ECF Fellows

Alice Coffey

I have recently submitted my PhD in Global Sustainable Development as part of the TRANSFORM programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My research focussed on sustainable diets and child health, incorporating policy recommendations from these findings.

I graduated from my Master’s of Public Health at the University of Warwick in 2021 and I have a first-class degree in Nutrition and Health from Coventry University. I have experience as a research assistant for the Warwick Obesity Network based at the University of Warwick, and as a research assistant at the University of Birmingham. Within these roles I have co-written a literature review on the effects of intermittent fasting on weight loss, metabolic health and insulin resistance and I have also undertaken qualitative research and analysis. While studying I have also undertaken teaching within GSD, including running seminars, presenting lectures, supporting students with coursework and marking assessments.

I have co-authored several publications and have first author publications, and presented my findings at several conferences.

Away from research, I also have experience as a Project Coordinator for a community food project for the Active Wellbeing Society, a health-based charity in Birmingham.

Claudia Di Tosto

Claudia Di Tosto is a contemporary art historian, museum professional and PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Warwick. She is currently researching the recent history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale through the lenses of global and national art histories, exhibition history and postcolonial theory to explore the Pavilion as site of national self-definition and redefinition. Prior to starting the PhD, she worked for various institutions such as: IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), V&A (London, UK), Vatican Museums – Contemporary Art Department and MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts (Rome, Italy).

Nicola Hamer

Nicola Hamer has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis explored how communities across the USA, Jamaica and Barbados use poetry to process and protest ecological grief — grief caused by broken relationships within ecosystems. Nicola has given talks at conferences in five countries and shared her work in creative and academic publications. In 2025-26, she will be splitting her time between two interdisciplinary Warwick institutes, as an early career researcher at IAS and as an early career teaching fellow at the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL).

Cat Jones

Dr Cat Jones is an IAS Early Career Fellow and a Research Officer in Evidence Synthesis at the Education Endowment Foundation. Her research interests span parental engagement, teacher education and education policy. Achievements include an Open Research Award 2025 for commitment to research transparency and usability, ECR Presentation 1st Prize at the British Education Research Association Conference 2022, and multiple peer reviewed publications.

She is a former Parliamentary Research Fellow, DfE Policy Fellow, and Vice-President of Oxford University Student Union. Cat is also an experienced teacher and serves as Vice-Chair of Governors at a primary school in the North West. She holds a PhD Education, MA Social Science Research, MA Educational Leadership, PGCE, and BA Experimental Psychology.

Farjana Kabir

Farjana Kabir (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies and an IAS Early Career Fellow at Warwick University. Her thesis, Theatre of Transformation: An Autoethnography, challenges the charitable model of applied theatre for displaced women. Utilising a rigorous Practice as Research (PaR) methodology, Kabir argues that theatre becomes a relational and iterative rehearsal of democratic life, enabling women to construct a new social and political ontology. Recent practice includes theatre-performance-installation The Kitchen Window Diaries (2025) at Warwick FAB and Dandelion: A Weed is Still a Flower at the Bolton International Film Festival (2024).

Oluwatosin Orababa

Oluwatosin Orababa recently completed his PhD at the School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick. His doctoral research focused on developing a new treatment for chronic biofilm infections using a historical remedy. He was also recently honoured with the prestigious 2025 Infection Science Award by the Microbiology Society. Currently, as an IAS Early Career Research Fellow in the same department, his postdoctoral research aims to understand the interaction between antimicrobial resistance mechanisms in chronic biofilm infections. His long-term career goal is to continue to contribute positively to the body of knowledge in the AMR field. Outside of research, Tosin enjoys playing football.

Ummul Fayiza Puthiya Peedikayil

Ummul Fayiza is an IAS Early Career Fellow and Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant at Warwick Law School. She recently completed her PhD at Warwick Law School on ‘Destitute’ Muslim Women and Muslim Personal Law Reform in Postcolonial India: A Critical Analysis of Muslim Women’s Rights Discourse in the Light of the Shah Bano and Shayara Bano Cases. Her research critically examines legal reforms concerning Muslim women’s rights to maintenance and divorce within the legally plural context of postcolonial India.

Charlotte Spear

Charlotte Spear is an Early Career IAS Fellow and recent PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled “Locating the Human: World Literature and the Concept of Rights” and explores the role of literature in rethinking dominant human rights frameworks. She has published in Modern Language Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Journal of Human Rights Practice. She is co-editor of the interdisciplinary volume, Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production with Routledge (2025). Charlotte is also a Research Associate at York University Centre for Applied Human Rights. Outside of academia, Charlotte has also worked for multiple international NGOs on issues including access to education and refugee rights.

Lizzie Smith

Lizzie Smith has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis, titled “Unsettling the Multispecies Encounter in Contemporary Ecopoetics,” explores the capacity for poetic encounters with uncharismatic others to suggest alternative modes of multispecies flourishing, with chapters on ocean invertebrates, insects, bacteria, and fungi. Her research interests include decolonial ecologies, ecofeminism, and weird creatures of all kinds, and she is always looking for interdisciplinary conversations.

Dan Wood

Dan is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Dan submitted his PhD thesis entitled “Relative Predictability: The International Political Economy of Passive Investment” to the Department of Politics and International Studies. Passive investment is a financial strategy which suggests optimum returns are made by tracking the returns of a market index like the FTSE 100 rather than by trading individual stocks. Dan’s research problematises the strategy, index providers like S&P and asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard. Dan is interested in the temporal element of passive investment and how the strategy works to make financial markets predictable.

Shaoyu Yang

Shaoyu is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. She recently submitted her PhD in Translation and Transcultural Studies at Warwick, funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Scholarship. Her research explores the intersection between translation and the traumatic memories of twentieth-century China, specifically investigating how diasporic works and their translations transmit and (re)construct the memory of the Nanjing Massacre across languages, borders, cultures, and time. Shaoyu’s work has been published in Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies. Her research interests include translation and memory, literary trauma theory, war literature, diasporic literature, and Chinese diaspora.

Xinyao Zhang

ZHANG Xinyao is an IAS Early Career Fellow and has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the University of Warwick.

Her research interests include gender and translation, fan and amateur translation and the intersection between audiovisual translation and transnational feminist translation studies. Her doctoral project examines the reception of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in China through translation and online circulation. Specifically, it explores how Chinese translations, together with feminist engagements on social media platforms, have reframed A Room of One’s Own and contributed to the articulation and ongoing negotiation of local feminist agendas.

Outside academia, she works as a freelance translator and subtitler, and has collaborated with ZOO Digital to make subtitling training more accessible to users in different regions.

Vineet Seemala

Vineet is a PhD student at WMG, University of Warwick. His research focuses on developing computational models of hip replacement surgery to predict fracture risk and assess implant stability post-surgery. The aim of his work is to support better surgical planning and reduce complications for patients. He has published in several peer-reviewed journals and presented his research at international conferences. His interests include computational biomechanics, patient-specific modelling for orthopaedic surgery, image analysis and processing, data science, and interdisciplinary engineering approaches that support personalised healthcare.

Silvester Schlebrügge

Silvester is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. He was awarded his PhD in Politics and International Studies for his thesis Back in Line? The Racialised Aesthetics of the UK’s ‘Small Boats Crisis’, which critically examined the ‘common sense’ politics of the border at the edge of national territory.

Working across International Relations and Political Geography, his research investigates the relationship between politics and aesthetics, with a particular focus on the role of representation and perception in the reproduction and contestation of state borders. Silvester’s current work explores these questions through studies of maritime bordering practices, migration discourses and aesthetic challenges to contemporary border regimes.

Tamar Rutter

Tamar is an IAS Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her PhD was an ESRC-funded project in collaboration with the charity Down Syndrome UK, investigating the experiences of families of children with Down syndrome of prenatal screening and the diagnostic pathway. This research aimed to understand parental experiences of support for autonomy and wellbeing in perinatal healthcare, including the representation of Down syndrome and disability in the clinical context, and implications for ethical practice. Tamar has published in several peer-reviewed journals and presented research at international conferences as well as events for professionals and advocates. Her background is in community learning disability nursing; her professional work grounds her passion for promoting understanding and reducing health inequalities for people with learning disabilities.

Katie Webb

Katie completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research explored the expectations and experiences of international in-service teacher students on the MA TESOL programme at Warwick. Her research utilised frameworks from applied linguistics, education, and intercultural studies to examine how teachers navigate cross-cultural learning environments. The findings challenge deficit perspectives of international students, demonstrating instead that they develop sophisticated strategies for navigating intercultural environments and negotiating the application of knowledge gained in Global North contexts to their teaching environments in the Global South. She has co-published three book chapters and two peer-reviewed articles on themes relating to teacher education and development.

She has also co-organised an online conference bringing together ELT (English Language Teaching) professionals from around the world, which attracted over 100 attendees.

She is currently the lead organiser of the BAAL/Cambridge University Press Seminar 2026: Beyond the Default: Rethinking Pseudonymisation in Applied Linguistics Research, a grant-funded event she secured alongside fellow research fellows and PhD candidates.

Xinran Gao

Xinran Gao is a sociophonetician and PhD researcher at the University of Warwick. Her research sits at the intersection of sociolinguistics, speech science, and computational linguistics, with a focus on how voice quality carries social meaning in bilingual and changing speech communities.

 

Her PhD examines voice quality in Shanghai Wu Chinese, investigating how breathy and creaky phonation vary across linguistic structure, discourse, and generation in a tonal variety undergoing change under Mandarin influence. Using acoustic analysis, quantitative modelling, and machine-learning methods, she explores how socially meaningful speech variation can shed light on language change while also informing more inclusive, human-centred speech technologies. She is also involved in interdisciplinary collaborations on language, identity, and the lived experiences of early-career researchers.

Saadia Gardezi

Saadia is a journalist and political cartoonist from Pakistan. She was awarded the Chancellor's Scholarship at Warwick Politics and International Studies (PAIS) in 2020 and she completed her PhD in 2026. Her research focuses on visual culture's importance to international politics and how "non-western" political cartoons, specifically in Pakistan, imagine the nation and national security.

She is the Co-Founder of Project Dastaan, an organisation that records oral histories of survivors from the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. She reconnects these survivors to their ancestral homes across the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders using VR and other new technologies.

She has won numerous grants to set up VR and traditional media installations of her films, including the British Council, Arts Council UK, and Warwick University's Enhancing Research Culture Fund. Her work has been displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museum, British Film Institute, National History Museum, Pakistan, and Partition Museum, India. In 2023 she was awarded the Warwick Award for Public and Community Engagement.

She is also a facilitator for the Researcher Development Office at Warwick University teaching design, social media writing and non-academic writing to Post-Graduate Researchers.

Pip Brown

Pip is based in the Department of Psychology and is interested the development of epistemic trust practices among young people online.

His PhD explores the developmental trajectory of adolescents learning how to make trust judgements about online information, the way this interacts with the affordances of online platforms, and how this can be supported. Through this, Pip became interested in interrogating the limitations of his own initial behavioural science intervention-focused approaches to combatting 'information pollution' online; what leads to this narrowing of outlook, and what context can be lost.

Pip is also keen to continue exploring interdisciplinary pedagogy and is currently working cross-intuitionally with a network of teaching-focused academics to incubate new pedagogical research for tertiary psychology teaching.

Aside from this work, Pip is also very interested in music - in performance, pedagogy and from a developmental perspective- and this has taken him to work with The Music Lab in the University of Auckland/Waipapa Taumata Rau on the effect of singing for newborn and caregiver health outcomes (as well as enthusiastic participation in numerous choirs on campus and beyond).

Will Berrington

Will is an Early Career IAS Fellow and recent Wolfson Scholar and PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

His research explores how labour market shifts in the wake of the 2008 financial crash have been narrated and processed by young workers through cultural forms including podcasts, political magazines, novels, and short-form video.

His work brings together cultural studies and political economy, whilst also drawing on strands of economic geography and critical social theory. In particular, it seeks to renew the theoretical insights of the Conference of Socialist Economists and the social theorist Simon Clarke.

Carys Hill

Carys is a PhD researcher in the Department of Sociology and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Working across sociology, cultural studies, and feminist media studies, her research explores the intersections of feminism, entrepreneurialism, platformisation, and consumption, and the use of creative/analogue methods like zine-making to explore experiences of digital media.

Her PhD research considers how feminists active online are shaped by, and navigate, the convergence of feminism, entrepreneurialism, consumption, activism, and precarity in digital platforms. In particular, Carys explores the entanglement of community and commodity in digital feminist spaces through the example of subscription platforms like Patreon, where content creators seek to ‘make a living’ from financial support from their audiences as a means to challenge inequality and precarity.

Carys’ work has been published in Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Gender Studies; she also has forthcoming co-authored chapters on feminist zine-making in Working-Class Knowledge(s) in the Academy: Theory, Practice and Method (Routledge) and on feminist hope in Feminism, LGBTI+, and Hope in a Turbulent Era (Edward Elgar).

Mathilde Alain

Mathilde is a historian based at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. My PhD thesis in cotutelle between Warwick and Tours (France) has focused on the travel account of the Portuguese Francisco Álvares, who accompanied an embassy to Ethiopia between 1520-1526.

Mathilde is interested in the history of travels and travel accounts to and from Africa, the history of Ethiopian-Portuguese relations and of Ethiopia, and the perception and knowledge of Africa in Renaissance Europe and beyond.

Hande Cayir

Hande Çayır is a practice-based researcher whose work explores mental health activism and documentary filmmaking. She draws on Mad Studies, critical disability theory, and visual anthropology.
Hande's recent project examines survivor-authored films through institutional, co-created, and DIY methods, using autoethnography, participatory action research, and creative-relational inquiry.

Hande's films have been screened internationally, and she received the 2024 Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a peer reviewer for Disability & Society. Her work has been published in Media Practice and Education and Sociology of Health and Illness.

Charlotte Gannon

Charlotte is a PhD candidate in Psychology and an Early Careers Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. She has recently submitted her thesis investigating the evolution and development of conscious imagination, with a particular focus on the role of language. To explore this, she worked with human infants and great apes to compare imaginative abilities in the context of language development (infants) and language absence (great apes). She also explored the role of mental visualisation by studying human adults with and without aphantasia, a condition in which individuals lack voluntary mental imagery.

Outside of academia, she is also heavily involved in wildlife conservation and is currently a trustee of the Red Squirrel South West charity.

Gozde Nur Gunesli

Gozde's doctoral research is in the inter-disciplinary field of computational pathology (CPath) where methods from computer science, statistics and mathematics are applied to problems related to histology, pathology and oncology.

Their thesis is specifically focussed on developing machine learning methods to improve histology image analysis, critical for cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

Nicola Hamer

Nicola Hamer has just submitted an AHRC-funded PhD in comparative literary studies. Her doctoral research asked how communities across North America and the Caribbean use poetry to process and protest ecological grief, the grief of ruptured ecosystemic relationality.

Molly Harrabin

Molly Harrabin recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Cinema (1918-1933)’, in the German Studies department of the School of Modern Languages & Cultures.

Molly is currently an Early Career Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick and Network Coordinator and Postdoctoral Researcher for the German Screen Studies Network.

Molly’s work has been published in Studies in European Cinema, and she has forthcoming publications on Pandora’s Box (1929) and the Netflix adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. She is also the founder and co-convenor of the Weimar Film Network, and she assists with the Weimar 100 project based here at Warwick.

Julian Harruch

Julián is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of Warwick. He recently completed his PhD in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Warwick, funded by Warwick Chancellor’s International Scholarship.

His research critically engages with contemporary Latin American decolonial theory, exploring the intersections of cultural difference, socio-political conflict, and popular struggles within Colombia’s multiculturalism.

Julián’s work has been published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. His research interests include Latin American intellectual history, political philosophy, and critical theory.

Grace Kamanga

Grace Kamanga is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. She began her academic career in 2012 and continued until she commenced her PhD in 2021. Grace has published her research in various journals, including Development Southern Africa (Taylor and Francis), Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (Wiley), Tourism Review International (Ingenta Connect), and Routledge. She earned her Master of Tourism from the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 2016. Her research interests include sustainability, ecotourism, women's empowerment, higher education, and tourism security.

Yanyan Li

Dr Yanyan Li completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick and is currently an Early-Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her PhD research explored the multimodal interactional processes through which peers conduct relationship work during group interactions. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose research interests and expertise extend beyond applied linguistics to include behaviour change theories, health interventions, digital and mental health, and research culture. Yanyan has contributed to research projects in Centre for Applied Linguistics and Medical School and consistently strives to use research to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Chinyere Magulike

Visiting Research Fellow

Dr Chinyere Magulike is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. She brings an interdisciplinary background and a strong commitment to advancing knowledge through collaborative and impactful research. Her research interest spans across education, mental health, public health, biomedical science, molecular pathology and toxicology. Currently her research focuses on investigating the association between mental health and educational outcomes, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Dr Magulike has a wider interest in understanding how public health inequalities impact the developmental outcomes of children and young people.

Miriam Gordon

Miriam Gordon is a PhD candidate in Caribbean Studies and an IAS Early Career Fellow funded by the PATHWAY Early Career Fellowship Scheme. Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Of Routes and Ruptures: Modes of Displacement in French Caribbean Literature" and examines displacement under the two interpretations of rupture and of movement and how this influences the narratives surrounding race, identity and memory in contemporary literature by authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporas.

Miriam has given papers at several conferences including at the Society for Caribbean Studies and Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and has an upcoming article to be published in the journal Modern and Contemporary France (Summer 2025).

Nursyaheedah Muhammad Isa

My PhD focused on the Discursive Construction and Negotiation of Identity in Secular Spaces, drawing on applied linguistics, sociocultural linguistics, fan and fandom studies, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Jessica Eastland-Underwood

Jess’s research agenda is focused on the intersection of everyday political thinking, economic ideas and racism. Her published work has looked at the use of ‘the market’ as a rhetorical device that reproduces white supremacy and on popular imaginations of the economic preferences of the American Founding Fathers to mask racial animus.

Jess's PhD investigated how the concept of ‘the economy’ intuitively implies a hierarchy of human beings, drawing from a rhetorical political analysis of everyday expressions of the term from activists in both anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid-19 pandemic.