Come back to see our growing list of Affiliate Academic Staff! Affiliate academic staff have research, teaching, and/or outreach interests in genders and sexualities, and are engaged in the Gender Institute's intellectual, pedagogical, and outreach work. If you are interested in becoming Affiliate academic staff, please fill out our survey or get in touch with us directly!
Professor Richard Alston, Professor, Department of Classics
Professor Alston is a historian of Roman society and culture working primarily on the imperial period. His interest in gender began with work on military masculinity in the 1990s. His work on houses and households, predominantly in Roman Egypt, led to several articles on power relations with households and engagement with ethnography and social theory. From around 2007, he worked with Efi Spentzou on a project on identity and the self in Rome (c. 60 CE - c. 120 CE), focusing on the transformations of self in that period, with an inevitable gender component. That work deepened an engagement with Foucault, leading to publications on Rome and Foucault in 2017. His forthcoming work looks at the relationship between discourses of gender and imperialism in Rome and, as part of a project of the building of nineteenth-century Athens, at modernity and gender in the early nineteenth century.
Dr. Nisreen Ameen, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr. Nisreen's research interests include: digital marketing, human-computer interaction, consumer behaviour, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled customers service, security and ethics of retailers use of consumers' data, digital education, e-business and technology adoption. She is also interested in cross-national and cross-cultural research in developing, emerging and developed markets.
Dr Akil N. Awan Senior Lecturer, Department of History.
Dr Awan lectures in Modern History and Political Violence, and is co-director of the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre (CVTRC) at Royal Holloway. His research interests are focused around the history of terrorism, radicalization, social movements, protest, religion, masculinities, and new media. His books include Radicalisation and Media: Terrorism and Connectivity in the New Media Ecology (2011, Routledge), Jihadism Transformed: al-Qaeda and Islamic State’s Global Battle of Ideas (2016, Hurst/Oxford University Press), The Crusades in the Modern World (2019, Routledge), Radicalisation: Narratives and Identities (2021, Cambridge University Press) and Radicalisation in Global and Comparative Perspective (2021, Hurst/Oxford University Press).
Dr David Bullen, Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance
David Bullen is also a director, writer, and dramaturg. Both David's research and practice focus on feminist, queer, and ecocritical theatre work that adapts traditional forms and narratives, such as myth. He is co-director of the Theatre of the Gentle Furies, a collective of artists and academics who create politically charged adaptations of myth. David's doctoral thesis was a feminist performance history of Euripides' tragedy Bacchae; an article based on one of the chapters won the Society for Theatre Research's New Scholars Essay Prize in 2020. Currently he is working on two book-length projects: Greek Tragedy as Twenty-First Century British Theatre (Liverpool University Press) and, with Professor Elizabeth Schafer, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Phyllida Lloyd (Arden Shakespeare). At Royal Holloway, he co-convenes the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance's MA Theatre Directing; this involves close collaboration with the programme's lead tutor, Katie Mitchell, one of the UK's leading feminist theatre directors.
Dr Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Department of English
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University. She is the author of two books of poetry, Retroviral* (Veer 2018) and {Coteries} (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017), and the co-author of House of Mouse with SJ Fowler (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017). Her critical work includes two monographs, The Feminist Fourth Wave: Affective Temporality (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and Queer Troublemakers: Poetics of Flippancy (Bloomsbury 2019). She is currently developing a project on Feminist Nostalgia in collaboration with Dr Elizabeth Evans and completing a poetry book inspired by Emily Dickinson's figure of Death.
Professor Rita D’Alton-Harrison, Department of Law and Criminology
Professor D’Alton-Harrison is also a solicitor, author and legal education trainer and adviser. Rita has been teaching in higher education for over 21 years both on undergraduate and postgraduate professional courses and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. As well as pursuing her interests in pedagogical research, Rita also researches in the field of international surrogacy arrangements and has a particular interest in the different scientific methods enabling family formation and the legal response to such advancements. Rita writes about the intersectionality of race, class and gender in assistive reproduction and its relationship with intimacy and knowledge transfer and its subsequent impact on policy formation. Rita’s 2014 publication has been cited by the Supreme Court of Ireland, The Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission.
Dr Patrick Doyle, Lecturer and Undergraduate Education Lead, Department of History
Dr Patrick Doyle is a historian of nineteenth-century America with specific research interests in the Civil War era and the society and culture of the U.S. South. In particular, his research endeavours to understand the fluid nature of political loyalty, the idiosyncratic ways in which individuals prioritise their respective allegiances to family, community, state and nation within the crucible of war. As part of this ongoing research, Patrick has increasingly engaged with how conflict and war destabilize and reshape gender identities and power relations.
Dr Dawn-Marie Gibson, Senior Lecturer, Department of History
Dr Dawn-Marie Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century US History in the Department of History. My research focuses on the history of minority Muslim communities in the United States. I have published a number of books, chapters and articles on the history of African American Muslim communities. My publications include: Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam -co-authored with Professor Jamillah Karim (New York University Press, 2014), The Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan and the Men who follow him (Palgrave, 2016), The Ministry of Louis Farrakhan in the Nation of Islam (Bloomsbury, 2023). I am currently working on a book project on Imam Wallace D. Mohammed and Sunni Islam.
Dr Kat Gupta, Lecturer, Department of Politics, International Relations and Politics
Dr Kat Gupta (they/them) is a Lecturer in Political Communication at Royal Holloway University of London. Their research uses corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis to explore representation, marginalisation and power, with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and intersections of these with other identities. They are the author of Representation of the British Suffrage Movement (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor of The Emergence of Trans: Cultures, Politics and Everyday Lives (with Ruth Pearce, Igi Moon, and Deborah Lynn Steinberg: Routledge, 2019). Kat has performed their creative writing as part of CN Lester's Transpose series, and both contributed to and co-edited Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities (with Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, and MJ Barker: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020), a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Dr. Richard Hawley, Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics
Dr. Richard Hawley has been actively researching classical Greco-Roman gender since 1986 and teaching classical gender at Royal Holloway since 1992. He has published on various aspects of classical gender and is currently at work on an undergraduate textbook 'Gender in Classical Antiquity: Sources & Methods' for Wiley-Blackwell. He is especially keen to support the teaching of gender/identity at all levels, from schools to high-level research.
Dr Betty Jay, Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor, Department of English
Dr Betty Jay teaches courses on women's writing, gender and on constructions of masculinity with a particular focus on twentieth century and contemporary literature. Her research interests include the Bildungsroman, psychoanalysis, feminism, and trauma and her publications include work on slavery, autobiography, the Great War, Anne Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and film.
Professor Emily Jeremiah, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies
Emily Jeremiah is the author of three monographs: Troubling Maternity: Mothering, Agency, and Ethics in Women's Writing in German of the 1970s and 1980s (Maney/MHRA, 2003), Nomadic Ethics in Contemporary Women's Writing in German: Strange Subjects (Camden House, 2012), and Willful Girls: Gender and Agency in Contemporary Anglo-American and German Fiction (Camden House, 2018). She is co-editor, with Frauke Matthes, of Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture (Edinburgh German Yearbook 7 2013), and, with Gill Rye, Victoria Browne, Adalgisa Giorgio, and Abigail Lee Six, of Motherhood in Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Europe (Routledge, 2017). Women's Narratives of Ageing and Care, co-edited with Shirley Jordan, will appear from De Gruyter in 2025. Prof Jeremiah is also a prize-winning translator of Finnish poetry and fiction, and the author of two novellas: Blue Moments (Valley Press, 2020) and An Approach to Black (Reflex Press, 2021).
Dr Rebecca Jinks, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Department of History.
Rebecca Jinks is a historian of comparative genocide and humanitarianism. Her first project, Representing Genocide, examined the ways in which representations of the Holocaust have influenced how other genocides are understood and represented. Her current project encompasses gender, humanitarianism, and photography in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, focusing on Armenian women who were ‘absorbed’ into Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab households during 1915, and their humanitarian ‘rescue’ after 1918. This project will be developed further into a comparative study of the ‘genocidal captivity’ of Armenian women in 1915 and the Yezidi women held as sex slaves by ISIS after 2014.
Dr Lyn Johnstone, Lecturer in Comparative Politics, Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy.
Dr Johnstone's research focuses on African politics, relationships between Britain and African states - particularly Zimbabwe and Rwanda, and queer Africa.
Lyn is particularly interested in the ways in which state and non-state actors attempt to regulate sexualities in Africa and has recently published an article on queer worldmaking in Wanuri Kahiu’s film Rafiki that was banned in Kenya in 2018.
Lyn’s Leverhulme project explores the everyday realities of life for queer people in a number of states in southern Africa that have decriminalised homosexuality. Studies of sexuality rarely take Africa as their starting point for theorisation. The project intends to move away from western queer theory to listen to, and work with, the everyday experiences of queer African citizens as a starting point for emphasising knowledge production and theory-building from the ground up.
Dr Will Jones, Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy.
Most of Dr Jones’s work is on the contemporary politics of Central Africa, particularly Rwanda, how diasporas mobilise against authoritarian regimes, and authoritarianism and state-building more broadly. His work addresses:
1. The role of refugees in positive political change
2. The Contemporary Politics of Rwanda
3. State-Building and Africa’s ‘New Authoritarians’
4. Diaspora Mobilisation and the Political Agency of Refugees
Dr Daanika Kamal, Lecturer in Law,
Dr Kamal's research explores the intersection of gender, law and access to justice, with a particular focus on domestic abuse and violence against women and girls in both criminal and family law contexts. She has worked across the development, legal and academic sectors as a socio-legal researcher, investigating police practices, litigation strategies and judicial responses relating to gender-based violence. Daanika is the author of Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (OUP, 2025), the editor of The Feminisms of Our Mothers (Zubaan, 2024), and a member of the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies.
Dr Manhua Li is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy Department at Royal Holloway. She received her PhD in philosophy at École Normale Supérieure de Paris in 2020. Her research spans the areas of aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. Her writing attempts to bridge the European and Chinese philosophical traditions in a contemporary context, on topics such as gender, art psychotherapy, philosophy as way of life, biopolitics, and the pressing environmental crisis. Her upcoming monograph in French Le corps ascétique will be published in September 2023, by Éditions Kimé (Paris). Her personal website is manhuali.org.
Dr Emily Manktelow, Senior Lecturer in Global and Colonial History, Department of History
Dr Emily Manktelow's research explores the social, cultural and intimate histories of the British Empire and the colonial missionary movement in the nineteenth century. She is a founding member of the Christian Mission in Global History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research (UK) and has published widely on the history of missionary families, including her monograph Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier (Manchester University Press, 2013). Her most recent book presents a microhistorical investigation of sexual abuse in the South Seas Mission of the London Missionary Society: Gender, Power and Sexual Abuse in the Pacific: Rev Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties’ (Bloomsbury, 2018). Her current research is on memories and legacies of Empire in modern Britain.
Dr. Lidia Meras, Language Tutor in Spanish, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Dr Lidia Merás is a film historian with an interest in contemporary art. She has published widely on European cinemas, gender studies, transnational cinemas, and documentary. Her latest publications in the field of gender studies is a book chapter included in Female Agency and Documentary Strategies (EUP, 2018). Lidia’s current research centres on the representation of the Roma people (Gypsies) in documentary. She serves as the member of the editorial staff of Secuencias, a film journal published by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and is currently a member of the Centre for Visual Cultures at Royal Holloway.
Professor Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance and Executive Dean of the School of Performing and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway.
Professor Mock is the immediate Past Chair of the Theatre & Performance Research Association (TaPRA) ; and Principal Investigator for the Transitioning to Sustainable Production across the UK Theatre Sector project (co-commissioned by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and Arts Council England). In addition to a commitment to exploring and celebrating "green" theatre practices, her research – which takes the form of both performance and writing – tends to focus on gender, sexuality and bodies, with a specific interest in live art and stand-up comedy by Jewish women. She is the author or editor of five books, including Jewish Women on Stage, Film & Television (Palgrave, 2007), and is currently completing the Methuen Drama Handbook to Gender and Theatre (co-edited with Sean Metzger), as well as the Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance (co-edited with Hershini Young and Victor Ladron de Guevara).
Lisa Moravec is a writer, curator, critic, and body practitioner, working at the intersections of the performing and visual arts. Her arts-based research is informed by critical theory (intersectional gender studies, capitalist critique, post/humanism, and animal studies). She currently lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Universität Wien, and was recently a steirischer herbst fellow. She is preparing her second monograph on artistic critiques of AI technologies, identity-based forms of discrimination, and posthumanist aesthetics. She has led several scholarships, curatorial and editing projects, as well as academic and art criticism publications. Forthcoming books include Dressaged Animality: Human and Animal Actors in Contemporary Performance (Routledge, August 2024), which features the work of Rose English, the co-edited volume Posthumanist Approaches to A Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices (Bloomsbury, 2025), as well as an exhibition on Rose English and a newly commissioned performance programme at Museum der Moderne Salzburg (July 2024-Feb 2025).
Dr Jennifer Neville, Reader in Early Medieval English Literature
Dr Neville's most recent monograph, Truth is Trickiest: Enigmatic Tropes in the Exeter Book Riddles, was published by University of Toronto Press in July 2024. In 2020-23 she collaborated with Dr Megan Cavell (University of Birmingham) on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project about riddles and group identity, which has led to one published and one forthcoming article featuring feminist and gender-related readings of the important eighth-century writer and missionary to Germany, St Boniface.
Dr Nicola Phillips, Lecturer, Department of History
Dr Nicola Phillips is an expert in Gender History c. 1660-1830 and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her first book examined the legal, cultural, social and economic position of Women in Business, 1700-1850 (Boydell Press, 2006). Her second book, The Profligate Son; Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice and Financial Ruin in Regency England (OUP, Oxford & Basic Books, New York 2013) was listed as one of the top ten books of the year by The Washington Post. Much of her research focuses on female legal agency and the interaction between age, gender, family relationships and the intersection of criminal and civil law. She is currently writing about the famous C18th Whig lawyer Thomas Erskine, libel law and transatlantic legal culture; while also working on a broader research project about Gender, Legal Advocacy, Politics and Emotion in C18th Britain and America. Nicola also has a keen interest in gender history from all periods, particularly its public representation online and in the media, in film and at heritage sites including museums, archives and monuments. She is the Director of the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender and is the Editor of the Bedford Centre Blog (https://bedfordcentre.wordpress.com/). She was a member of the National Archives Advisory Group, Chair of the Historical Association Public History Committee and has acted as a Historical Consultant for organisations including The National Trust, Royal Mail, and Addidi Wealth Ltd, as well as contributing to radio and television programmes.
Professor Guiliana Pieri, Vice Principal (International), Professor of Italian and Visual Arts, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Giuliana Pieri (Dott. Lett. Pavia; MA Kent; DPhil Oxon) has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century visual culture, cultural history and popular literature. Her research interests are comparative and interdisciplinary, especially the intersection of the verbal and the visual, and the role of visual culture in the construction of Italian identity both in Italy and abroad.
Dr. Efi Spentzou, Reader in Latin Language and Literature, Department of Classics.
Dr Spentzou teaches undergraduates and masters students across both Latin and Greek literature and myth and their reception. Her research interest include the intersection of Classics and feminist theory engaging with and producing feminist studies in Latin poetry and modern Classical Reception.
