different teaching and learning materials and delivered teaching content in person and remotely (during the Covid-pandemic) to UG and PGR students on different courses within the broad and overlapping subject areas of contemporary art and visual culture, art history and media studies across the School of Art and Media and on the History of Art and Design programme in the School of Humanities and Social Science.