ABOUT
Editor-in-Chief
Editor
Marthe Lisson
Think Pieces is the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) review; an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and collaborative online platform that extends the critical thinking to which the IAS is committed into the realm of online publishing.
Contributions are published in the form of essays, conversations, reviews, creative writing, visual art works, photography, film and sound. These are inspired by the multiple strands of research at the IAS and its Research Centres.
Every year, the Institute’s Postdoctoral Fellows guest-edit a themed journal issue, thus continuing what Think Pieces started in print, with themed issues on Lies, Turbulence and Laughter. These issues are available to download in the ARCHIVE.
We invite contributions from anyone at UCL who has been involved in the work of the IAS and its Research Centres.
Contributors of Think Pieces
Abigail Bleach
was IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows in Languages of the Anthropocene in 2023-24 and co-convener of the Languages of the Anthropocene research cluster which facilitated explorations of how language and narrative represent, negotiate, and reshape more-than-human ecologies in times of emergency.
Adrian Masters
is a scholar of Spanish Colonial history who studies early modern Spanish colonial law, racialization, petitioning, religion, and mobility and teaches at the University of Trier in Germany.
Adriana Suárez Delucchi
is a geographer, analysing institutions and environmental dynamics to challenge the marginalisation of
rural and Indigenous communities from environmental governance. A former IAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, she is now a Lecturer in Sustainability at the Universidad Católica de Temuco, Araucanía, Chile
Alani Hicks-Bartlett
is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies at Brown University, and affiliated faculty of Italian Studies, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Her research focuses on Medieval and Early Modern literature, particularly as related to tragedy, authorship, disability, gender, race, lyric and epic intertextuality, and Petrarchism.
Alejandro Bolaños-García-Escribano
is Associate Professor in Audiovisual Translation at UCL School of European Languages, Culture and Society.
Alessandra Aloisi
is a Lecturer in French at the University of Oxford. Her research explores modern and early modern literature and philosophy, with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her book The Power of Distraction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) also appeared in Italian and Spanish.
Alexandra Baybutt
is a former IAS Visiting Research Fellow and convenes performance practice modules (BA Creative Arts and Humanities, UCL East), and is a freelance somatic movement educator and artist. Research interests include politics of space and ethics. Recent commissions include ‘equity in working conditions in dance’ for the European Dance Development Network (2023).
Alice Vittoria
is a social anthropologist working with Bayaka Indigenous communities in the Republic of Congo. Her research focuses on Bayaka mobility and movement at multiple scales (from local to regional) and deals with land rights and access to customary territories in a logging concession.
Alice-Anne Psaltis
is an arts researcher and educator based in Melbourne, Australia.
Alicia Spencer-Hall
is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Their research interests include medieval hagiography, gender, film, and digital culture. Her first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, was published in 2018.
Amit Chaudhuri
is a leading novelist, essayist, poet and musician. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His North Indian classical recordings were first released in the 1990s by HMV in India; his experiments in ‘not fusion’, in which he brought jazz, blues and other kinds of music together with the raga, were released by Times Music and EMI in India and Babel Label in the UK. The second CD in this genre, Found Music, was on allaboutjazz.com’s Editor’s Picks for 2010. His book, Finding the Raga (2021), about his relationship with North Indian classical music, won the James Tait Black Prize in 2022.
Ana Sáez-Hidalgo
is Associate Professor of English literary and cultural studies at the Universidad de Valladolid. Her research focuses on Anglo-Spanish cultural and literary relations, exploring the cross-cultural dimensions of textual and material exchanges between Spain and England and the circulation of knowledge, ideas, and objects through English Catholic exiles. Her books include Exile, Diplomacy and Texts: Exchanges between Iberia and the British Isles, 1500–1767 (2021), The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (2017) and John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception (2014).
Anna Koch
is DAAD Francis Carsten Lecturer in Modern German History at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies. In her research and teaching, she examines histories of displacement, exile and return, often employing a transnational or comparative lens. She has published on Italian and German Jewish history. Home after Fascism is her first book.
Anna Stelle
is a proof-reader & copy-editor for Think Pieces
Bassel Akar
is Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at Notre Dame University – Louaize, Lebanon. His research focuses on learning and teaching for active citizenship in the context of Lebanon and other sites affected by armed conflict.
Becka S Hudson
is a Visiting Research Fellow at IAS, researching the relationship between psychiatry, racialisation and notions of trauma. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck College researching and writing about the politics of mental health, imprisonment and capitalism.
Brian Lally
is an educator and researcher at Kingston University with broad experience in the sector including teaching, education leadership, safeguarding/child protection and programme management. He has worked extensively at local, regional and national levels both within schools in the UK as well as in the SWANA region, East Africa, Indonesia, Central America, West Africa and China.
Catherine Stokes
is the Institute of Advanced Studies Administrator and Executive Assistant to the Director. She graduated in History from King's College London and has previously worked in university administration for the former Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School, the Institute of Historical Research and Cass Business School, City University, as well as having been a teacher of English as a foreign language in Helsinki, Finland and Lund, Sweden.
Chloe L. Ireton
is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 in the UCL History Department and a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026), whose research and teaching interests span the histories of slavery, freedom, empire, and subaltern public spheres in the early southern Atlantic world.
Christina Parte
is lecturer at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at UCL. Her research interests are gender studies, visual culture and border studies.
Cydney Phillip
was IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows in Languages of the Anthropocene in 2023-24 and co-convener of the Languages of the Anthropocene research cluster which facilitated explorations of how language and narrative represent, negotiate, and reshape more-than-human ecologies in times of emergency.
Doğuş Şimşek
is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at Kingston University, London.
Eleanore Hargreaves
is Professor of Learning and Pedagogy at the UCL Institute of Education. Her published research focuses on children's own expressions of their schooling experiences. These are fed into theoretical conversations about teacher professional development, children's wellbeing and social justice.
Emily Baker
is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at UCL.
Emily McGiffin
was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations. She’s the author of Between Dusk and Night, shortlisted for the CAA Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, Subduction Zone, winner of the ASLE Creative Book Award, and Of Land, Bones and Money, a book of literary criticism, and the winner of the 2008 RBC Bronwyn Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for poetry. She is a Research Fellow at UCL SELCS.
Fíacha O’Dowda
is an anthropologist at UCL, where he is a member of the Human Ecology Research Group and the Centre for the Anthropology of Technics and Technodiversity. Ongoing research in northeast Madagascar concerns vernacular theories and practices of life and living with and through the forest and its substances.
Frances Clemente
is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Italian at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the notions of alterity and otherness, and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving, drawing on methodologies taken from cultural studies, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, (eco)feminist and queer criticism.
Fuhito Endo
is Professor of English at Seikei University, Tokyo, and a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the IAS, where he worked on a comparative study of modernist literature, contemporary spiritualism and art theories, and the history of British psychoanalysis between the wars.
Gianfranco Selgas
is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry at UCL’s School of European Languages. He is an interdisciplinary scholar researching the media and political ecology of nature extraction and energy consumption across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Guyanne Wilson
is the Quirk Lecturer in English Linguistics at UCL. She is the author of Language Identities and Ideologies on Facebook and TikTok: A Southern Caribbean Perspective (Cambridge, 2024) and the co-editor, with Michael Westphal of New Englishes, New Methods (John Benjamins, 2023). Guyanne currently serves on the editorial board of the journal English World-Wide.
Helen Finch
is Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds. Her main areas of research are in the representation of the Holocaust in German-language literature, queer identity and memory in German culture, and curriculum design. Linking all three is a concern with marginalised voices, poetics of resistance, and inclusivity, concerns which she also brings to her teaching. Helen is Director of German at Leeds, and a member of the University’s Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for World Literatures.
Huda Tayob
is lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent and Global South. She is cocurator of the open access curriculum Race Space & Architecture and lead curator and project manager of the digital exhibition Archive Forgetfulness.
Igor Rogelja
is Lecturer in Global Politics at European and International Social and Political Studies (EISPS), working mostly on international infrastructure and Chinese politics. Apart from his field research, Igor works on bringing insights from the anthropology of infrastructure into global politics to better understand how infrastructures interact with political and physical space.
Jagjeet Lally
is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India within the UCL History Department and the author of India and the Silk Roads (2021) and India and the Early Modern World (2024). He is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, and Director of the Centre for Transnational and Global History.
Jasmine Costello
is a project manager at Student Achievement Partners where she designs resources and professional learning for teachers.
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin
is Lecturer in early Modern History at Cardiff University. Her publications include Crafting Identities (2021) and Metropolitan Science (2024).
Jennifer Rushworth
is Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at Ucl. Her research interests include mourning, medievalism, and music. Proust’s Songbook is her third monograph.
John Sabapathy
is Professor of History at UCL History Department, co-convenor of UCL Anthropocene, and an editor at The English Historical Review. He is writing one book about thirteenth-century Europe and another about the half-lives of the medieval fantasy land of Cockagne
Jumana Al-Waeli
is a postdoctoral research fellow at Ulster University.
keisha bruce
is a creative researcher and educator of media, technology, culture, and the spaces in between. After completing their PhD in Black Studies, keisha began a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies (2022-23). Their scholarship has been published in Women's Studies Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Kelechi Anucha
is a Lecturer in Literature and Environmental Justice at the University of Manchester. She has worked collaboratively in cross-institutional, interdisciplinary research teams and as a part of creative projects centred on wellbeing, connection and equality. Her past and current work explores the impact of environmental crises on individual and planetary health, with a focus on how historic and ongoing forms of harm are distributed along racial lines. She is the convenor for Critical Ecologies, a core module which introduces students to key concepts from environmental humanities, anchoring their understanding of how the politics of climate crisis are registered across various geographical sites, archives and collections, cultural forms and critical-theoretical interventions.
Lara Choksey
is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures in UCL English, and Associate Faculty in the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre.
Lee Grieveson
is Professor of Media History at UCL. Most recently he is the author of Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (University of California Press, 2018) and co-editor of Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (University of California Press, 2018).
Lo Marshall
is a Senior Research Fellow in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion within the Built Environment at The Bartlett, UCL and a former Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies. Their work focuses upon LGBTQI+ people, communities, and spaces, as well as equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education.
Lucía Stubrin
is Professor and Researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos, Argentina. She is the author of Bioarte. Poéticas de lo viviente (2020) and director of the research group Grupo de Estudio Biosemiótica, Arte y Técnica (GEBAT ). She also works as art curator in the field of art-science-technology with special emphasis on life sciences and bio-art.
Maja Fowkes
is Co-Director of the Postsocialist Art Centre at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and Principal Investigator of the ERC/UKRI Consolidator Grant, Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts. Her publications include Art and Climate Change (2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1945 (2020) and The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (2015).
Margaret Comer
was a Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. Her research focuses on the heritage of mass repression, memorialisation and heritagisation of the Holocaust and Soviet repression, grievability and memory, and contested memory, especially portrayals of suffering, perpetration, bystanding and victimhood.
Maria Paula Prates
is a Brazilian-Uruguayan medical anthropologist who grew up in the Pampa biome in South America and has experience in conducting ethnographic fieldwork among Indigenous peoples in the South American lowlands, mainly among the Guarani- Mbyá women of the Brazilian far south. Her current research interests are reproductive and sexual health as well as infectious diseases within the Anthropocene. She is a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene at the UCL Department of Anthropology.
Mariam Gomez
is a London-based fashion photographer and dedicated to championing the beauty and importance of diversity and realistic beauty standards. Her mission is to create a safe and empowering space for every subject, allowing their true self to take centre stage. Showcasing her take on breaking down unrealistic beauty standards, and celebrating diversity, self-love, and self-empowerment, both within and beyond the fashion industry.
Mario Graña Taborelli
is a historian of the Early Modern Iberian Worlds who works on political cultures, law and social history, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 2024/25.
Mataio Austin Dean
uses intaglio printmaking to create images and symbols that explore England’s and Guyana’s darkly intertwined histories, throwing light upon moments of resistance as well as unearthing stories of coloniality and rebellion embedded in English landscape and architecture. Austin Dean’s practice is research-driven, exploring Marxism as a framework for emancipatory praxis. English and Guyanese oral cultures are at the heart of the work. Reimagining, writing and performing folksong and poetry breathes life into the printed landscape, making the past tangible while presenting liberating modes with which to confront the present.
Melissa Gatter
is a lecturer in International Development at the University of Sussex, researching forced migration, aid, and time in the Middle East. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020. She has also worked for leading aid agencies in Jordan, including Save the Children.
Niall H.D. Geraghty
is Associate Professor in Latin American Cultural Studies at UCL. His first book was The Polyphonic Machine: Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature (2019). He has published articles and book chapters on literature and film from Latin America, with a particular interest in memory, urban culture, and religion in the region.
Nicholas Lackenby
is a social anthropologist with interests in morality, religion, nationalism, and belonging. Regionally, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia, especially Serbia. His current project – based at UCL Anthropology and funded by the Leverhulme Trust – explores the memorialization of violence committed during the Independent State of Croatia [NDH] (1941-1945).
Nicholas Mirzoeff
is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. He published two books in 2023: White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press) and the third edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge). A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Nikolas Kosmatopoulos
is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration and the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. He works at the intersection of global affairs and political anthropology, international political economy and insurgencies in non-human environments, particularly the oceans, anticolonial action and thought in the Mediterranean East.
Pablo Bradbury
teaches at the University of Greenwich and holds a PhD in History from the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on left-wing political cultures and social movements during Latin America’s Cold War, exploring religion, international solidarity and strategies for resisting state repression.
Patrick Bray
is Professor of French Literature and Director of the Centre for French and Francophone Research at UCL.
Paulette Williams
is a mum, social entrepreneur, and podcaster. She has worked in EDI related roles in higher educationfor 15 years and runs an initiative which aims to support Black students in higher education. She is passionate about creating spaces for Black people to find community and feel empowered to further their education.
Phoebe Braithwaite
is a PhD student at Harvard University and a former visiting student at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre (SPRC). Her writing has been published in the Dissent, Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and ArtReview.
Pushpa Arabindoo
is Associate Professor on Geography and Urban Design at the Department of Geography, UCL. She is codirector of the UCL Urban Laboratory leading the priority research theme ‘Wasteland’. She is also the co-convenor of the interdisciplinary MSc Urban Studies programme.
Rahul Rao
is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews and the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010). He is currently writing a book about statues.
Rasa Kamarauskaitė
is a PhD student at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She is working towards the completion of her thesis on 'Everyday (in)visibilities of Lithuanian LGBQ+ people'.
Rebecca Drake
is a poet and researcher based at the University of York, where she completed her PhD titled ‘Living with the Sea in Late-medieval English and Icelandic Romance’ in 2023. Her most recent book of poetry is Unstill Landscapes (Guillemot Press, 2025), which was a BBC Radio 4 Poetry Extra Book of the Month.
Rebecca Empson
is Professor of Anthropology at UCL where she teaches on the Anthropology of Capitalism and the Environment. Her research has explored the kinds of communities and subjects that emerge in the extractive mineral economy of Mongolia. She is currently focused on Baltic sea relations, between and beyond humans.
Rebekah Higgitt
is Principal Curator of Science at National Museums Scotland and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Recreating Newton (2007), Finding Longitude (2014) and Metropolitan Science (2024).
Robert Petitpas
studied Forestry in Chile before completing an MSc in Environment, Science and Society at UCL. Currently a PhD student in UCL’s Geography department, he is researching the political ecology of conservation. He is also a member of the Chilean Society of Socioecology and Ethnoecology.
Sarojini Sapru
is a final year PhD candidate at UCL Geography, funded by the ESRC. Her doctoral project is grounded in ethnographic methods, and she collaborates with young people who are part of Delhi’s hip-hop scenes to ask questions around fandoms, virality, aspiration, and mobility.
Sascha Auerbach
is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham. He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), the co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series ‘Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies,’ and regularly serves as an on-air historical expert for the BBC, Times radio, Discovery Science, The History Channel, and Curiosity Stream.
Sean Curran
is an inclusive heritage specialist with 17 years of experience working in historic houses, libraries, archives and museums. Their PhD at UCL Institute of Education was about LGBTQ+ heritage, and they curated the first ever LGBT History Month exhibition at a National Trust property.
Selena Daly
is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UCL. Her research explores modern Italy with a focus on the history of Italian emigration. Previous publications include Italian Futurism and the First World War (2016), which was shortlisted for The Bridge Book Award 2017. She is currently writing a trade book about the global history of Italian emigration from Marco Polo to today, to appear with Viking Penguin, Hodder & Stoughton, and Mondadori in 2028.
Simon Farid
is a sometime visual artist, moretime art gallery invigilator and a former Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Farid is interested in workers' conditions and experience, institutional critique, surveillance cultures, solitary poetics and alternative research frameworks and methods.
Sophie Chauhan
is a third-year PhD candidate [2024] in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her research investigates diasporic ‘Asianness’, the shifting parameters of whiteness and anti-racist coalition movements in Australia and the United States. Outside of academia, she organises in queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist solidarity spaces, and is author of Curious Affinities, a collection of essays and poems on the politics of intimacy.
Sophie Lewis
is an ex-academic writer who lives in Philadelphia and is the author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms. Her essays appear everywhere from n+1 to the LRB. She is working on an essay collection, Femmephilia, and a book, The Liberation of Children (forthcoming from Penguin, 2027).
Tatiana Thieme
is Associate Professor in Geography at UCL. Her contribution to the Wastiary draws on ethnographic research conducted in Paris for a multi-sited collaborative project titled 'Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of integration and response between "camps" and the city.'
Tomasz Jablonski
is a master’s research student in Anthropology at UCL. He specialises in environmental and economic Anthropology and is researching community response and the social impact and political implications of ecological disasters in western Poland.
Uta Staiger
is Associate Professor of European Studies and Director of the European Institute, UCL.
Vicki Baars
is Head of Culture Transformation at Culture Shift where they help organisations to identify, tackle and work to prevent cultures of bullying, harassment and discrimination. Baars formerly worked as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Manager in the Office of the President and Provost at UCL.
Victoria Mangan
is a PhD student researching transgender literatures and theories. Her thesis enquires into how we read and interpret trans literature and what this growing body of work might offer literary criticism as a discipline. She is a Wolfson scholar in the humanities and has taught across several departments at UCL.
Virginia Vecchioli
is a social anthropologist and full-time professor at the Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil.
Wendy Sims-Schouten
is Professor of Interdisciplinary Psychology and Head of UCL Arts & Sciences.
Will Damarjian
is a former UCL student of Comparative Literature, union enthusiast, and adoptive mom to many cats. They recently created an archival piece with the Museum of London interviewing members of the London bear scene about the impacts of gentrification on older men’s ability to hangout, cruise, and get drunk. When not Complaining, Will enjoys canning and pickling veggies, cooking for their husband and painting.
Zoltán Kékesi
is a cultural historian with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. His publications include Agents of Liberation. Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film (2015) and Memory in Hungarian Fascism: A Cultural History (2023). He works as a Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.