ECF Fellows
Niels Boender
Niels recently completed his doctoral thesis in Warwick’s History Department on local politics and anti-colonial rebellion in Kenya. It emphasises the interactions between colonial counterinsurgency and post-colonial politics, using newly revealed archival material and oral history interviews.
Niels' work has thus far been published in the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and the Journal of Museum Ethnography. He continues to work with the Imperial War Museum, consulting on their upcoming Empire and Conflict season.
Elena Mylona
Elena Mylona has successfully defended her doctoral thesis in Sociology at the University of Warwick (ESRC-funded). She is currently an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Time Use Research, UCL. Her research focuses on time use, adolescent health, and advanced quantitative methods.
Elena has published in the Journal of Time Use Research, has produced data management guides for the Centre for Time Use Research and Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL, and contributed to reports for the Social Mobility Commission and the What Works Centre for Wellbeing.
Elena became an Associate Fellow of the HEA in 2021, and has experience in delivering lectures, seminars and data workshops, quantitative methods mentoring, as well as dissertation supervision and marking.
Eugene Malthouse
Eugene completed his PhD in the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick. His thesis focused on collective action problems, which describe situations such as climate change in which individual and group interests are misaligned.
His research spans psychology, economics, and philosophy. For more details please see his personal website.
Xuxu (Lawrence) Wu
Xuxu (Lawrence) Wu earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Warwick. He is also a gemologist and holds membership in the Gemmological Association of Great Britain (Gem-A).
He has been deeply involved in the field of diamond science and technology over 8 years. His expertise encompasses diamond-related knowledge, optical and magnetic spectroscopy, and spatial data analysis.
His career goal is to make diamond great again: by making CVD synthetic diamond a genuine super material for industrial and high-tech applications.
Wenyuan Liu
Wenyuan Liu is a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (CIDD), University of Warwick. Funded by Chancellor’s International Scholarship of the University of Warwick, his PhD explores psychosocial adjustment in families of children with autism from UK and Chinese contexts.
As an IAS Early Career Fellow, he is currently working on publishing his thesis studies and disseminating research publications. He also aims to build an autism, ethnicity, and culture research network to bring together early career researchers from multiple disciplines to better understand the role of ethnicity and culture in autism research.
Lance Hayward
I am an Early Career Fellow in Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study, and a PhD candidate and Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant in Film and Television Studies.
My doctoral thesis, which was funded by an M4C/AHRC studentship, was entitled The Documentary Serial: Forms and Implications. It concerned the formal and narrative intersection of serialisation and television documentary modes of representation.
I am currently working on turning my thesis into a book, and developing articles based on areas adjacent to my PhD research, including one on performance and deception in reality-game programmes.
Sergei Zotov
Sergei holds a BA and MA in German, Literature, and Translation, and an MA in Cultural Studies from the Russian Anthropological School at RSUH Moscow. His Erasmus experience was at UA Barcelona. After this, Sergei worked as a researcher on two projects on alchemical images and medieval book history at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. He also held fellowships in Wolfenbüttel, Gotha, and Berlin.
As a PhD candidate at the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, funded by the Chancellor’s International Scholarship, Sergei conducted research that connects Renaissance manuscript iconography with the history of alchemy.
He also has authored two and co-authored three monographs on history and art history, including two award-winning works.
William Gildea
William Gildea is an IAS Early Career Fellow working in moral and political philosophy. His research asks why humans and animals matter morally, how human rights compare to animal rights, and what duties we have to non-human animals.
Will holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, where his work was supervised by Victor Tadros, Patrick Tomlin, Kimberley Brownlee, and Steve Cooke. He has a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and a BA in PPE from the University of Warwick.
Personal website: www.williamgildea.comLink opens in a new window
Camilo Uribe Botta
Camilo Uribe Botta completed his PhD in History at the University of Warwick. His thesis is about the history of the commerce of orchids between Colombia and the United Kingdom during the 19thcentury.
From an environmental history and material culture perspective, he investigated orchids as botanical curiosities, scientific objects and commodities, highlighting the role of different communities in this exchange of plants.
Camilo has a BA and MA in History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and has worked for the Ministry of Culture of Colombia.
Will Scott
Will is an IAS Early Career Fellow based in Warwick Medical School and the Department of Chemistry.
Funded by the Medical Research Council and the Medical & Life Sciences Research Fund, Will’s research focuses on developing novel techniques for studying the actin cytoskeleton via synthetic biology and organic chemistry approaches.
As an IAS fellow, he is currently working on publishing his doctoral project as a number of publications and review articles.
Paula Hollstein Barria
Paula Hollstein Barria is a PhD in Law researching the shortcomings of mainstream narratives about domestic abuse.
Central to her research is the display of a dynamic and diverse set of responses from victims/survivors, which causes them a sense of being implicated. Her goal is to shed new light on the primary harm of this phenomenon: the traumatic feeling of "self-betrayal."
Paula holds an LLB from the University of Chile, an MSc in philosophy from LSE and an LLM in human rights from UCL. Her academic interests lie in the intersections of law with phenomenology, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and trauma.
Weize Zhao
Weize Zhao is a 2024 Early Career Fellow at the IAS and a Research Assistant at the Department of Philosophy. He holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Nottingham, an MSc in Behavioral Economics, and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Warwick.
Weize's research interests include human behaviours in their political activities and computational social simulation. His recent paper: The Evolution of Polarization in Online Conversation: Twitter Users’ Opinions about the COVID-19 Pandemic Become More Politicized Over Time, examines the dynamic change of Twitter users’ attitudes toward a social crisis (COVID-19 pandemic).
Weize passed his viva with no corrections in March 2024, his thesis: Attitude Polarization: Field Evidence and Computational Simulation, analyzes how to simulate the emergence of group conflict and polarization in an artificial society.
Huba Marton
Huba joined the Department of Chemistry and the School of Life Sciences as a BBSRC-funded MIBTP PhD candidate in 2019 and as an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick after finishing his PhD in 2024.
Huba's doctoral research focused on developing cryoprotective formulations for the long-term storage of bacteriophages and bacteriophage inhibition formulations to prevent infection of bacterial stocks.
Huba has published three articles during his PhD. As an IAS fellow, Huba has been working on a 4th research article and a review article following his doctoral research.
Misha Yakovlev Iakovlev
Misha have completed a PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Professor Karl Schoonover and Professor Rachel Moseley.
Their research investigates shifting configurations of gender, sexuality and race on the russian screen during the period often imagined in terms of 'transition to democracy' (1986-2006).
More broadly, they are interested in using insights from decolonial and critical race theories to address violent erasures and exclusions in US-centric and Eurocentric queer thinking.
Varvara Sklez
Varvara Sklez is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies.
Her doctoral project, funded by the International Chancellor's Scholarship Aesthetics of Effort: Performing Difficult Past in Contemporary Russian Theatre focuses on performances of memory and resistance in contemporary Russian theatre. It argues that in approaching the contentious issues of Soviet history, theatre artists participated in negotiating the 'difficult past', raising questions about power, responsibility and agency, and proposing strategies of resistance at a time when more familiar forms of political participation were being made increasingly difficult by the state. While situating their work within the landscape of memory politics in Russia, the project demonstrates the heterogeneity of this field in which theatre has been a significant actor.
During her time at the IAS, Varvara is working on articles and a book proposal based on her dissertation, as well as on the edited volume Languages and Forms of Resistance: Contesting Russia's Nationalism with Prof Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa) and Prof Julia Listengarten (University of Central Florida).