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IHSS

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

Professor Adrian Armstrong - Poetry, language and ideology, narrative, visual semiotics

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

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

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) - 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

Dr Elsa Noterman - Spatial imaginaries; speculative futures; children’s legal geographies and make-believe; spatial & legal prefiguration

Professor Miles Ogborn - I’m currently interested in the ways in which people imagine futures, in particular imaginations of what the end of slavery might involve

Dr Isobel Roele - Visual culture and the public eye; world-making; the United Nations; storytelling; phantasy; neurotic insecurity

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 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

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

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

Abi Kingsnorth (PhD Student), Canterbury Christ Church University - Early modern ballads and broadsides, popular culture and gender, and digital approaches to sound history

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

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 Jesus Velasco, Yale University (USA) - Law, Philology, and Humanities, with a particular focus on the techniques imagined and use to write the law 

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