Chair: Anthony Julius
Anthony Julius, of Mishcon de Reya, is one of the UK’s most prominent litigation lawyers, renowned for defending Deborah Lipstadt in the David Irving Holocaust denial trial, and is the author of several major books including TS Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form and Transgressions: The Offences of Art.
Anthony marked the commencement of his role as Chair of the London Consortium with an inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Trembling Jurisprudence, or how to be mutildisciplinary’, which took place at SOAS, University of London, in November 2005.
Core Faculty
Core Faculty contribute to the core courses of the London Consortium Programmes. Where possible we have included information on their research interests, which give an indication of the kinds of dissertations and theses they would be willing to supervise. The Consortium also appoints many other external supervisors, who may come from academic or other institutions around the world. PhD students are assigned a first supervisor towards the end of the first term, MRes students during the second term.
Research Fellows
The London Consortium occasionally acts as host institution to Post-Doc Research Fellows. There are currently two Research Fellows attached to the Consortium:
Mike Doherty
Hilary Powell
Biographies
Parveen Adams is known for her work in the field of psychoanalysis and feminism on the journal m/f (1978-86), [selected papers in The Woman in Question (1990)]. Since then she has focussed on the use of psychoanalysis in the analysis of art. She guest edited a Special Issue ‘Rendering the Real’ for October (1992). Her books include The Emptiness of the Image (1996) and Art: Sublimation or Symptom (2003). She has published extensively on Cronenberg’s Crash, most recently, ‘The Sexual Relation in James Joyce and in Cronenberg’s Crash’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks (2005). Her work on Thomas Demand has been published in Grey Room (2006). Her most recent publication is ‘Art and the time of Repetition’ for the Generali Foundation in Vienna (2007). Other recent work has considered the Chapman brothers and their relation to Goya (2007). She is on the Board of numerous journals including the Journal of Lacanian Studies and Savoir et Clinique. Parveen teaches on the Pychoanalysis and Contemporary Society MA at Brunel University. She is currently working on what a ‘political’ art might be.
Daniel Albright, Professor of Literature, Harvard University
Samantha Ashenden BA (Kingston), MPhil (Cantab.), PhD (Lond.) is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck College. She has particular interests in contemporary social and political theory, feminist theory and sociology of gender, governance and theories of the state, legal theory and the sociology of law. She has published articles on feminist theory, child sexual abuse, and on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann. She is co-editor of Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory (1999), and author of Governing Child Sexual Abuse: Negotiating the Boundaries of Public and Private, Law and Science (2004). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Economy and Society and is reviews editor for the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
Patrizia di Bello, Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography, Birkbeck College, University of London
Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, Melbourne
Jane Bennett, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, and a founding member of the journal theory & event. She is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Thoreau’s Nature (2002), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1987). Her current project, tentatively entitled Vital Material: The Political Life of Things, seeks to bear witness to the force of “things” — e.g., stem-cells, food, electricity, and trash — in public life, of entities and energies that are crucial to politics but whose power and agentic capacities tend to get effaced by all the attention paid to the actions of human persons..
Louise Bethlehem, is currently Head of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is also a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. Her research interests include gender and postcolonial theory, as well as South African literary and cultural historiography. Her book, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath was released by Unisa/Brill in 2006. A new collection Violence and Non-Violence in Africa, co-edited with Pal Ahluwalia and Ruth Ginio, was published by Routledge in 2007.
Claire Bishop, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, University of Warwick
Joanna Bourke, Professor, Department of History, Classics and Archeology, Birkbeck College,
Augustus Casely-Hayford, Director, inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts)
Howard Caygill, Professor of History, Goldsmiths College, London
Steven Connor is the Academic Director of the London Consortium and Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College. His books include Postmodernist Culture (1989), Theory and Cultural Value (1992), The English Novel in History 1990-1995 (1995), Dumbstruck - A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2003) and Fly (2006). He is currently at work on an historical poetics of the air. He has many interests in 19th and 20th century literature as well as in cultural theory and history. Specific areas of interest include magic; medicine; auditory culture; the cultural life of objects and the material imagination; relations between culture and science; the philosophy of animals; and the history of the senses. A full list of publications, along with the texts of many unpublished essays, broadcasts and lectures can be found at www.stevenconnor. com.
Mark Cousins is Director of General Studies and Head of the Graduate Programme in Histories and Theories, at the Architectural Association. He is Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and also Visiting Professor at the Architecture School of the University of Navarre at Pamplona. He has been a member of the Arts Council and consultant to the practice of Zaha Hadid. He has written on the relation of the human sciences and psychoanalysis. He has published Michel Foucault (with Athar Hussain). His series of articles on ‘The Ugly’ in AA Files has been translated into several languages. He has contributed to many journals including Harvard Design Magazine, m/f, October, Economy and Society, and Art History. His most recent publication is the Introduction to a new translation of a selection of Freud’s papers on The Unconscious in a series edited by Adam Phillips for Penguin (2005). Recent work is on Odysseus and the history of homecoming; and the concept of ‘scape’ which is embedded in landscape.
Barry Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at Middlesex University. He has an interest in post-war British culture and has recently written essays for two Tate catalogues on aspects of the 1960s. An essay on ‘Dinosaur Design’ was published in 2006 and he is writing a book on The Haunted House. He edits the Location series for Reaktion Books and is involved in a number of projects on ‘Suburbia’. Recent work includes an essay on ‘Negotiated Modernity’ in the proceedings of the ‘Making a New World Conference’ [Louvain ‘06, published 2007].
Marko Daniel has been Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern since May 2006. Before then, he was Director of the Graduate School at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where he was responsible for the School’s PhD students in art history and theory, fine art, design, museum studies and conservation. Between 2000 and 2003, he was a visiting lecturer at the Center for Art and Technology, Taipei National University of Arts, where he set up a critical theory programme for visual artists, musicians and computer programmers working across a wide range of electronic and multi-media arts. He curated a show by the Taiwanese artist Tsui Kuang-yu at City Crevice, Winchester Gallery in 2006.
Costas Douzinas, Professor, School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London
Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London
Paul Edwards, Professor of English, Bath Spa University
Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director, Institute of Contemporary Arts
Joanne Finkelstein, Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts, Victoria University, Australia
Simon Frith, Professor of Film and Media, University of Stirling
Nicholas Gane, Department of Sociology, University of York
Paul Hamilton, Professor of English, Queen Mary College, University of London
Ian Henderson, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College London
Gillian Howie (B.A (Exeter) PhD (Jesus College, Cambridge)) is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool and Director of the Institute for Feminist Theory and Research. She is author of Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (2002), editor of Critical Quarterly’s special issue on higher education, ‘Universities in the UK: Drowning by numbers’ (2005), editor of Women: A Cultural Review’s special issue on ‘Gender and Philosophy’ (2003), and co-editor of Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education (2001) and Third Wave Feminism (2004), part of the IFTR conference series. Recent work has been on feminism and (historical) materialism.
Richard Humphreys is Curator: Programme Research at Tate Britain and Deputy Chairman of the London Consortium, of which he was a founding member. He has organised many international conferences and events and is author of books on Futurism, Kurt Schwitters, British landscape art, the history of British art, Wyndham Lewis and contributing editor of a book of essays on Ezra Pound and the visual arts complementing an exhibition for which he was co-curator. He has been a curator of various displays of British art at Tate Britain from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and was lead curator of the major BBC TV-linked exhibition’ Picture of Britain’ (2005). His interests are broad-ranging across the arts, social sciences and humanities, reflecting his diverse roles at Tate over many years.
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Senior Lecturer / Director, Arts and Humanities Graduate School, University of Glasgow
Esther Leslie, Reader in Political Aesthetics, English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, London
Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer, English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, London
Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at Pittsburgh University and Professor of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. He has published widely on film and literature with particular emphasis on Joyce, Godard and topics in the history and theory of language. His most recent publications are T.S. Eliot and The Butcher Boy. He has been producing documentary and fiction films since 1985. A recent production was Chris Marker’s OWLS AT NOON: PRELUDE THE HOLLOW MEN at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was a founder member of the London Consortium, its Chairman from 1995-2005, and is now Associate Director.
Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, is published by Alma Books in the UK and Vintage in the US, as well as in several foreign languages, and is currently being adapted for cinema by FilmFour/Cowboy Films. His novel Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism, is out with Alma Books in the UK and will appear in the US with Vintage in 2008/9. His non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books, is published by Granta Books in the UK and will appear with Soft Skull Press in the US in 2008. Tom is also founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of artists, writers, philosophers and political activists.
Peter Morris has been in charge of research at the Science Museum since 2004, having been Senior Curator of Chemistry since joining the museum in 1991. Before then, he was the first Royal Society-British Academy Research Fellow in the History of Science and Assistant Director (programs) at the Centre for the History of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published on the history of the chemical industry and the history of chemistry, including a book on the development of modern chemical instrumentation, and is currently investigating the relationship between innovation in the chemical industry and the fear of overpopulation. He also has a long-standing interest in the dichotomy between natural and synthetic.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). Her films include, with Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980), and with Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994).
Andrea Philips, Department of Visual Art, Goldsmiths College, London.
Hilary Powell is an artist based in London. She completed her interdisciplinary PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmith’s College, University of London last year and is carrying on the research and practice started within her thesis – focusing on the potential of creative practices operating in the ‘junkspaces’ and ruins of the city. Hilary is committed to opening up this potential of neglected urban space to new events and perception and does so through both research and practice with her projects and collaborations. She is a partner with Dan Edelstyn in the film production company Optimistic Productions and they are developing a ‘specialism’ in this urban field and reaching a wide and varied audience. Their series of Three Minute Wonders for Channel 4 on ‘Subverting the City’ opened up a range of collaborations particularly with the Office for Subversive Architecture. Their most recent commission, ‘The Games’ continues this interdisciplinary practice in a film that involves staging a surreal alternative Olympics on the sites set to become the 2012 London Olympic Village. It was co commissioned by Urbis and is now showing in their exhibition ‘Play: Experience the Adventure of Our Cities’ and Architecture Week 2007. Hilary is excited to be involved in the London Consortium and was attracted by its interdisciplinary focus and work with various media outputs.
David Reason, School of the History and Philosophy of Art, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Denise Riley is Professor of Literature with Philosophy in the School of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Aura Satz is an artist and writer. She completed a theory/practice PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she held a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Sculpture Fellowship. She has taught at the Slade, Central Saint Martin’s, and the History of Art Department of UCL, and been invited to speak at venues such as the Henry Moore Institute, Baltic, the Hayward Gallery and Goldsmiths College. She is a regular contributor to Tema Celeste, and has published in a variety of journals, including Performance Research, New Formations, New York Arts magazine, Journal of Visual Culture, and the Financial Times. She is co-editor of Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance (Peter Lang publishers, 2008), and has published essays on tableaux vivants, iconoclasm, automata, phantom limbs and spiritualism. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including FACT (Liverpool), Site Gallery (Sheffield), Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento (Italy), De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea), the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland), Whitechapel Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum (London). She is currently developing a film project on musical automata with Film and Video Umbrella, and is supported by Artsadmin. Her previous project can be seen online at www.iamanagram.com.
John Sellars is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. Before joining UWE he held a post-doctoral fellowship at King’s College London and a junior research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. His research interests span both ancient philosophy and modern European philosophy, with a particular interest in points of connection between the two. He has written two books on ancient Stoicism (The Art of Living , 2003, and Stoicism , 2006) and recently edited a collection entitled “Encounters with Ancient Thought” (in Angelaki , 2006). John is a Fellow of the Consortium.
Daniel Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University, USA
Isolde Standish, Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London
Brett Steele, Chairman, Architectural Association School of Architecture
Dimitris Tziovas, Professor of Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham
Alan Walker, Reverend of Hapstead Garden Suburb, London and regular contributor to BBC radio
Michael Weinstock is an architect and urbanist who is Diploma Master and Head of Technical Studies at the Architectural Association.
Patrick Wright is an author and broadcaster. His first book, On Living in an Old Country (1985), tracked the rise of ‘national heritage’ as a theme in post-war British life. A Journey Through Ruins (1991) told the story of the Thatcher years through the experience of Dalston Lane, a not entirely distressed street in East London. The Village that Died for England (1995) used the story of an area of land requisitioned to form a military firing range to trace the relations between nature and technology in the twentieth century. More recently he has published Tank: the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000) – a book that treats the tank as a partly cultural phenomenom, which was engineered out of Edwardian fantasy, and still works as a symbol of overbearing power. Patrick has written regularly for diverse magazines and newspapers, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Independent and the Observer. He has been a presenter of Radio 3’s Night Waves and continues to make documentaries on cultural themes for both BBC Radio 3 and 4. His television work includes ‘The River’, a four part BBC2 series on the Thames (1999), ‘A Day to Remember’, a documentary history of Remembrance Day, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1999, and a number of more recent programmes on BBC4. He has been a member of the Art Panel of the Arts Council of England, and was co-curator of Tate Britain’s exhibition of Stanley Spencer’s work in 2001. He is a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University, and has recently completed a book entitled Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. For full details of Patrick’s work, visit his website at www.patrickwright.net.
