Dr Ryan Arthur

Dr Ryan Arthur is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Warwick.

Ryan holds a BA, MPhil, and PhD in the social sciences. He also has an MA in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and a postgraduate qualification in coaching. He was a lecturer in law at the University of Reading and SOAS, University of London. He previously managed learning development at the Birkbeck Business School, University of London, and the Institute for the International Education of Students. He describes his pedagogical approach as student-centred, dialogic, and engaging.

His research interests include the BME award gap, decolonisation, and innovative pedagogies.

Ryan was awarded a P2K Fellowship by the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) to address the biases of researching the black experience in the higher education sector. Current research often distorts the full humanity of black students by only documenting their negative experiences; difference is viewed through the lens of adversity and joylessness. However, so much more can be gained through the lens of value. Correspondingly, Ryan will spend his fellowship developing a praxis of appreciation. Three projects will be developed from the fellowship to promote this praxis.

Dr Roxanne Douglas

Roxanne was the co-organiser of the Women in World(-)Literature conferenceLink opens in a new window in 2022, (conference programmeLink opens in a new window) which asked 'in “a singular modernity, combined and uneven”, what is specific about women’s experiences; and how are these specificities registered in world(-)literature?'.

Since then, Roxanne has led a special issue on Women in World-Literature for the Journal of World Systems ResearchLink opens in a new window, and an edited collection Women in World-Literature which will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. She will also shortly be launching a CfP for a follow up conference 'Women in World-Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion', which will focus on how the ecological and health impacts of the world-system are implicated by gender.

Roxanne will be using her time as a Pathway to Knowledge Fellow to run this conference and to begin work on her second monograph It's the End of the World As She Knows It, which will use world-literary methods to engage with women's apocalyptic and pre-apocalyptic writing from across the world. The project will ask questions such as: what does it mean to be a woman, a social role, at the end of society; how are bodies and (reproductive) labour examined as resources for the “greater good” in a crisis? How does “culture” continue? Is this task gendered?

Roxanne's first book, Feminist Gothic, Critical Irrealism and Arab Women’s World-Literature: ‘Living with Ghosts’ will be published with Palgrave Macmillan's ‘New Comparisons in World Literature’ series soon.

Dr Dino Jakusic

Dino works on the history of philosophy, with particular focus on the history of ontology and epistemology/logic in Early Modernity and the period of Classical German Philosophy. He is particularly interested in Christian Wolff, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel, and the relationship of their systems to the earlier rationalist and natural theological traditions.

His Pathways to Knowledge Fellowship project investigates the history of academic and disciplinary secularisation. He is looking into the mistaken beliefs we hold about the way in which the university disciplines and scientific theories have taken their current shape, and how our societal views on religion might have influenced these beliefs. He is particularly interested in investigating the phenomenon of exclusion of Medieval philosophy from the standard philosophical curriculum in the UK.

Dino’s project is separated into three areas of activity. The regular seminar series entitled Our ‘Irrational’ Past will bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss the benefits of engaging with the periods of their disciplinary history which are considered theoretically superseded or do not fit into the narratives of scientific development which we often tell ourselves. Dino will also undertake historiographical research to investigate when Medieval philosophy became understood as the philosophy of the priests. Finally, he will organise a fieldwork study to investigate how the UK Philosophy academics see the place of Medieval philosophy within the undergraduate curriculum.