Ronghui (Kevin) Zhou

Ronghui (Kevin) Zhou is a PhD candidate at the Department of Education Studies funded by the Warwick-China Scholarship Council Joint Research Scholarship. His research highlights Education for Sustainable Development concept and policy in China and global contexts. Kevin has recently been appointed as a Guest Editor for the Special Issue “Rare Earths and Critical Minerals in the Planetary Just Transition: Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Upstream-downstream Supply Chains in the Drive for a Low Carbon Transition” for the Journal of The Extractive Industries and Society. His research interests include Education for Sustainable Development, just transition, education inequality, discourse and power, and policy enactment.

Folusho Balogun

I am an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and a Physics PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. My doctoral research focused on using ultrafast spectroscopy techniques to investigate charge carrier dynamics and transport in emerging materials; these materials have applications in photovoltaics, lasers and beyond. A good analogy for my research is using a high-speed camera (ultrafast spectroscopy) to track a hummingbird’s movement (processes in the material).

My current research interests involve using ultrafast spectroscopy techniques to study stability in these emerging materials, as this is vital for their future commercial applications.

Aparajita Haldar

Aparajita completed her PhD with the Department of Computer Science, and is now an Early Career Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on graph algorithms (e.g., studying the spread of information through a social network) and graph learning tasks (e.g., using machine learning on graphs for recommender systems). Her PhD thesis was about optimisation techniques for using such algorithms in limited resource environments (i.e., with communication, latency, memory constraints) as well as on dynamic graph inputs. More broadly, she is interested in graph neural network applications, knowledge graphs for AI, spectral techniques in graph theory, and fairness in ML/AI.

Kathryn Sidaway

Kathryn Sidaway is a PhD candidate in the Department of Applied Linguistics funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Her PhD focuses on the language learning motivation of both forced and voluntary adult migrants learning English in England. Prior to her PhD, Kathryn taught English in FE colleges to teenagers and adults and is passionate about connecting research with the language classroom. She co-convenes the NATECLA ESOL Research Community and edits the IATEFL ESOLSIG biannual publication ‘ESOL Matters’. She also co-convenes the Language Learning Psychology PhD/ECR Community, which supports PGR students around the world through online events.

Christopher Earley

Christopher Earley recently completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His doctoral research looked at the philosophical problems posed by contemporary art. His current research focuses on attempting to explain why it is that artists are increasingly encouraged to exempt themselves from the norms that guide action in other domains of life, and why looking at the normative structure of artworlds rather than the works of individual artists might help us to understand this. He is also interested in the relationship between art and epistemology and the philosophy of history.

Reece Goodall

Reece Goodall is a PhD student in French Studies, and he is working on an industrial and theoretical analysis of contemporary French horror cinema, uniting these two facets of the genre into a cohesive and complementary framework. His research interests include horror and other genres in French cinema, the contemporary horror genre, and the interplay between media, news and politics. He has previously written for French Screen Studies, Horror Studies and Animation Studies, and he is the author of forthcoming chapters on Alexandre Aja, Wes Craven, folk horror, and the Conjuring franchise.

Charlie Price

I submitted my PhD in Politics and International Studies in April of 2023; my research focussed on the Nordic Region, wherein I studied novel kinds of bordering arrangements performed by far-right organisations and use this to interrogate the concept of sovereignty. My research lies at the intersections between political geography, philosophy, political sociology, and political psychology. I am primarily interested in biopolitics and ontological security and use these concepts to study how far-right groups influence politics and our understandings of core political concepts.

Lucrezia Sperindio

Lucrezia Sperindio is an Early Career Fellow, and has recently completed her PhD in the Department of Classics and Ancient History. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Rethinking Horace’s Lyric modus: Horace’s Odes 1-3 and Tragic Choral Lyric’, explores the intertextual interactions between Horace’s lyric poetry and Greek and Roman tragedy, with a specific focus on tragic choral odes. Lucrezia is interested in applying the critical questions and methods of intertextuality and reader reception to Latin literature of the Early Empire. Currently, she is working to develop several outputs from her PhD thesis, as well as shaping her post-doctoral project on the Latin author Seneca and his intertextual relationship with Horace’s lyric.

G. Ali Shair

G. Ali Shair has recently completed his PhD in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick. For his doctoral studies he won the prestigious Chief Minister Merit Scholarship (CMMS) funded by the Punjab Education Endowment Fund (PEEF) of Pakistan. Titled Singing Survival: The Social World of Classical Musicians in Pakistan, his PhD is a first-of-its-kind study into the survival strategies of classical music practitioners against the backdrop of music’s contested place in the postcolonial formation of national culture in Pakistan. He is particularly interested in postcolonial theory, nationalism, religious identity, and performance cultures. Currently, as an Early Career Fellow at IAS, G. Ali Shair is expanding upon his PhD through a book proposal and his postdoctoral research on Muslim modernity and music.

Choudhry Shuaib

Choudhry Shuaib is an Early Career Research fellow based in the Department of Mathematics. He recently finished a PhD in the Mathematics of Systems where he focused on the field of network science. His research consists of developing the mathematics to analyse complex systems using the abstract concept of networks to represent and subsequently model them. During my PhD I focussed on analysing complex systems through the lens of hierarchical structure. This resulted in novel insights upon applications to a wide variety of systems such as disease spreading and economic systems such a trade networks.

I am looking to further develop the novel mathematical framework I constructed during my thesis. Additionally, I want to demonstrate its utility to other researchers by applying it to other domains. During the fellowship I look to extend my work to a unique sociohistorical network that I have constructed with a team of researchers from a historical corpus of data that was recently digitised. At its core this network is a rumour transmission network that is formed from the transmission of the Islamic religious tradition over a millennium and spans the geographic expanse between Spain and the subcontinent. I will use a novel mathematical and computational approach to provide new insights into the history of Islam.

Dr Liz Egan

Liz is a historian of the Caribbean and British Empire, and am particularly interested in questions of race, class, and gender in the colonial Caribbean. Her doctoral project focused on the construction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking how the meanings of whiteness – and who could claim whiteness – were shaped by the legacies of slavery, questions of political autonomy, and wider colonial discourses of race. Several articles based on this research are currently in progress, and she is continuing to extend this research with the intention of developing a monograph proposal. More broadly, She is beginning to develop a new project that addresses the place of policing in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Her full research profile is available here.

Ricardo Aguilar-González

Ricardo Aguilar-González is a historian of Latin America who focuses on the intersections between social history of colonialism with history of foods, drinks and bodies in Mexico and Guatemala. His research areas comprise the history of the indigenous nobility in colonial Mexico, and the cultural and political history of indigenous belief systems before and during the colonisation period. He completed his PhD at the Department of History at the University of Warwick with a thesis titled ‘Sustenance: A History of Foods, Drinks and Bodies in the Colonisation of Mesoamerica, 1470-1600’. Additionally, he has published, along with art historian Angélica Afanador-Pujol, Don Antonio Huitziméngari: An Indigenous Nobleman’s Petition and Life in Sixteenth-Century Colonial Mexico (UNAM-UMSNH, 2019, in Spanish) and a 15-chapter edited volume (Tilling and Opening Pathways: Essays on Memory and Regional History in honour of Gerardo Sánchez Díaz, Morelia, UMSNH, 2022, in Spanish) on the intersection between social memory, and regional history. Currently, Ricardo is working on a research project on the social history of the introduction of spirits and wheat breads to indigenous colonial towns on the one hand, and on the contestation and reinterpretation of these foreign foodstuffs by indigenous peoples.