Affiliates

Biography to be provided.

Batool is an AI Metascience Research Fellow at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), University of Edinburgh. Her fellowship explores how AI is shaping disruptive science and influencing scientific norms in research on complex, "wicked" problems, where she asks questions about how we can better address our global challenges through pluralism and a decolonial approach. Her interests are grounded in open science, with a focus on plural approaches to knowledge production and more justice-oriented research systems. She is particularly interested in how alternative knowledge infrastructures can support intellectual and economic solidarity across global contexts, and what dependencies in the economic system are systemically overlooked. 

She started as computational biologist and worked with grassroots open science communities rethinking what open science movement means for the global majority. She is an active mentor and governance committee member for The Open Life Science (OLS) and a jury member (2024–2026) for the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. She was selected as a DWeb Fellow by the Internet Archive, contributing to global conversations on decentralised technologies and knowledge justice. She was also invited to speak at the UN forum “Open Science for Future Generations: Equity, Access and Local Knowledge” to reflect on open science reform in relation to Pact of Future and explore how well-intentioned policies can perpetuate systemic inequities. She also co-organised severalinternational events, Responsible Research in Action Unconference, Global Dynamics in Responsible Research 2022. Before joining EPCC, she was Data Service Manager for the Imagery Smart Data Service (Imago), part of the Smart Data Research UK programme funded by the ESRC, which focuses on improving the usability of satellite imagery for public health, urban planning, and policy. 

Daisy Bao is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work focuses on pedagogy, student–staff relationships, and the emotional and social dynamics of higher education. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, examining how power, agency, belonging, and emotional–cognitive processes shape student–staff research partnerships. Her research combines qualitative, participatory, and intensive longitudinal methods to investigate student engagement, inclusive pedagogies, and interpersonal interactions in learning environments.

Her future research aims to develop a relational neuroscience approach to higher education, exploring how student–staff interactions shape emotion regulation, wellbeing, and learning. By integrating behavioural observation, experience sampling, physiological and neuroimaging methods, and computational modelling, she seeks to understand how individual differences and institutional inequalities influence these relational processes and to translate this evidence intomore equitable, emotionally supportive, and effective pedagogical practices.

Biography to be provided.

Dr Molly Rose Bond is a Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political Science. She works interdisciplinarily on the (fraught and promissory) relationship between people, nature, and technology. In particular she researches the role of other species, particularly plants - and more recently pollinators, the significance of place, and the diverse knowledges and narratives drawn upon that shape - or could shape - sustainable, responsible and just development trajectories.

Dr Marion Boulicault is Lecturer in philosophy and the Director of Interdisciplinary Research at the Harvard GenderSci Lab. In her research she examines how social norms and values are entangled in scientific measurement practices. 

Dr Malgorzata Bugaj is a teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Open Learning. She convenes and teaches short open-access courses, such as Cinema and the Five Senses, Avant-garde Cinema of 1920s, Women Directors in Focus or Auteurs of Polish Cinema.

Her current research lies at the intersection of medical humanities and film studies, with a focus on ageing and neurodegenerative disease. She is particularly interested in the ethical dimensions of film representations of (health)care. Malgorzata is co-editor of an upcoming volume "Dementia in Film, Media and Culture: Towards Ethically Responsible Discourse" mapping the crossover of the medical ethics with the ethics of cultural representation (EUP, publication planned for the beginning 2026) and co-lead of NECS (European Network for Film and Media Studies) workgroup Ageing, Lifecourse and Media.

Tiffany Kaewen Dang is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at ECA. Her research straddles human geography and landscape architecture, with interests in topics surrounding landscape studies, decoloniality, other-than-human discourses, and infrastructure, especially in settler colonial contexts. She completed her doctoral research in geography at the University of Cambridge in 2024, with her thesis exploring the role of nature imaginaries in the making of the Canadian settler colonial state. Her work has been published in several journals including Antipode and Landscape Research.

Biography to be provided.

Biography to be provided.

Dr Miriam Hancill is an Edinburgh-based artist, researcher, and AFHEA-accredited educator, specialising in printmaking, installation, material-led practices, and practice-based research. 

Miriam's doctoral project, Obdurate matter? Unfolding potential within materials, apparatuses, and procedures of printmaking through speculative practice (2026) employs material interrogation as a means of exploring how print's media and processes shape both approaches to and outputs of practice. Grounded in Deleuzian and new materialist theory, as well as key recent discourse in anthropology, art theory, material culture, and philosophy, her research considers how these core technical, practical elements of printmaking can also influence the perception and future situation of the discipline within the wider contemporary arts. 

This research was guided by Miriam's practice as a visual artist, which employs material and process-led approaches to explore themes of labour, material awkwardness, and procedural uncertainty in the context of contemporary printmaking. Evolving over thirteen years of experience, Miriam's work brings together a number of artistic methods and matter, ranging from image-based and abstract prints, 3D sculptural components and installation strategies, to textiles, photographic imagery, and creative writing. In combining this assemblage of outputs, her practice attends to the generative sensations of printmaking – drawing out new potentials from encounters with traditional media and methods. Beyond print, new materialist sensibilities in Miriam's practice situate it as a means of reflecting upon material interplay and assumed ways of thinking and being in broader contemporary life. 

Miriam has presented her work nationally and internationally, with selected recent outputs including Unfolding peripheral acts (article, IMPACT International Printmaking Journal, 2026); Obdurate matter? (conference presentation, CAA 114th Annual Conference, Chicago, USA., 2026); a tarlatan net (solo exhibition, Mote102 Edinburgh, 2025); PhD Showcase (group exhibition, University of Edinburgh, 2023-2025); Awkward matter?(Conference presentation, University of Angers, France, 2025); and DCA Print Studio X Jerwood residency (Dundee, 2025).  

In addition to a PhD in Art practice, Miriam holds an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice from Edinburgh College of Art (2020) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Newcastle University (2015). Since 2022 she has worked as a Tutor in the schools of Art, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art. 

Dr Katie Harling-Lee is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2025-28) based at the School of Divinity. She is working on a research project titled ‘Quiet Literary Listening: Quaker Silence in the Novels of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’ which proposes that listening to the Quaker-influenced literary silence in Canfield Fisher’s novels offers new insights into how silence can be creatively perceived as a positive force both within literature and wider society. This research into literary silence builds on her previous PhD-related research into literary representations of music and conflict in the contemporary novel, which she is developing into a monograph provisionally titled Literary Music in Conflict: Renditions of Music and War in the Contemporary Novel. 

Rowan Jackson is a lecturer in Planetary Health and Food Systems at the Division of Global Agriculture and Food Systems in the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. His research spans climate, heritage and historical research in the North Atlantic islands (Greenland and Iceland), East Africa (Kenya and Ethiopia), and the UK. 

Environmental and Climate in the North Atlantic

Over the last decade, Rowan’s research had used environmental, historical, and archaeological records to understand how human societies have responded to environmental and climate stress. His research has primarily focused on interconnected social-ecological changes on island environments in the North Atlantic from the Viking Age (c. 793 – 1066) onwards, with a particular focus on Greenland and Iceland in the High and Late Medieval Periods (c. 870 – 1500 AD). Using multiple datasets to reconstruct these deep-time records, his research has also identified the role of historical data for understanding environmental baselines and human vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the present.

Climate Heritage

In recent years, Rowan’s research has expanded from history and archaeology to understanding the impacts of climate change on tangible and intangible cultural heritage. His work has spanned Greenland, Iceland, South Africa, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Syria, with a focus on medium- and long-term impacts of climate on connections with place, traditions, systems of knowledge, and memory. To highlight the importance of environmental and cultural histories and to conserve it for future generations, Rowan actively works to promote international collaborations to support the protection and conservation of physical and intangible cultural heritage. 

Information Flows and Cultural Perceptions of Climate

A further strand that Rowan has focused on in recent years is to analyse the historical and contemporary flow of information about local resources and climate information within social networks. His research has examined the perceptual limits of knowledge among historical case studies, including Iceland and Greenland, and the flow of climate information within pastoral communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. By tracking information flow, both in the past and present, it is possible to better understand the social and cultural mediation of knowledge and the assumptions that might be drawn about the efficacy and power of technologies and governance.  

Dr Tanvi Kanchan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded project Medicine without Doctors, where they are working on the LGBTQ+ health activism case study, alongside community partner The Love Tank CIC. They are based the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the Usher Institute. Their research sits at the intersection of queer theory, gender studies, digital media and political economy, and spans India and the UK.

Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, Tanvi was a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London, where they also completed their PhD in Politics and International Studies. Their doctoral research explored social media's affordances and limitations for queer and trans women and non-binary people in India to build community and produce knowledge, examining online and offline structures of caste, religion, Hindu nationalism, and platform capitalism.

Dr Marie Larsson is a medical sociologist and qualitative researcher who is passionate about improving experiences and highlighting injustices in sexual and reproductive health, contraception and abortion through research, teaching, community engagement, and creative collaborations. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Lund University, with her doctoral research (2023) exploring young people’s experiences and practices of doing, what she terms, “the work of contracepting”. 

She joined the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow in 2023 and is based at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. She currently leads research and engagement activities on the SCOPE+ project, which aims to enhance access to post-abortion contraception information in Scotland using participatory and co-design approaches. Additionally, she teaches on the Master of Public Health and MBChB programmes at the Usher Institute and the Medical School. 

Since 2024, Marie has been involved in the Contraception and Abortion Inter-disciplinary Research Network group (CAIRN). In 2025, she joined the steering group of the Interdisciplinary Research in Sexual Health (IReSH) network in Scotland and was elected to the BSA Medical Sociology committee as an ECR representative. Beyond contributing to the wider academic research community in the area of medical sociology and SRH, she has also been involved in organising several engagement and knowledge exchange activities which centre interdisciplinary collaboration and lived experience in research, such as the “The Pill. Angry Chuckles.” poetry exhibition on contraceptive experiences. 

Overall, her scholarly work examines dynamics of power and knowledge in the abortion and contraceptive landscape and, most recently, the value of creative and arts-based methods in sexual and reproductive health knowledge generation and exchange. This includes exploring alternative ways to investigating and articulating contraceptive experiences and desires. Rather than accepting biomedical and neoliberal logics centred on reducing the risks of unplanned pregnancies and STIs, she wants to emphasise the importance of pleasure, joy, and care – and explore how we might go about ‘romancing’ contraception. 

Francisco's research lies at the intersection of culture, history, and migration within Venezuelan studies. He is interested in how oil-fuelled modernisation, the dialectic of civilisation and barbarism, and their associated social and spatial hierarchies are mediated through Venezuelan visual and textual discourse. His current work pays particular attention to how Venezuelan migrant culture re-articulates socio-spatial divisions in the transnational reality of the diaspora. Drawing on material culture, digital humanities, and critical theory, Francisco has pursued these interests within academic writing and teaching, and through a rich curatorial and public engagement practice.

Dr Sayed Mahdi Mosawi is an Alwaleed Fellow, with research interests in gender, masculinities, migration, and issues related to the Muslim diaspora. In his current project, he highlights the issue of migrant masculinities in the UK and focuses on the changes migration facilitate in gender relations within migrant families. 

Biography to be provided.

Biography to be provided.

Dr Anna Myers is an art historian focusing on British visual and material culture c.1600-1900. She is a specialist in the cultural history of Shakespeare, with recent and forthcoming publications addressing histories of gender, consumption, and intermediality in relation to Shakespeare.

Anna was awarded her PhD, ‘“We are such stuff”: Shakespeare and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’ from the University of Edinburgh in 2024. She is presently working on her first monograph which builds on her PhD research, examining how Shakespearean objects permeated everyday life in the eighteenth century and informed contemporary social identities as the playwright became the English national poet. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships spanning a range of funding bodies including The British Shakespeare Association, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies on British Art, The Lewis Walpole Library (Yale), and Edinburgh College of Art.

Anna is currently a Teaching Fellow in 18th Century Art History at Edinburgh College of Art. She has held several teaching positions and fellowships at the University of Edinburgh and is an Associate Fellow of Advance HE (AFHEA). Her cross-disciplinary research—spanning art history, English literature, theatre studies and environmental humanities—informs her object-led, research-informed teaching.

Research interests:

Anna is particularly interested in how people have 'thought with things’ through material, sensory and embodied experiences. Her interdisciplinary research interests broadly encompass, Shakespeare, adaptation, temporality, histories of belief, cultural history, and ‘the middling sort’. 

Her new research project focuses on the material histories of wood and considers wooden objects sourced from, or visually and textually associated with, culturally significant trees in Britain from circa 1650-1850. It analyses how these 'things' could embody memories, mythologies, past events and people, and in doing so informed British identities.

Biography to be provided.

Javier (he/him) is a queer Latin American film scholar. He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Early-Career Research Fellowship at LLC. His research examines Latin American cinema through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together queer theory, decolonial thinking, and film studies. Javier's postdoctoral project, "From the Fringes to the Frame", examines the place of queerness in twenty-first-century Latin American documentary films. Javier holds a PhD in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Film and Film Cultures from the University of Leicester, and a BA in Philosophy and Theology from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). His writing has appeared in publications such as The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, and The Bulletin of Latin American Research, among others.

Dr Giulia Pinton is an Associate Tutor at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, where she teaches across Masters programmes in the Institute for Language Education. She completed her PhD in 2024, researching interculturality, collaborative learning and the experiences of international students in higher education.

Her research interests centre on internationalisation, interculturality and student experience, with a growing focus on intersectional and decolonial approaches to higher education. She is currently a Research Assistant on a PTAS-funded project exploring international students’ perspectives on decolonising teaching and assessment, and a co-researcher on the Form-Ed project exploring AI-supported formative feedback. She is also a member of the TILTED research group. Her wider interests include pedagogical practice, community and interdisciplinary approaches to intersectionality and decoloniality.

Lianya Qiu-Bremner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Her current research explores how university students engage with questions of values, meaning, purpose and moral identity. More broadly, she is interested in belonging and inclusion in education, and in whose languages, identities and ways of knowing are recognised within educational spaces. Her doctoral research examined curriculum design and development in Polish and Chinese complementary schools in Scotland, leading to further work on home, heritage, and community language education; race and belonging in multilingual Scotland; and the challenges of translation and knowledge production in cross-cultural research. Her research also includes the experiences of university students from widening participation backgrounds, and she is interested in how higher education can create more inclusive, meaningful, and humane conditions for learning.

Dr Chiara Quaranta is Teaching Fellow in Film Studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2019). The common thread of her research is the critical dialogue between the moving image and society, with particular attention to how films represent at the intersection of gender and sexuality. She has published on a variety of topics including film ethics and aesthetics, queer film and sound, girlhood, representations of women in audiovision, film moods, and digital cinema. Her first monograph, Iconoclasm in European Cinema: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Image Destruction (2023, Edinburgh University Press), was shortlisted for Best First Monograph Award 2024 by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. The book centres on destructive gestures in cinema and investigates the political, affective, and ethical charge of cinematic images. She is a founding collaborator of the International Institute of Women in Cinema, which advances the visibility, participation, and critical study of women in global cinema. She also serves as editorial board member of the journal Film-Philosophy and of the book series Filosofia del cinema. Her next book-length project is on dance and the moving image, with emphasis on issues of gender, sexuality, and race.

Cristina Richie, PhD is a Lecturer of Ethics of Technology in the Philosophy Department at the University of Edinburghand the Deputy Program Director for the MSc in Data and Artificial Intelligence Ethics at the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute. She was previously a Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics of Technology at Delft University of Technology and had a decade-long career in the United States which included a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in Bioethics and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Brody School of Medicine and a semester as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

Her research is driven by a global vision of clean, just, and ethical health care and technology through the development of strategies and policies. In addition to her monographs, Principles of Green Bioethics: Sustainability in Health Care(Michigan State University Press, 2019); Environmental Ethics and Medical Reproduction (Oxford University Press, 2024); How Health Care Impacts the Planet and What We Can Do (Routledge, 2027) and edited volumes, Environmental Bioethics: Theory and Practice for Environmentally Sustainable Health Care (Routledge, 2024); The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Bioethics (Oxford University Press, 2026), Dr. Richie is the author of over seventy articles in journals including Nature Climate Change, the NEJM, The Lancet, the Lancet Planet Health, and the American Journal of Bioethics.  

She is the joint-Editor of Global Bioethics, the Head of the Netherlands Unit (Rotterdam) of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics, and a Board Member of the International Association of Bioethics and the European Society for Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care, and the Institute for Medical Ethics.

Dr Sabina Savadova is a Teaching Fellow in Childhood Studies and Practice at Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh. Recently, she was a Global Research Data Fellow at Childlight - Global Child Safety Institute and Research Associate for the Toddlers, Tech and Talk project at Lancaster University. 

Her research focuses on very young children and digital media; parental mediation; children’s digital media practices; early years; digital play; digital literacies; children’s rights; children’s rights in the digital age; children’s rights and AI; educational technologies (EdTech) and children’s rights; digital documentation in early years settings; online child sexual exploitation and abuse; qualitative research methods; digital participatory research; visual research methods; ethnography; digital ethnography; visual diary methods. 

Biography to be provided.

Biography to be provided.

Nicola Sugden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS). Her current research is an ethnography of health and care data innovation in Scotland as part of “Data and the Healthcare ‘Revolution’” (dare.ed.ac.uk), where she is following attempts to harmonise patient pathways and data journeys; the ways that storytelling and worldbuilding animate innovation; and how data practices are changing what it means to be a patient and a citizen.

Trained in the history and philosophy of science and influenced by Science and Technology Studies (STS), she has brought her overarching interests in human development and the life course, technoscience, and the politics of knowledge to bear on a series of empirical domains: her past work has interrogated evolution and genetics; psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry; child development; and disability. Her PhD thesis Winnicott's Worlds: A History of Psychoanalysis and Childhood in Britain, c.1920 - c.1975 was shortlisted for the Society for the History of Children and Youth Dissertation Prize in 2020. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, she was a Visiting Fellow at the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Washington, D.C..

Nicola is always interested in finding ways to bring her interests in science fiction and fantasy, crafting, play, and games together with her academic work, whether as theoretical touchpoints and activities for thinking, methods for engagement, or community-nurturing shared activities.

Biography to be provided.

Dr Elizabeth Vander Meer is a Teaching Fellow in Interdisciplinary Data Methods at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Elizabeth’s current research interests include One Health and One Welfare, considering feminist (or ecofeminist) care approaches that decentre the human, and the cultural dimensions of both development and implementation of these concepts. She also continues to be interested in cultural and ethical dimensions of wildlife trade and human wildlife conflict and coexistence, specifically with animals considered introduced ‘alien invasives’, big predators, and wild animals that are seen to spread zoonotic diseases. She tends to approach multispecies anthropological research through the lenses of phenomenology and biopolitics.

Dr Ivar Vargas Rivas is a Tutor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science.

His research examines the intricate political effects of governing modern autonomous warfare in the name of humanity, with a focus on contemporary humanitarian efforts to regulate artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous weapons. Ivar is currently writing his first book with Edinburgh University Press. The monograph, entitled “Humanising War: Killer Robots, the United Nations and the Paradoxes of Humanitarianism” will be published in the interdisciplinary book series Advances in Critical Military Studies. 

Ivar holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Melbourne. He is an Associate Fellow of Advance HE (AFHEA).

Dr Karolina Watroba is Lecturer in German Studies. She researches modern literature, film, and culture, specialising in European modernism and its global reception and continuing relevance today. She is working on a new project, provisionally titled "Weimar Worlds: A Transcultural Literary History of Interwar Germany".

Dr Evelyn Whorrall Campbell [they/them] is a researcher, writer and artist specialising in histories of trans and queer theoretical and cultural production. Their current research project, undertaken with support from the Leverhulme Trust, seeks to map the foreclosures of a British trans theoretical project, attending to the epistemic and infrastructural impasses that shaped moments of trans theorising in the latter half of the twentieth century. They have published on queer and trans theory; trans cinema and cultural production; gender and sexuality; and aesthetic theory for British Art Studies, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, world picture journal, and The SAGE Handbook of Gender. Evelyn is also finishing a monograph about sexual difference, the politics of representation, and the relationship between early queer and trans theory in the UK and US.

In 2024, they completed their PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on the history transgender cultural and theoretical production in 1990s Britain. Prior to joining Edinburgh College of Art, they held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. In addition, Evelyn has taught critical theory, film studies, history of art, and studio practice at the University of Cambridge; Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University; Royal College of Art; and London College of Communications, University of the Arts London.

Dr Yifang Xu is an Associate Tutor and dissertation supervisor at the Institute for Language Education and the Institute for Education, Community and Society, Moray House School of Education and Sport. With an interdisciplinary background in education, applied linguistics, and social psychology, she situates her academic work around Global Englishes, language attitudes, English language teaching, and the internationalisation of higher education to understand both the theoretical dimensions and the practical implications of these intersecting fields.

Dr Tommaso Zerbi is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. He is an architectural historian who specialises in responses to the past — with an emphasis on responses to the Middle Ages (medievalism) — in the modern world. While his first book project (Building the Risorgimento: Architecture, Medievalism, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Italy) scrutinised the intersections of architecture and medievalism vis-à-vis the making of Italy, his Leverhulme-funded second book project (The Colonial Middle Ages: Architecture, Revival and Italian Imperialism, 1911–36) investigates their exchanges in the material and ontological construction of the Italian Empire.