Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations and Head of Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research addresses issues of genders and sexualities and security, with foci on politically violent women, feminist war theorizing, sexualities in global politics, and political methodology. She teaches, consults, and lectures on gender in global politics, and on international security. Her work has been published in more than 50 books and journals in political science, law, gender studies, international relations, and geography.

Dr. Sjoberg’s recent books include Women as Wartime Rapists (New York University Press, 2016), (with J. Samuel Barkin) Interpretive Quantification (University of Michigan Press, 2017), (with Caron E. Gentry and Laura J. Shepherd) Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security (2018), (with J. Samuel Barkin) International Relations’ Last Synthesis? (Oxford, 2019), and (with Jessica Peet) Gender and Civilian Victimization(Routledge, 2019). Her recent articles have explored failure in critical security studies, characterizations of women in and around the Islamic State, what counts as feminist work in Security Studies, sexuality in US-Cuba rapprochement, gendered insecurity, and everyday counterterrorism. Dr. Sjoberg has recently taught in the areas of international law, gender and armed conflict, international relations theorizing, and international security.

Josephine Carr is the Assistant Director of the Gender Institute and is the first point of contact if you have any questions regarding the Gender Institute however big or small and may be contacted by email, Josephine.Carr@rhul.ac.uk. 

Josephine is currently leading the Archives project #historyofwomenseducation and is studying part-time for a MSc by Research "The gendered development of Governance at Royal Holloway and Bedford Women’s College’s Governance 1849-2020"

Emily Gee is a PhD student in Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. Her project, "A feminist analysis of the perspectives pf peacekeeping forces and international actors on sexual abuse and exploitation", examines the phenomenon of "peacekeeper babies" as examples of how international organisations are failing women and girls.  Her research interests surround gender-based violence/exploitation and the Responsibility to Protect (P2P).

Since 2020, Emily has been working with Professor Sjoberg on her upcoming project, Sexual Relations as International Relations. Supported by the British Academy, the project builds on feminist and queer theorising to provide a new perspective on the co-constitution of the state and sex in global politics.

See below for our growing list of Associate Academic Staff! Associate faculty members participate in the continued development of the educational, research, and outreach missions of the Gender Institute by serving on one of its core committees. Associate faculty members also serve as discussants at some of our events, and contribute to our curricular or co-curricular offerings. If you are interested in becoming Associate academic staff, please fill out our survey or get in touch with us directly! 

School of Law and Social Sciences

r.barn@rhul.ac.uk                       @ProfRaviBarn

Ravinder Barn is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Law & Criminology at Royal Holloway University of London. At RHUL, she is the Head of the Families & Children Research Cluster. Much of her academic writing is international, and comparative in scope, focused particularly on family, children, and gender. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and a member of the Social Policy and Social Work sub-panel for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2021.

Ravinder is the author / editor of eight books and over 100 journal papers or book chapters. Ravinder writes on marginality and discrimination, principally on the topics of gender and violence, child and youth welfare, criminal justice, and the sociology of technology. Her research on child welfare and migrant groups is highly regarded nationally and internationally. Ravinder's empirical work on sexual violence and the judiciary in India, has been among the top 10 'most read' papers in the British Journal of Criminology. Ravinder is a mixed-methods researcher. Her academic base is inter-disciplinary and spans social policy, sociology, social work, and criminology. As Principal Investigator, she has successfully led on a number of externally funded research studies. Ravinder's empirical research has been funded by many organisations including the Economic and Social Research Council, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Social Tech Trust, Former Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), Canadian High Commission, Department of Health, Family Rights Group, and the European Union. In undertaking policy related research, Ravinder has worked in partnership with numerous statutory and non-statutory organisations including many local authorities across England, National Children's Bureau, First Key, Youth Justice Board, Council of Europe and the European Union. Ravinder's research is empirically and theoretically grounded and key findings are disseminated to a wide variety of potential beneficiaries ranging from academic researchers, central and local government, international organizations including the Council of Europe and the European Union, and third sector organizations.

Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy

Michelle.Bentley@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Michelle Bentley is Reader in International Relations and Director of the Centre for International Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has authored two books: Weapons of Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy: The Strategic Use of a Concept (Routledge, 2014) and Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo: Exploiting the Forbidden (Manchester University Press, 2016). 

Department of Music

Mark.Berry@rhul.ac.uk

Mark Berry is an intellectual historian and musicologist with interests running from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. His most recent books are Arnold Schoenberg (London: Reaktion, 2019) and The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). He writes regularly on music in performance for his blog, Boulezian, and is currently writing a study of Mozart’s Operas.

University of Edinburgh

Sarah.Childs@ed.ac.uk 

Sarah Childs was Professor of Politics & Gender at Royal Holloway, University of London until May 2022. Previously she was Professor of Politics & Gender at Birkbeck College, University of London (2017-2020), and the University of Bristol (2009-2014; lecturer and SL 2003-2009). Sarah’s research centres on the theory and practice of women’s representation, gender and political parties, parliaments and institutional change. Key articles have been published in Political Studies, Politics and Gender, Parliamentary Affairs and Party Politics. In 2020, and writing with Karen Celis (VUB), Sarah will publish with Feminist Democratic Representation (Oxford University Press, US). Other books include: New Labour’s Women MPs, 2004; Women and British Party Politics, 2008); Sex Gender and the Conservative Party, with Paul Webb,  2012 and based on three-year ESRC grant; Gender, Conservatism and Representation, and Deeds and Words, 2015, edited with Celis and Campbell respectively, both by ECPR press. For 2020-21 she has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to write a monograph, Building Feminist Institutions, based on her experiences re-gendering the UK House of Commons. In 2015 Sarah received the UK Political Studies Association ‘Special Recognition Award’.

Sarah Childs is an impactful academic: In 2009-10 she was the gender Special Adviser to the UK Parliament’s ‘Speaker’s Conference’ on representation and in 2014 the Special Adviser to the All Party Parliamentary Group, Women in Parliament Inquiry.  Following a secondment to the House of Commons in 2015-2016 funded by the ESRC, Sarah published The Good Parliament (TGP) Report which identified a series of reforms to make the UK House of Commons diversity sensitive. On her recommendation a new group of MPs, The Commons Reference Group on Representation and Inclusion was established by Mr Speaker. In the years since publication of TGP, some 18 recommendations have been adopted; most notably in 2019, the introduction of proxy voting for MPs on ‘babyleave’. Having advised the Reference group during 2016-18, in 2019 Sarah advised the Women and Equalities Committee's inquiry into the UK Gender Sensitive Parliament Audit.

University of Birmingham

l.cianetti@bham.ac.uk

Licia Cianetti is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Birmingham, formerly Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Hollowat. Her research deals with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in ethno-culturally divided democracies, both at the national and the local level, drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship on representation. She is the author of The Quality of Divided Democracies: Minority Inclusion, Exclusion, and Representation in the New Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2019). Her current research on "What happened to the multicultural city?", funded by the Leverhulme Trust,  looks at the effects of austerity and nativism on ideas and policies of inclusion in four European cities (see her recent article for Urban Studies). She is interested in methodological innovation and interdisciplinary methodologies and her work combines process-tracing, discourse analysis, and ethnography-inspired collaborations with artists. She is also an area specialist in Central and Eastern Europe and writes and teaches on the politics of the region (see for example a recent East European Politics SI she co-edited).

Department of History

Kate.Cooper@rhul.ac.uk         @kateantiquity

Professor Kate Cooper is a Professor of History whose writing and teaching centres on the world of the Mediterranean in the Roman period, with an interest in daily life, religion, and the family, and the inter-connected problems of martyrdom, resistance movements, and religious violence. One of her distinctive interests is how ancient narrative sources used rhetorical patterns shared with fiction, especially motifs of moral purity such as virginity and martyrdom. Kate received her PhD at Princeton, where her doctoral dissertation, which became her first book, The Virgin and the Bride (Harvard, 1993), traced the connections between the ancient novel and the early lives of the Christian saints. This was followed by a thread of empirical work on women and their position in society and the household, re-framing the fall of the Roman Empire in this context with the monograph The Fall of the Roman Household (Cambridge University Press 2007). Her most recent monograph, Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (Atlantic Books 2013), offers a what has become an incredibly exciting area of research. At the same time Kate has been involved with historical broadcasting (links to clips at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Cooper) and writing for a general audience. Kate's individual and collaborative research projects on the problem of religion and violence have been supported by major awards from the RCUK Partnership for Conflict, Crime, and Security Research (Constantine's Dream: Belonging, Deviance and the Problem of Violence in Early Christianity, 2009-12) and the Leverhulme Trust (Major Research Fellowship 2012-15, for a project on The Early Christian Martyr Acts: A New Approach to Ancient Heroes of Resistance). Kate has worked to bring together the work of established and younger scholars in multiple publication projects, including eight collected volumes. A collection forthcoming from Cambridge University Press Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds, co-edited with Jamie Wood, brings together the themes of violence and the household. One of Kate’s current projects addresses the boundary between fiction and history, considering how historical fiction can open new perspectives on the ancient world. A monograph in preparation, Augustine and Monnica, re-visits the landscape of Augustine’s Confessions, written in what is now coastal Algeria around the year 400, considering how the techniques of historical fiction can illuminate one of the best-known but still impossible-to-pin-down families of the ancient Mediterranean.

School of Business and Management

R.Deem@rhul.ac.uk                    @rosemdee

Professor Rosemary Deem is Emerita Professor of Higher Education Management and Senior Research Fellow in the Doctoral School. She was Vice-Principal for Equality and Diversity at Royal Holloway 2017-2019. She has also been a professor of Education and Dean of Social Sciences at Lancaster University UK (1991- 2000) and at Bristol University UK (2001-2009) where she was also Vice-Dean for Research in Social Sciences and Law from 2006-2009. She has twice been Chair of the British Sociological Association, is a former joint-editor of The Sociological Review, and since 2013 a co-editor of the journal Higher Education (Springer). She was chair of the UK Council for Graduate Education 2015-2018. She has been working on equality and diversity in education for over 40 years (first book Women and Schooling 1978) and has published many articles and book chapters on this topic and also on management, leadership and governance, with a focus on higher education from 1996 onwards.

Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy

Suki.Finn@rhul.ac.uk

Suki Finn is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. Her diverse areas of research span metaphysics, logic, feminism, queer theory, epistemology, metaphilosophy, and the philosophy of science. Her current interests are in applied philosophy, specifically the metaphysics of pregnancy, the epistemology of love, and queer logic.

Dr. Finn has published her work in the online magazine Aeon and in various academic journals, which can be viewed on Academia or PhilPeople. She is the editor of the forthcoming book Women of Ideas with Oxford University Press which is a collection of ‘Philosophy Bites’ interviews with women. She is represented by Ben Clark at the Soho Agency with whom she is preparing a book proposal on the topic of queer reasoning.

Dr. Finn is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is on the Executive Committee for the Society for Women in Philosophy UK, and on the Council for the Royal Institute of Philosophy. In her other life, Suki is a musician. Other information can be found on her website: www.sukifinn.com

Department of Economics

J.Frank@rhul.ac.uk

Jeff received his PhD from Yale University.  He joined Royal Holloway in 1994 and established the new department of Economics, which is now rated among the top 10 in the UK.  Jeff has taught at the Universities of Sussex, Essex and Birkbeck College in England, and the University of California (San Diego and Berkeley) and Harvard University.  His most recent academic papers report research on the gender pay gap, as well as studies of sexual orientation and managerial authority and earnings.  Earlier work has explored ethnicity as well as gender pay and representation gaps.  Highly cited seminal work includes a study of the dynamics of part-time and temporary work and the impact on women’s careers over time.  A major research project concerns the economic prospects for the newer generations.  Part of this has focussed upon universities, which was the subject of Jeff’s most recent book with colleagues, English Universities in Crisis.  Throughout his career, Jeff has published on his PhD topic of monetary and fiscal policy, and he is currently exploring the impacts on the prospect for the newer generations.

Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance

Maria.EstradaFuentes@rhul.ac.uk

Before coming to Royal Holloway in 2019, Maria Estrada Fuentes was Guest Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam (2018) and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick (2017-2020). My research interests include arts-based conflict transformation, gender and complex victimhood, politics and performance. I am co-investigator in the international research project Towards a Moral Grammar of Transitional Justice: Secondary Care Practices to Support Conflict Transformation in Colombia (2018-2020), a public–private partnership between the University of Warwick (UK), Los Andes University and the Reincorporation and Normalization Agency (Colombia).

Department of Classics

liz.gloyn@rhul.ac.uk

Liz's research interests explore the intersection between Latin literature, the Roman family and ancient philosophy; she also has considerable expertise in classical reception. She is the author of The Ethics of the Family in Seneca (2017) and Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (2019).

Department of Social Work

Anna.Gupta@rhul.ac.uk

Anna Gupta is Professor of Social Work. Her research interests include child protection/ welfare policy and practice with families living in poverty, Black and minority ethnic children and families, children in care and adoption. Her recent work has included participatory approaches and co-production with families living in poverty who have experienced social work services. A recent publication, Protecting Children: A Social Model, is a co-written book with Profs Brid Featherstone, Kate Morris and Sue White.

The Bodies and Material Culture Research Group

The Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender

Department of History

Jane.Hamlett@rhul.ac.uk

Professor Jane Hamlett is a historian of modern British society and culture with a focus on the home, the family and the material and visual world. At RHUL, Professor Hamlett co-directs the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender and the Bodies and Material Culture Research Group. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy and a member of the executive committee for the British Association of Victorian Studies. Professor Hamlett co-edits the The Journal of Victorian Culture. Broadly, Professor Hamlett's research interests lie in the histories of society and culture in modern Britain, women and gender, the family, intimacy and emotion, and material and visual culture. 

Department of Geography

harriet.hawkins@rhul.ac.uk

Harriet's research focuses on the intersection of geography and the arts and humanities. Interested in working beyond disciplines, much of her work evolves collaboratively with creative practitioners and arts organisations. Exploring ideas and practices of creativity, the imagination and aesthetics, Harriet seeks to develop feminist, post-human and decolonial approaches to key geographical themes, including the environment. Harriet is active in research groups and task forces around the world that seek to build feminist academies, as well as supporting the development of discussions of well-being and mental health in academic contexts.

Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 

Ruth.Hemus@rhul.ac.uk

Ruth Hemus is a Professor in French and Visual Arts and Head of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her research specialism is avant-garde women, spanning literature, performance and the visual arts. She is the author of Dada’s Women (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Poetry of Céline Arnauld: From Dada to Ultra-Modern (Legenda, 2020). Ruth has worked with arts’ institutions in the U.K. including The National Theatre, Southbank Centre, and Hatton Gallery Newcastle, and is one of the co-organisers of Royal Holloway’s annual partnership activities at Tate Exchange, led by the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance. Further afield she has collaborated on exhibitions and catalogues in Denmark, Italy, Norway and Switzerland. Underpinning each of these ventures is a project to recognise diverse and sometimes neglected radical women artists. Ruth’s current project centres on creative and outreach work arising from her research into Dada’s women. The team, comprising Ruth, the composer Sonia Allori, and visual artist Vaia Paziana, stages workshops and installations characterised by accessibility and interactivity. Among the course modules Ruth convenes at Royal Holloway are ‘Wanton Women: Artists and Writers of the French Avant-Garde’ and ‘Gender and Clothing in 20th Century Literature and Culture’, each of which discusses the impact of gender on cultural production, representation and reception. Ruth’s full professional profile can be read here.

School of Business and Management

Vera.Hoelscher@rhul.ac.uk   @VeraDorothea

Dr. Vera Hoelscher is a Lecturer in Marketing at Royal Holloway. Her current research focusses on gender issues such as reverse marriage proposals, public space and the female body, as well as female heroism. Vera is particularly interested in how intersectional feminism can inform contemporary teachings of business, management and marketing by giving voice to authors overlooked in the canon of classics.

Department of Law and Criminology

Jenny.Korkodeilou@rhul.ac.uk

Dr. Jenny Korkodeilou is a criminologist/psychologist with research expertise and strong interest(s) in stalking/harassment, gender-based violence and responses, violence against women, critical and cultural criminology, interpersonal violence and harms. She still believes in criminological imagination and social inquiry, keen on using creative (qualitative) research methods, and with unfailing interest in feminist theory and interdisciplinary thinking. She has taught, convened and led seminars for a wide range of criminology topics in different HE institutions in England and Wales, namely Universities of Swansea, Sheffield, Salford and Durham.

School of Business and Management

Olga.Kravets@rhul.ac.uk

Dr. Olga Kravets is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Royal Holloway's School of Management. Her research interests lie with the ideological aspects of consumption and markets. Her latest research critically examined the gendered tropes and politics in promoting social entrepreneurship. She is currently co-editing a volume titled "The Routledge Companion to Marketing and Feminism" (forthcoming in 2021).   

Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy

Daniela.Lai@rhul.ac.uk

Daniela Lai is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on transitional justice and peacebuilding, the politics and political economy of international interventions and post-war transitions. She has a particular interest in the gendered dimension of these processes and in feminist approaches to the study of justice, peace and political economy. Daniela also writes about methodology and methods in IR, research ethics and fieldwork. Daniela’s book Socioeconomic Justice: International Intervention and Transition in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.

Department of English

amber.lascelles@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Amber Lascelles (she/ her) is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research explores how fiction intervenes in global Black feminisms, examining manifestations of solidarity through embodied communication in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Bernardine Evaristo. She is also an editor at Feminist Review journal.

Department of History

Victoria.Leonard@rhul.ac.uk

Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Postdoctoral Researcher in Late Ancient History, as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Connected Clerics. Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-604 CE)’, at Royal Holloway, University London and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Austrian Academy of Sciences, University of Vienna. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, violence, and theories of the body in antiquity.

School of Law and Social Sciences, Department of Law and Criminology

Jill.Marshall@rhul.ac.uk

@JillMarshallLAW

Professor Jill Marshall is a full time Law Professor in the Department of Law and Criminology in the School of Law and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway where she has worked since August 2017. Her previous appointments were at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Leicester. Before becoming an academic, she was a senior international litigation lawyer. Professor Marshall is an expert in feminist legal theory and the human rights of women. Her work connects law with justice, humanity, care and belonging, particularly in relation to women’s lives, and interrogates the role law plays in creating, representing and protecting certain aspects of our identity and personal freedom. She has written widely on these topics including three monographs, Humanity, Freedom and Feminism; Human Rights Law and Personal Identity; and Personal Freedom through Human Rights Law?. Dr. Marshall's current projects include working on a GCRF network grant in Uganda; confidentiality in giving birth in times of conflict and peace, Islamic and other dress bans, and law and humanities research using the work of Georges Perec.

School of Business and Management

lauren.mccarthy@rhul.ac.uk @genderCSR

Dr. Lauren McCarthy is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Sustainability and Co-Director of the Centre for Research into Sustainability, housed at the School of Business and Management. Her research focus on gender equity and equality related to corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Her fieldwork has taken her to Ghana, Tanzania and recently, India, where she has researched 'women's empowerment' programmes in businesses' supply chains. Lauren is also researching online feminist activism; and men's roles in enabling or constraining action on gender equality. She has been published in journals such as: Organization Studies; Business Ethics Quarterly; Gender, Work & Organization; & Business & Society. She teaches business ethics, responsible business and diversity and inclusion across undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance

Rebecca.McCutcheon@rhul.ac.uk

Rebecca is a theatre director and practice-led researcher, working across site-based practice, feminist performance and feminist theatre history. She completed her practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway funded by the AHRC. Her practice connects text-based contemporary theatre practice with forms and techniques relating to site-led, immersive theatre practice, installation and devised work. Her research interests sit at the intersection of feminist performance histories, contemporary performance practice and cultural geography. Her research has explored affective contagion in audience participation and the generative site. Outputs include articles for Dance and Theatre Performance Training Journal, Early Theatre, a chapter in Theatres of Contagion, and site-based performances at Dilston Grove in Southwark (A Testimony and a Silence), and The Hannah Barry Gallery, Peckham (Cary: The Mariam Cycles). Rebecca founded Lost Text/Found Space, direcing Til We Meet in England, an Arts Council funded production created for Safehouse in Peckham. Other site-based directing includes Dido, Queen of Carthage in the House of St Barnabas in Soho & Kensington Palace, Still Life at the Aldwych tube station and and The Round Dance at the Roundhouse, Camden, working in partnership with London Underground, Historic Royal Palaces, St Barnabas Refuge trust, and the Roundhouse trust. Recent directing includes Mirabel for Chris Goode & Co (Ovalhouse), Vincent River by Philip Ridley (Trafalgar Studios) and Town Hall by Caridad Svich for Camden People’s Theatre Calm Down Dear feminist theatre festival 2019 and tour. She has also held roles at the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre & Young Vic Theatre.

Department of Law and Criminology

caterina.nirta@rhul.ac.uk

Caterina is a theorist whose research broadly focuses on conflictual relations between normativity and various forms of individual, social, legal, corporeal disobedience. Her research interests are in social and critical theory, gender and sexuality, Continental philosophy, feminist philosophy. Part of her work has dealt with trans embodiment, forms of corporeal and spatial dissonance and gender recognition, where she has published extensively. She is currently in the early stage of a new project that, adopting a qualitative mixed-method approach, investigates the gap in significance, perception and expectation between the projected ideal of gender imbedded in the GIDS assessment criteria for gender dysphoria in young people and the gender diverse and inclusive landscape young people navigate today.

She is the author of Marginal Bodies, Trans Utopias (Routledge, 2018).

Department of Law and Criminology

Elizabeth.pearson@rhul.ac.uk

Dr Elizabeth Pearson is a Lecturer in Criminology with the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre at Royal Holloway. Her research interests are in gender, extremism and counter-extremism.  Elizabeth is the lead author of the 2021 book Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter, which explores the gender dynamics of extremism and countering violent extremism in five countries: Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. Elizabeth's ESRC-funded PhD research at King's College London focused on masculinities in Islamist and radical right movements in the UK. A book based on this work is forthcoming in 2023. Elizabeth has written on gender  and the West African jihadist group Boko Haram, and worked with both RUSI and the European Union Technical Assistance to Nigeria's Evolving Security Challenges (EUTANS) providing CT and CVE training in Nigeria. Currently she is working with the REASSURE project to explore the negative impacts on academics of online extremism research. Elizabeth is an Editorial Board member of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) and an Associate Fellow at RUSI. Before academia, Elizabeth worked as a radio journalist, mainly for the BBC.

Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy

jennifer.piscopo@rhul.ac.uk

Jennifer M. Piscopo is Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research focuses on women’s political representation and gender and elections in Latin America, the United States, and the globe. She has published in over 30 peer-reviewed journals, including The American Political Science Review ,The American Journal of Political Science, Social Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Latin American Research Review, Latin American Politics and Society, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. With Susan Franceschet and Mona Lena Krook, she is editor of The Impact of Gender Quotas (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her work also has appeared in multiple edited volumes and as review essays in noted journals. She consults regularly for international organizations and national governments, including UN Women and United Cities and Local Government. Her public writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and Ms. Magazine, among other outlets.  Fluent in English and Spanish, she comments on U.S. politics, Latin American politics, and gender and politics for media outlets across the globe. https://www.jenniferpiscopo.com/

School of Business and Management

Chloe.Preece@rhul.ac.uk                       @chloempreece

Chloe Preece is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing. Her research focuses on marketing within the arts and creative industries. She is particularly interested in examining the ideological framework within which the art market operates and how this affects the art that is produced within it. Recent work has examined the intersectionalities at play in artistic careers with an emphasis on gender.

Department of Law and Criminology

jacqueline.sancheztaylor@rhul.ack.uk

Dr Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Department of Law and Criminology. Dr. Taylor is primary interested in the sociology of gender and sexuality with a special focus on exploring the intersections between race, gender, sexuality through two core areas: sex tourism and cosmetic surgery/beauty.

Jacqueline recently completed research funded by the British Academy entitled 'Revisiting Child Sex Tourism: Rethinking Business Responses' (2018). This project brings together law and sociology into dialogue to consider child about and child sexual exploitation in relation to tourism and to critically interrogate mainstream responses to the issue and to trafficking. It revisits research on child sexual exploitation and sex tourism conducted in the 1990s to ask what has changed and what impact current policy initiatives to combat child sex tourism have had.

Jacqueline’s other area of interest is a critical exploration of markets in beauty and cosmetic surgery to think about racial and gendered capital and inequalities. She has published data from an ESRC funded project Sun, Sea, Sand and Silicone: Aesthetic Surgery Tourism in the UK and Australia (Award Number ES/I004513/1 – 2012-2016) and continues to think and talk about how beauty is sold, pursued and experienced.

Department of Music

tim.summers@rhul.ac.uk

Tim Summers researches music in popular culture, particularly music for video games. He is currently researching queer aesthetics in game music, and teaches on gender and LGBT* topics.

Department of Music

shzree.tan@rhul.ac.uk

Shzr Ee Tan is a Reader and ethnomusicologist (with a specialism in Sinophone and Southeast Asian worlds) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is committed to decolonial work and EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) practice in music and the performing arts, with interests in how race discourses intersect problematically with class, gender and recent debates on posthuman digitalities, climate change and multispecies thinking.

Shzr Ee is also Vice Dean of EDI for the School of Performing and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, where she has initiated campaigns including an ongoing Safe Space Discussion Series, and workshops on topics ranging from inter-ethnic solidarity to mental health and toxic masculinity. She is committed to mainstreaming EDI considerations within broader and systemic School workflows. As a steering committee member of the national sector group EDIMS, she also serves in co-mentoring projects.

History Department

Amy.ToothMurphy@rhul.ac.uk                       @AmyToothMurphy

Amy Tooth Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Oral History and Co-Director of the MA in Public History. She specialises in queer history and oral history, never happier then when bringing these research and teaching interests together, using oral history to record and analyse the stories of LGBTQ people in their own words. She is passionate about using history to explore and combat inequality and injustice, both historical and in our contemporary world. As such she is deeply invested in the histories of marginalised and oppressed identities and communities. She grew up in a politically engaged household, and her path to oral history began there, learning that ‘having a voice’ meant the difference between inclusion and exclusion. She went to school in the days of Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), which prohibited the ‘promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’ in state schools. In part, she does what she does as an act of reclamation, and defiance against political and education systems that told her that LGBTQ identities and lives were not valid. For her, oral history is a tool that breaks down barriers and builds communities up. It is a way in which we can speak truth to power. 

Dr. Tooth Murphy has published on lesbian oral history, lesbian pulp fiction and lesbian reading practices, and on theory and method of queer oral history interviewing. In 2020 She co-edited a special LGBTQ issue of Oral History. She is currently co-editing an edited collection on queer oral history (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current research project, ‘Historicising Butch: Narrating Butch Lesbian Identity and Experience, 1950-Present’, seeks to undertake a holistic exploration of butch lesbianism in the UK, the US and Australia via oral history interviews.  

As a Trustee of the Oral History Society and Co-Founder of the OHS LGBTQ Special Interest Group, Dr. Tooth Murphy is also committed to oral history as a way to engage and inspire communities in the examination of their own histories, as well as to facilitating dialogues between academic institutions and communities. She is also a Co-Founder and Managing Editor of the blog, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality. Founded in 2014, Notches is a peer-reviewed, collaborative and international history of sexuality blog that aims to get people inside and outside the academy thinking about sexuality in the past and in the present.

Dr. Amy Bonsall is co-founder and co-director of the Women in Academia Support Network (WiASN), which aims to provide a safer space for all women in academia at every level to support each other, to build networks and to share knowledge, in order to enable women to better navigate academia, and to support women in their various roles inside and outside the academy.

Dr. Bonsall is working with the Gender Institute to further build and publicize WiASN, in particular expanding the research role, reach and impact of the network. 

She was named as one of the top 20 most influential disabled education influencers for 2021 in the Shaw Trust Power 100 and WiASN won the Diversity and Inclusion Award at the 2022 Northern Digital Awards.

Dr Bonsall is an accomplished theatre director and scholar. She is especially interested in the intersection where gender, creativity and performativity and networking co-exist. Her most recent publication is as co-editor of the book ‘ResearcHer’, published by Emerald Publishing (September 2022), showcasing the research of a wide range of women and non-binary researchers, to show young people that they too have the potential to be researchers, regardless of their background.

Dr. Seema Shekhawat is a social scientist with a PhD on intersection of gender, conflict and displacement. She researched and taught at the Universities of Jammu and Mumbai, India, from 2004 to 2012. She is recipient of several awards including Scholar of Peace, New Delhi and Berghof fellowship, Berlin. She has been a consultant to Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Geneva in 2006 and 2010. Dr. Shekhawat was the guest editor for January 2014 issue of Journal of Internal Displacement focusing on displaced women. She is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Internal Displacement, and Research Papers, the journal of the Human Rights Conflict Prevention Centre, University of Bihac, Bosnia. She is a member of several organizations including Dignity and Humiliation Studies, Action Asia and EPOS. She has published several articles, reports and books. Her publications include Conflict and Displacement in Jammu and Kashmir: The Gender Dimension (2006); Contested Borders and Division of Families in Kashmir: Contextualizing the Ordeal of the Kargil Women (2009) (co-author). Her latest publication is Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir: Invisible Stakeholders (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and her forthcoming book is Gendering Conflict and Peace Making.

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 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.

Dr Emily Clifford is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations.

Her research interests include the politics of human trafficking protection, sexual and gender-based violence, gendered approaches to armed conflict, (im)migration, and theories of time. Her PhD studied the experience of protection for women trafficked into Britain, exploring how promises protection rely upon and reproduce particular temporal politics, whilst concealing others. She also works in a freelance capacity coordinating an experts-by-experience Survivor Advisory Board for Ella’s, a charity offering outreach, casework, and safehouse support for women who have experienced trafficking in London.

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. 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.   

Dr Rebecca Jinks, 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 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 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 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.

Professor Giovanni A. Travaglino, Department of Law and Criminolgy

Professor Travaglino obtained his PhD at the School of Psychology, University of Kent. He is a Professor in Criminology & Psychology in the Department of Law & Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has held faculty positions at the University of Kent (UK) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His interdisciplinary research interests focus on the nexus among culture, politics and crime. His work has been published in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the European Review of Social Psychology. He founded and is editor of the scientific publication ‘Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest’. In 2021, Professor Travaglino was awarded a European Research Council’s StG Grant to investigate the psychological dynamics of criminal governance.

Dr Eugenio Vaccari, Lecturer in Law, Department of Law and Criminology 

Eugenio Vaccari obtained his LL.B. from the University of Modena (Italy), a PG Cert. from the University of Bologna (Italy), his LL.M. from the LSE and his PhD at City, University of London. He also worked at the University of Essex as a lecturer in company and insolvency law.

Eugenio is a qualified Italian lawyer specializing in insolvency law. He is an active member of several leading institutions in the field, including INSOL International, INSOL Europe and the Insolvency Lawyers’ Association [UK]. He is chair of INSOL ERA (Early Researcher Academics) and a member of the board of YANIL.

Eugenio’s main areas of interest are the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of corporate insolvency law, the impact of artificial intelligence on insolvency practice and abusive practices in insolvency. Eugenio is particularly interested in identifying the additional barriers that members of the LGBTQ+ community need to overcome to have access to insolvency relief procedures and discharge their debts.

Come back soon to see our growing list of Affiliate graduate students! Affiliate graduate students 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 a graduate student affiliate, please fill out our survey or get in touch with us directly! 

Dylan Sebastian Evans, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Dylan Sebastian Evans (BA Brist, MSc LSE, MA by Research Nott) is a postgraduate researcher whose interdisciplinary research interests include: discourse analysis; rhetoric; epistemology, linguistics, and historiography; queer and feminist theory; the history and politics of sexuality; and the life and works of French philosopher Michel Foucault, especially his quasi-structuralist Archaeology of Knowledge (first publ. in 1969 as L’Archéologie du savoir). A scholar of French language, literature, and culture, he completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project at the University of Nottingham in October 2013. Supervised by Prof. Judith Still, ‘The Rhetoric of Rape: A Critical Mapping of the Discursive Landscape in France’ uncovers the conditions of existence (or ‘archaeology’) underlying the discourse on gang rape in early twenty-first-century French society. Underway since September 2016 in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London, his doctoral research — under the joint supervision of Prof. Hannah Thompson and Dr Robert Priest — employs Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ methodology for the purposes of writing a ‘micro-history’ of rape in France during the Second-Empire period (1852–70).

Karia Hartung, PhD student, Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy

Karia Hartung is a postgraduate researcher and takes an intersectional feminist approach to questions of international security and the politics of international law. Her current research focuses on the way in which gendered stereotypes structure military decision-making in the context of the increasing automation of warfare. Her work analyses how the ‘natural’ roles ascribed to women and men influence the process of perceiving them as either civilians or combatants. Moreover, she assesses how similar dynamics structure the international law supposed to regulate this process.  Karia holds a BA in International Relations and Global History from the University of Erfurt, Germany and an LLM in the Law and Politics of International Security from VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Laura Shipp, Department of Geography

Come back soon to see our list of Affiliate student organizations. If you lead or are a part of a student organization interested in getting involved with the Gender Institute, please fill our our survey or get in touch with us directly.