Institute of Advanced Study
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 Thank you to everyone at IAS for making me feel so welcome since taking up the post of Director in March. I have already had my intellectual horizons extended to think about colliding water droplets, the role of music in modern British Muslim communities, and boggy landscapes in literature!I am looking forward to finding out more about the huge diversity of research across our IAS community and to bringing into IAS more of the exciting interdisciplinary research currently being pursued across the University.
Please spread the word that IAS has funding for new interdisciplinary projects, and that there are now FOUR deadlines per annum for this scheme, in addition to the IAS Conversations Fund and Visiting Fellowships scheme. We have had a bumper crop of applications for our Early Career Fellowships and are looking forward to welcoming our new Fellows in October. At the same time, we bid farewell to one cohort of ECFs and wish you all a happy onward journey from IAS: please keep in touch. Likewise, if anyone else has an idea for an event or initiative – whether a session for Accolade, a reading group, or seminar series – please get in touch with me.
Alison Cooley, IAS Director
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Featured Calls
The IAS is pleased to announce two new funding schemes available for Warwick staff and IAS fellows: the Interdisciplinary Research Development Award and IAS Conversations.
Interdisciplinary Research Development Award will open on 4 August 2025 and will offer up to £5,000 to support the development of new interdisciplinary research ideas and collaborations aimed at generating future research outputs and funding. The deadline for this call is 15 September 2025, 5pm. Visit our website to find out more.
IAS Conversations support Warwick staff and IAS Fellows in hosting small, informal gatherings that encourage the development of new interdisciplinary research ideas. Submissions for IAS Conversations are accepted on an open call basis and will be reviewed at the end of each month.
IAS Visiting Fellowship Schemes support visits of from ten days to ten weeks in order to enrich the academic life of the University and create lasting links with established academics and other high-profile figures from around the globe. We are currently accepting applications, the deadline for this call is 14 July 2025, 5 pm.
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Early Career Fellows
Farewell and thank you to the cohort of Early Career Fellows who joined the IAS in October 2024.
| Hannah Ayres |
Sociology |
| Mouli Banerjee |
Politics and International Studies |
| Ilaria Puliti |
Film and TV |
| Daniel Sutherland |
Warwick Medical School |
| Yangzi Zhou |
Theatre and Performance Studies |
| Daniel Gettings |
History |
| Noha Khamis |
Chemistry |
| Peter Lewin-Jones |
Maths |
| Lucy Crompton |
Law |
| Hatice Gundeslioglu |
Education and Psychology |
| Johan Heemskerk |
Philosophy |
| Madeleine Sinclair |
English and Comparative Literary Studies |
We congratulate those who have secured their next posts, which include two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Exeter, a Research Fellowship on an NIHR-funded project at the University of Warwick, as well as teaching positions within the university, and several upcoming book projects (details to be announced in due course!)
We hope that everyone will stay in touch with the IAS.
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Congratulations to the following for recently passing their PhD vivas:
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Hannah Ayres (Sociology)
"Re/presentational Complexities: queer and Trans* Existence Within Museums"
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Miriam Gordon (English & Comparative Literature)
“Of Routes and Ruptures: Modes of Displacement in French Caribbean Literature”
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Nicola Hamer (English & Comparative Literature)
“Beyond Elegy: Confronting Grief in Contemporary Ecopoetry”
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Yanyan Li (Applied Linguistics)
“Peer Relationship Work as an Interactional Accomplishment During Group Interaction in Second Language Classrooms”
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Conferences/Research Workshops
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 Uses and Abuses of the Decolonial
17 May 2025
Organised by Julián Harruch
A one-day interdisciplinary conference exploring how "decolonial" ideas are used, and sometimes misused, across academic, cultural, and activist spaces. The event brought together scholars, practitioners, and artists to examine where decolonial thought retains political urgency and where it risks being diluted or co-opted.
A highlight of the day was the keynote lecture by Professor David Lehmann (University of Cambridge), titled "Critiques of the Decolonial: Between Polemics and Scholarly Debate." Panel discussions covered themes such as decolonial theory, imperial legacies, museum practices, pedagogy, and research methods.
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Visita Interiora: ReImagining Allegory in Alchemical Tradition
Warwick’s Venice Centre, 16-17 June 2025
Organised by Sergei Zotov, former IAS ECF, now at the Warburg Institute
This conference invites case studies on the allegorical iconography of alchemy (1400–1800), aiming to foster new perspectives on the role of visual culture in the history of science. We particularly emphasise manuscripts and material culture and encourage submissions that engage with previously unstudied or undigitised sources.
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EUTOPIA-SIF Fellows
The IAS is pleased to welcome two visiting EUTOPIA-SIF Fellows who here for their internal secondments. Dr Ru Li and Dr Ashima are both from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and will be working on their research within Department of Psychology and the Department of Chemistry.
We would also like to highlight our EUTOPIA SIF Fellows that have been invited to a present their research and deliver teaching or attend conferences at different institutions both internationally and nationally.
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Dr Derya Kaya Ozdemir attended the Polymer Processing Society (PPS) International Conference in Auckland, New Zealand, from the 22 – 25 April 2025 and gave an oral presentation on her research project.
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Dr Thomas Bilterys has been invited to deliver a course on sleep and pain management in chronic pain for physiotherapy students at a university in São Paulo, Brazil, in June 2025.
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Dr Carla Guerra Tomazini was selected to present her latest article at the PSA Women and Politics Conference 2025, which was held on June 17th and 18th, hosted by the Gender and Inequalities (GAIN) Centre at the University of Southampton.
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Dr Carla Guerra Tomazini will be chairing the ‘Sustainable Development and Backlash Politics: Which Implications for Public Policies?’ session at the 7th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP7), which will be held on the 2-4 July 2025 in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
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Dr Matteo Leta has been awarded a four-year fellowship at He will start his fellowship in September 2025 on his project ‘Staging Otherness: The Representation of “Gypsies”, Turks, and Moors in Italian Renaissance Comedies and their European Translations (c.1500-1650)’.
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On Thursday 3 July, along with the other EUTOPIA-SIF partners within the Alliance, the IAS will be holding a hybrid farewell meeting to celebrate Cohort 3 who will be finishing their fellowship at the end of September 2025.
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Eutopia Young Leaders Academy Fellows
The fellows of Cohort 2 of the EUTOPIA Young Leaders Academy (YLA), Dr David Orrego-Carmona and Dr Georgiana Mihut, have been collaborating with their YLA cohort within the Alliance to organise their YLA Symposium. This event is scheduled to take place during EUTOPIA Week in December at the Warwick Venice Centre in Venice.
Dr Georgiana Mihut visited Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in May 2025. The purpose of her visit was to meet with colleagues and advance her research while networking within the EUTOPIA Alliance.
Dr Hannes Houck and Dr Christopher Strelluf are scheduled to visit Vrije Universiteit Brussel in July 2025. They are meeting with their fellow cohort 3 YLA to start planning for their YLA Symposium, which will take place in 2026.
Dr David Orrego-Carmona will be visiting NOVA University Lisbon in July 2025. During this visit, he will collaborate with colleagues on his research and continue building connections within the EUTOPIA Alliance.
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Pathway to Knowledge Fellows
We are delighted that our three P2K fellows will be continuing to be part of IAS for the academic year 2025/26.
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 Dr. Ryan Arthur Delivers Keynote at Inaugural University of Hertfordshire Academic Skills Conference
May 2025
At the inaugural University of Hertfordshire Academic Skills Conference, Dr Ryan Arthur delivered a keynote exploring his concept of appreciation as a transformative approach to academic support. He challenged the prevailing deficit models, which often focus on what students lack, and instead advocated for a shift toward recognising and building on the strengths, knowledge, and experiences that students bring with them.
His keynote was very well received, with attendees responding positively to the practical insights and the hopeful, student-centred ethos of the talk.
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 Women in World-Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion
Warwick, 19-20 June 2025
Organised by Roxanne Douglas, P2K Fellow
This conference asks: how does world-literary and world-systems thinking change when we foreground gender in our analysis of global and local crises, climate collapse, and contagion? How might attending more keenly to women's experiences and cultural production as "peripheral" agents actually upset and usurp capitalism's insistence on exchange value, and what does this offer us as an imaginary to circumvent crisis-capitalism and scarcity thinking? The conference aims to open up new routes to understanding the patriarchal world-system and how we might imagine better ways to live through this epoch of collapse. Such ways of living might focus on the interconnectedness of all people with the environment and with one another. Moreover, the inclusivity at the heart of the conference aims to show how a supportive environment of care, which refuses scarcity mindsets, generates new and unexpected collaborations, outputs, and ideas.
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 Dr. Nataliya Pratsovyta delivered presentations at two conferences in May and June 2025.
25.06-27.06.2025 - “Narrating Faith, Defying Power: Religious Memory and Cultural Resistance in Natalena Koroleva’s Legends of Old Kyiv.”
International Network for the Study of War and Religion in the Modern World: Fifteenth Annual Conference: Religious Dynamics in Contemporary Conflicts. Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, Swindon, UK.
This presentation focused on the Ukrainian author Natalena Koroleva (1888–1966), examining her work Legends of Old Kyiv as a powerful response to the Soviet revisionist agenda, which systematically suppressed Ukrainian culture and sought to reshape historical narratives.
28.05-29.05.2025 - “Personal Transformation Through Faith: Sigrid Undset’s Defence of Catholicism in the Interwar Period,” Catholics in Conflict, 1900-1945 Conference. King’s College London, UK.
The paper examined Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) and her engagement with the cultural and spiritual crisis of the early twentieth century. Undset turned to Norway’s sacred past and its foundations in the Christian faith as a means of addressing the existential uncertainties after the First World War. |
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The twenty-first century has been deemed the “Age of Crisis”. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?
The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of “Territorial Bodies” to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.
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Carla Tomazini has just published a special issue of Revue internationale des études du développement, which she coordinated with Catia Grisa and Jean-François Le Coq.
She also co-authored the introductory article, “ Introduction. Backlash Politics in Latin America: Challenges to Sustainable Development,” examining backlash politics and their impact on sustainable development in Latin America. |
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Belayneh Gedifew's paper titled John Dewey’s Ethics, the Context of African Healthcare System, and the Issue of Healthcare Allocation, in John Dewey’s Human Nature, and Conduct: A Centennial Handbook (Leonard J. Waks and Andrea English, editors: Cambridge University Press) is in press for publication.
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Congratulations to Insiya Antria on the arrival on her baby boy, Luvai. Both Mum and baby are doing well. Whilst Insiya is on leave, please continue to contact us at our resource account: IAS@warwick.ac.uk and one of the team will respond to you as soon as possible.
Our very own Exchanges Chief Editor, Dr Gareth J Johnson made a surprise but most welcome appearance in Warwick’s Inbox Insite newsletter this June. Gareth was featured in conversation about the Exchanges journal, but also the Exchanges Discourse podcast which he’s been running for a number of years now alongside the journal. Unsurprisingly, Gareth also highlighted the journal’s ongoing work with the National Centre for Research Culture on a series of special issues, the next one of which is scheduled to appear later this summer.
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 InReach10x - Professor Roberta Bivins: Unimagined Communities, Untold Stories: Ethnicity and Innovation in UK Biomedicine
Warwick, 11 June 2025
Organised by the IAS
Roberta's talk was a contemporary discussion about the persistence of health inequality paint a gloomy picture of the intersection between biomedicine and marginalised ethnic communities. In history and in policy, attention has — justifiably — focused on mutual misunderstandings, mistrust and even mistreatment of patients and ethnic communities. The talk highlighted a different strand of this troubled history, one in which scientists and clinicians work with ethnic communities to power innovation and positive change not just for those who are marginalised from mainstream biomedicine, but for the majority community as well. From chorionic villus sampling to DNA profiling, Roberta focused on the unimagined communities of innovators who have transformed biomedicine in Britain.
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Ukranian Summer School
In July 2025, the IAS is proud to sponsor a two-week summer school for 19 visiting students from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, for the third year in a row.
Since 2023, this summer school has been led by Christoph Mick (History) and Nataliya Pratsovyta (English), with the involvement of many other staff and students from the Faculty of Arts, funding from the IAS, and additional administrative support from the International Strategy & Relations team.
The programme offers a diverse range of courses and workshops on topics ranging from environmental humanities to war memorials and religious poetry. Students also participate in excursions to historic sites such as Stratford-Upon-Avon, Baddesley Clinton, and Coventry Cathedral. These visits not only deepen their understanding of British history and culture but also foster international academic exchange and lasting friendships.
As part of the programme, the students also share their personal experiences of living and studying under the conditions of war during a Public Event. In addition, they take part in workshops focused on current global issues, contributing valuable perspectives shaped by their lived realities.
Students from the 2024 cohort share their reflections on the Ukrainian Summer School at Warwick:
“The Summer School at the University of Warwick is a wonderful opportunity to become part of an inspiring academic community for two weeks,” shared Yuliia, one of the participating students. “During this time, we attended engaging and thought-provoking lectures, workshops, and seminars. The professors were incredibly supportive, helping us grasp new concepts and encouraging dynamic discussions. Beyond the classroom, we explored many fascinating and historic sites across England—including London, Westminster Abbey, Baddesley Clinton, Stratford-upon-Avon (where we watched a Shakespearean play), and the city of Coventry with its famous Cathedral and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.”
Anna reflected on the personal significance of the experience, stating:
“I am deeply grateful to the University of Warwick for the opportunity to study on campus and interact daily with such wonderful professors. It meant a great deal to us to experience the British education system firsthand and to engage with university staff and students. We were met with incredible openness and kindness. The programme was thoughtfully structured; the lectures were intellectually rich and interactive, and the excursions beautifully showcased different dimensions of British culture and history. The vividness of these experiences left a lasting mark on all of us.”
This summer school is a mutually beneficial collaboration, and we are very privileged to welcome these Ukrainian students to the Warwick campus. See the showcase of the 2023 event, including video testimonials from the people involved.
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 June saw the publication of the latest issue of the interdisciplinary Exchanges research journal, based at and published by the IAS. Volume 12(2) was the thirty-first issue published to date and brought various interesting papers to its readers. Excitingly, a number of the papers dealt with explicit interdisciplinary and intersectional topics, from scholars worldwide.
As part of Exchanges’ commitment to transparent practices the issue’s editorial took a deep-dive into the challenges facing editors around peer-reviewer recruitment.
Additionally, interviews with some of the issue’s authors about their lives, work and publications are being set up for the coming weeks as part of the Exchanges Discourse podcast series too.
Contributions are welcomed throughout the year for consideration for future issues, and the Chief Editor (exchangesjournal@warwick.ac.uk) is always happy to discuss potentially suitable submissions with authors too. |
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Upcoming deadline for open IAS Funding Calls:
Please see our website for the key dates for our funding and fellowship schemes
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If you would like to get involved, join the IAS community or apply for funding please refer to our current schemes.
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