Members list
Members and their research interests
Professor Maksymilian Del Mar (Convenor) - Imagination, imagery, simulation, pretence, thought experiments, embodiment, fiction, metaphor, utopia, hypothesis, character, rhetoric, fables, emotion, legal reasoning
Dr Matthew Abbey - Migration, AI, surveillance, queer theory, environment; imagination as abolitionist praxis
Dr Alexis Javier Alvarez Nakagawa - The intersection of law and political ontology, with a particular interest in the ‘worldmaking’ power of law, prefigurative politics and legality, and the varied ways in which nature and the natural are represented, constructed, and imagined through law and legal practice
Thom Andrewes (PhD Student) - Music as unreality; music as fiction; live and mediated performance as the representation/realisation of musical unreality
Professor Adrian Armstrong - Poetry, language and ideology, narrative, visual semiotics
Isadora Bellati (PhD student) - Legal imaginaries over space, legal reasoning, speculative design
Professor Lucy Bolton - Film as an art of the imagination; film consciousness; aesthetics of imagination
Professor Andrea Brady - Poetry and poetics
Dr Rachel Bryant Davies - Imagination of different time periods, storytelling, fables, myths, pedagogic and didactic communication as means to re-imagine past as way of constructing an ideal future
Dr Theodora Christou - Reimagining law, its sources and its implementers/enforcers; transnational law and governance; private standard setting actors; private actors are creators and implementers of normative expectations
Professor David Colclough - Early modern science, religion, law, rhetoric
Professor Brian Dillon - The essay as form, literary nonfiction, text and image, style, aesthetic education, autobiography, illness and experience
Dr Clio Doyle - Imagining the origins of agricultural as a form of ecological thinking
Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice - History of Political Thought; the creation of new communities; the Moon
Lily Freeman-Jones (PhD student) - Early modern drama, material culture, critical race studies, sensory studies
Professor Johanna Gibson - Authorship and nonhuman authorship (including nonhuman animals), law and literature/film/art/fashion, legal narratives
Dr Rhodri Hayward - Film and imagined worlds; Aesthetics of imagination; Film-Poems; Speculation, futures
Dr Alasdair King - Film and imagined worlds; Aesthetics of imagination; Film-Poems; Speculation, futures
Professor Renisa Mawani - Colonial legal history and maritime law; oceans, racism, capitalism, shipping, legal history
Dr Alessandro Merendino - "Creative Accounting", art-based approaches, leadership, businesses, mindsets
Dr Kasia Mika-Bresolin - Environmental imagination; imagining futures in context of slow violence/ordinary disasters; postcolonial imaginaries/Caribbean; imaginaries of crisis ‘in the minor key’, away from hyperbole
Dr Ananya Mishra - Imagination in Indigenous land ethics/ ecology/land-based literatures
Dan de la Motte (PhD student) - Sleep on co-creation with children as a form of political activism in the company’s work
Professor Rukmini Nair - Coleridge’s distinction between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ and its current relevance in ‘post-truth cultures’; colonial and postcolonial imaginaries; imagining technology; the relationship between imagination, deception and pretence; Indian theories of the imagination
Professor Miles Ogborn - The ways in which people imagine futures, in particular, imaginations of what the end of slavery might involve
Dr Hazel Pearson - Formal semantics – the study of meaning and how it arises via a combination of grammar and context. I am interested in how events of imagining are reported in language, with a particular focus on imagining being someone other than oneself and living through a different time
Professor Julie Peters - Legal humanities / history, policing, trials, film, media, performance, visual culture
Dr Jaclyn Rajsic - Imagining Britain’s legendary history. I specialise in medieval literary and historical texts, but I am interested how the early and legendary pasts are re-imagined through time. Related interests include: genealogies and ideas of history and family, England and Britain as imagined spaces in literary and visual texts (e.g. maps)
Dr Isobel Roele - Visual culture and the public eye; world-making; the United Nations; storytelling; phantasy; neurotic insecurity
Dr David Scott - Temporality in international law; international legal theory and imaginations of future global law
Dr Mario Slugan - Fiction as mandated imagining; free imagining v. mandated imagining; distinction between belief and imagination; the question of whether fiction can change real-life beliefs
Dr Clare Stainthorp - The (Victorian) secular imagination, the role of the scientific imagination as catalyst for experiment/discovery
Professor Kiera Vaclavik - Imagination as particularly associated with children; imagination as tool for conceiving of radical alternatives, imagination and storytelling/creativity for and by children; aesthetic education; dressing up and fancy dress
Dr Elisabetta Versace - Animal cognition/behaviour, positive psychology (individual character strengths and positive emotions), Open access science
Dr Hedi Viterbo - Legal / human-rights / humanitarian imagination, images and conceptualisations of childhood, visual images of state violence
Dr Roberto Volpe - Creativity and imagination in scientific research in engineering and materials science
Dr Chloe Ward - The history of beliefs (imaginings, fears, philosophies) about art in nineteenth century Britain, including its relationship to politics, social change, and emotion
Dr Rob Waters - The ‘historical imagination’: definition, use, critique of; historicising imaginations method, sources, concepts
Dr Hannah Williams - Imagination in relation to artistic communities, institutions, and spaces
Dr Andy Willimott - Historical imagination,’ ‘social imagination,’ ‘imagined communities,’ future-orientated or utopian imagination, and story-telling in history esp. re: revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union
Associated Members
Associate Professor Caddie Alford, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA - Rhetorical theory, digital rhetoric, critical AI and AI futures, information studies
Professor Malcolm Baker, University of California, USA, and Victoria and Albert Museum - The role of imagination in the reconfiguration of traditional visual genres (especially sculptural) in the 18th century
Alexandra Beste (Postgraduate Student), University of Cambridge - Emotional history, late medieval history, history of the mind, and the history of suicide with a special focus on the Middle Ages
Lizzie Burton (PhD Student), Canterbury Christ Church University - Early modern emotions focusing on the poor, poverty, trauma and the English poor laws
Professor Tita Chico, University of Maryland, USA - Film Studies and Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, Literature and Science, Restoration and 18th Century
Dr Emily Clifford, University of Warwick - Cultural imagination, ancient imaginative processes, visual and literary mediation of exploratory thought in Graeco-Roman antiquity, art and text
Associate Professor Rosa Eberly, The Pennsylvania State University, USA - histories and theories of rhetoric, publics theory, public memory, sound, character, and deliberation
Professor Mariano Dagatti, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina - Rhetoric, mediatization, discourse analysis, media semiotics, politics, communication and ideology
Dr Christina J Faraday, University of Cambridge - History of art, history of ideas, Tudor period, vividness, material culture, models of the mind
Professor Sergio C. Figueired, Kennesaw State University, USA - The histories of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, media theory, the avant-garde arts, and electracy; the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and culture
Francesca DelGuidice (student) Kings College London and (Trustee) Mary Ward Centre - Creative expression and its history
Dr Khaled El-Shamandi Ahmed, University of Kent - Consumers' experiential consumption (imagination and fun) and theory of mind when using technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR); Virtual Reality (VR); and Mixed Reality (MR)
Professor Helen Hackett, University College London - Theories of the imagination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; how these shaped and influenced the literature of the period; the relationship between imagination and gender; and how our understanding of imagination is being advanced by current neuroscience and cognitive theory
Abi Kingsnorth (PhD Student), Canterbury Christ Church University - Early modern ballads and broadsides, popular culture and gender, and digital approaches to sound history
Dr Fryderyk Kwiatkowski, University of Krakow, Poland - Intersections between transhumanism, esotericism, and science fiction, the epistemic and social dimensions of imagination, and specifically, how it connects seemingly disparate fields like techno-utopianism and occult revivalism, and how these are expressed through narratives of the future, both fictional and nonfictional
Dr Phillip Brendan Martin, University of Central Florida, USA - Poetry, rhetoric, memory/mnemotechnic, grammar, languages, religion, philosophy, renaissance, medieval and ancient
David A I Martin (PhD student) University of Cambridge - Anglican narratives and constructions of the Caste System in South India through the nineteenth century; the City (Bangalore) as a space where colonial ideals and ideologies are made material through lived experience and usage, memory and emotion
Professor Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics - Importance of imagination in scientists’ work, particularly in the social sciences, and using approaches from history and philosophy of science
Professor Gabriella Moretti, University of Genoa, Italy - Allegory and metaphor in classical literature
Assistant Professor Elsa Noterman, University of Nottingham - Spatial imaginaries; speculative futures; children’s legal geographies and make-believe; spatial and legal prefiguration
Assistant Professor Shawn Ramsey, University of Doha for Science and Technology, Qatar - History of rhetoric, classics, medievalism, Egyptology and Assyriology
Barret Reiter (Unaffiliated) - History, philosophy and politics of the imagination across all historical periods; early modern religion: the inter-relationship between imagination and early modern religion
Professor Anat Rosenberg, School of Advanced Study University of London - History of modern capitalism, liberalism, and media, drawing on multidisciplinary methods in Law and the Humanities, including law and visuality, law and materiality, and law and literature
Professor Michael Squire, University of Cambridge - Greek and Roman material and visual culture; classical literature, culture and thought; ancient attitudes to the body and sensory archaeology; early Christian art and theology; history of aesthetics (especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany)
Assistant Professor Jarron Slater, Brigham Young University, USA - Relationships between rhetoric and imagination
Professor Caroline A. van Eck, University of Cambridge - Art and art theory of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; classical reception; the anthropology of art; and camouflage and mimicry as ways of thinking about human art
Professor Jesus Velasco, Yale University, USA - Law, philology, and humanities, with a particular focus on the techniques imagined and use to write the law
Professor Emeritus Mark A. E. Williams, California State University, Sacramento, USA - Rhetorical criticism, theory, communication and religion, history of rhetoric