Departmental news

We are thrilled to extend our congratulations to Ana Kedves who has been seconded to the role of Student Engagement and Experience Officer in the School of Law for the next year.

We are thrilled to extend our congratulations to Lauren Horobin who has been seconded to the role of Student Engagement and Experience Officer in the School of Law for the next year.

There will be a launch event taking place on Wednesday 6th December from 12.00 - 14.00 in FAB2.25 - we recommend that all potential applicants attend - useful information - free lunch - meet Alison and Sue - ask questions.

Booking for this event is now open - Booking Form

Doctoral Fellowship Competition (warwick.ac.uk)

Warwick Law School welcomes new Assistant Professor to our community.

Rachel Pimm-Smith joins us from Exeter Law School where she taught for four years.

The University of Warwick's teaching has been rated ‘outstanding’ by the UK Government's Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

The University achieved the highest possible rating across all three categories for student experience, student outcomes, and for the overall assessment.

Out of 228 universities which took part in the TEF, Warwick was one of 26 to achieve the gold standard across all three. Warwick was one of only four Russell Group universities - including Oxford, Cambridge and Exeter - to achieve this.

It is the latest in a series of top ratings the University has been awarded over recent weeks.

The expert panel concluded that most student experience and student outcomes were of “outstanding quality”, including for students from under-represented backgrounds.

TEF is a national scheme run by the Office for Students (OfS) which aims to encourage higher education providers to deliver excellence in the areas that students care about the most: teaching, learning and achieving positive outcomes from their studies.

The ratings provide students and parents with an independent assessment of the quality of the education delivered by universities within these key areas.

The University has also demonstrated strong progress in closing the attainment gaps for students from disadvantaged backgrounds including those who might have not considered university an option for them in the past. Data from TEF showed better outcomes for students at Warwick from neighbourhoods where less people attend university, and those studying part-time, compared to similar groups of students at other universities.

Commenting on Warwick’s results, Stuart Croft, Warwick’s Vice-Chancellor and President said: “This is an outstanding achievement which recognises the fundamental quality of a Warwick education.

“We’re incredibly proud to have been ranked gold across both the experience students have whilst at Warwick, as well as their outcomes once they have left university.

“These results, which place Warwick as one a handful of institutions to achieve full gold rankings, is a phenomenal achievement for the people responsible – our innovative and remarkable staff and students.”

Professor Gill Cooke, WMG’s Pro Dean (Education) said: “TEF gold standard confirms the commitment and dedication to the student experience from my colleagues in WMG, and it is a delight to have our achievements recognised.”

Warwick was also recently rated as a Top 10 university in the UK by The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Times. The National Student Survey meanwhile found that 82% of students at Warwick said they would recommend their University to future students.

Find out more about TEF 2023 here.

This conference aims to explore the different forms that the idea of a ‘return of the repressed’ has taken over a broad chronological period ranging from the early 18th century through to the Second World War. The notion of an area, inaccessible to rational consciousness, where memories, thoughts, and images could be ‘stored’ and re-activated without any agency of the conscious mind, is largely credited to Sigmund Freud, whose theoretical model of repression, return and ‘compromise formation’ has been highly influential for a vast part of the 20th century. The idea of the ‘return of the repressed’, however, has a remoter and more ramified history, and its pervasiveness extends far beyond the spheres of psychology and psychoanalysis.

In bringing these areas of research together, this conference ultimately seeks to examine the multifaceted presence of the ‘return of the repressed’ – as a polyvalent metaphor, a philosophical concept, and a theoretical method, or as all three simultaneously – throughout cultural modernity as a whole. In particular, we aim to examine three distinct discourses: that of archaeology, in which the ‘return of the repressed’ applies to the physical exhumation of the past; the discourse of psychoanalysis, covering individual memories; and, finally, that of post-colonial theory, exploring the ways repressed colonized voices are subject to a re-emergence and a haunting return in collective spaces, discourses, and praxes. In doing so, the conference employs the notion of ‘return of the repressed’ as a quintessentially inter- and trans-disciplinary tool, enabling us to cross-fertilize different domains and research practices, provoking questions such as: Does the notion of ‘repression’ change in different historical, geographical, and broadly cultural contexts? To what extent, if at all, can psychoanalysis’s view of the repressed be disentangled from its original cultural context? What role has the repressed played in the legitimation, maintenance, and deconstruction of colonial powers? What was the role of physical excavation in the creation, manipulation, showcasing and exploitation of cultural memory? (e.g. the discovery of ancient ruins and archaeological searches for the garden of Eden)?

Bringing together academics from diverse disciplines and fields (including but not limited to (post)colonial studies, archaeology, literary studies, film studies, media studies, psychology and anthropology), this conference aims to attract the attention of academic staff, postgraduate research students and early-career researchers working in the UK and beyond.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers with different methodological approaches and temporal focuses. Topics may include but are not restricted to:

• Pre-freudian concept of unconscious in literature and media;
• The notion of the civilized/uncivilized in colonial discourses;
• The representation of personal and collective pasts;
• Return of ‘primitive’ beliefs, i.e colonial engulfment;
• Social and cultural repression;
• The uncanny, memory and trauma;
• Archaeology of the mind: mind as colonial territory;
• Exoticism, orientalism and racism in literary/cinematic discourses;
• The return of the surmounted;
• Colonial literature and cinema;
• The role of archaeology in the legitimization of colonialism.

Those interested in presenting a paper should send a short abstract (max. 300 words) and a biographical note (max. 150 words) to apcwarwick@gmail.com by 15 December 2023. Participants may also be invited to publish their contributions in an edited publication as part of the Warwick Series in the Humanities, published by Routledge.

This conference is sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the University of Warwick.

We look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the organizers, Gennaro Ambrosino and Kerry Gibbons at apcwarwick@gmail.com

We are thrilled to extend our congratulations to Becca Kirk who has been seconded to the role of Student Services Manager in the School of Law until September 2025.

Researchers at The University of Warwick are among four world-class teams receiving a share of £18 million to pursue transformational bioscience research programmes. The School of Life Sciences team will investigate the bacterial cell wall – which could help to develop new classes of antibiotics, tackling the global challenge of antibiotic resistance. The project is led by Professor David Roper in collaboration with Dr Séamus Holden, Professor Phill Stansfeld and Dr Stephen Cochrane (Queen's University Belfast).
Press Release (29 September 2023)

Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, the leading international venue for machine learning research, which will be held on 10-16 December 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA:

• EV-Eye: Rethinking High-frequency Eye Tracking through the Lenses of Event Cameras, by Guangrong Zhao, Yurun Yang, Jingwei Liu, Ning Chen, Yiran Shen, Hongkai Wen, and Guohao Lan
• Fully Dynamic k-Clustering in Õ(k) Update Time, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Martin Costa, Silvio Lattanzi, and Nikos Parotsidis
• Initialization Matters: Privacy-Utility Analysis of Overparameterized Neural Networks, by Jiayuan Ye, Zhenyu Zhu, Fanghui Liu, Reza Shokri, and Volkan Cevher
• Learning a Neuron by a Shallow ReLU Network: Dynamics and Implicit Bias for Correlated Inputs, by Dmitry Chistikov, Matthias Englert, and Ranko Lazic
• On the Convergence of Shallow Transformers, by Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Towards Data-Agnostic Pruning At Initialization: What Makes a Good Sparse Mask? by Hoang Pham, The Anh Ta, Shiwei Liu, Lichuan Xiang, Dung Le, Hongkai Wen, and Long Tran-Thanh
• Towards Unbounded Machine Unlearning, by Meghdad Kurmanji, Peter Triantafillou, and Eleni Triantafillou

We are delighted to announce that Dr Henrique Carvalho, Associate Professor in the School of Law, and co-author Dr Anastasia Chamberlen have been awarded the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Best Article Prize for 2022.