LHub

Laurie Bashford (they/them) is a writer and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at Columbia University in New York City. Through ongoing ethnographic research in London and the UK, they learn from trans artists and activists, focusing on the constitution of contemporary trans experience through encounters with built infrastructures and the urban sensorium. Their work has been featured by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and the International Quarterly of Asian Studies.

Email: lb3235@columbia.edu

Dr Andrew Benjamin Bricker is Associate Professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University in Belgium and Senior Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670-1792 (Oxford University Press, 2022), which focuses on the development of defamation law in relation to written, visual, and dramatic satire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain. Starting in March 2025, Bricker will be Principal Investigator for DELIAH: Democratic Literacy and Humour (2025-2029), which is funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, and which grew out of his multi-university research network HACIDA: Humor and Conflict in the Digital Age (2022-2024). He is a member of the Cartoons in Court research team, which is funded by a Constructive Advanced Thinking Grant from the Network of European Institutes of Advanced Study; and serves as Co-Coordinator of the Literature, Law, and Society Research Group at the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL). During Lent Term 2025, Bricker will be a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining UGent, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at McGill University and a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia.

Email: Andrew.Bricker@UGent.be

Personal Website: https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/andrew.bricker 

Dr Jess Connolly-Smith is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar with research interests in the areas of legal geography, law and everyday life, and law and the senses. Her research explores how law engages in abstract and material practices of meaning-making to produce identities which construct, shape, and permeate our experience of everyday life. Jess is the author of Law, Registration, and the State: Making Identities through Space, Place, and Movement (Routledge, 2023) - awarded the Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics 2024. She is co-editor of ‘Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal’, a special section of Social & Legal Studies. Her research has been also published in Feminist Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, and The Sociological Review. 

Email: JessSmith@lincoln.ac.uk

Dr Ogulcan Ekiz is a lecturer-in-law at the HRC School of Law, Swansea University. Ogulcan’s research areas primarily concern copyright law, its theory and practice in relation to photography, film, fashion, and visual arts. 

Dr Ogulcan conducted his PhD research at the Queen Mary University of London with the Humanities and Social Sciences Studentship funding. He studied LLM at QMUL with the JAL Sterling Postgraduate Bursary Award.

Ogulcan is a member of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, a collaborator of Art/Law Network, and he works closely with Artists’ Union England on copyright-related matters.

Email: ogulcan.ekiz@swansea.ac.uk
 

James Campbell is a DPhil Candidate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and Lead Editor of Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies. He has a background in performance studies, legal anthropology, and the sociology of law. His current research explores the significance of physical movement within legal spaces. He holds law degrees from the University of Strathclyde, the University of Edinburgh, and the International Institute for the Sociology of Law. A passionate legal educator, James was previously Tutor in Public Law (Strathclyde), Tutor in Critical Legal Thinking (Edinburgh), and is an Associate Lecturer with Open University. As of 2023, he holds a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Email: james.campbell@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Personal Website: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/james-campbell

Dr Jonah Miller is a historian of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He is especially interested in the relationship between history and law as disciplines, legal documents as historical sources, and the history of legal arguments in political debates. He is currently working on legal and political responses to police violence in nineteenth-century Britain, especially campaigns for justice launched by radical groups. Outside the IALS, he is a lecturer at King's College London and a research fellow at King's College, Cambridge.

Email: jonah.4.miller@kcl.ac.uk 

Lecturer: Jonah Miller | King's College London (kcl.ac.uk)

Research fellow: Dr Jonah Miller | Faculty of History University of Cambridge

Dr Jake Subryan Richards is a historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora. His research concerns how enslaved and free people interacted with law in a world structured by Atlantic empires. His first book project analyzes the history of the suppression of the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people. He has published his research in Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Modern Intellectual History and is coeditor of Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2023). He cocurated the Black Atlantic exhibition at the University of Cambridge Museums (2023–24). Richards is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker and a British Art Network Emerging Curator.

Email: J.Richards@lse.ac.uk

Personal Website: https://www.lse.ac.uk/International-History/People/academicStaff/richards/richards

Parashar Kulkarni studies religion, political economy, and utopias, in colonial and contemporary India and the British Empire. He collaborates on films and documentaries. His work appears in literary and academic journals such as Granta, Boston Review, The Sociological Review Magazine, Social Science History, and the British Journal of Political Science. His writing has received several prizes, including the British Academy’s Brian Barry Prize, the Boston Review Aura Estrada Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize. He has published two novels, Cow and Company (Penguin 2019) and Darako (Penguin 2024). He has a Ph.D. from New York University. He is now writing about court trials and labor movements in Bombay.

Email: parashar.kulkarni@gmail.com

Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/view/parasharkulkarni/

Shekinah Vera-Cruz is a final year PhD student in the Department of Classics at the University of Warwick, and her research is funded by the Wolfson Foundation. Her current work is an interdisciplinary study of ritual acts in Roman civil law, especially those which govern the creation of wills, alter the constitution of the family, and effect changes of status and citizenship. More specifically, she is concerned with the function, purpose, and efficacy of these rituals within the logic of ius civile itself, and the relationship between 'form' and 'substance' in law. Through this study, she hopes to demonstrate the potential of rituals to transform the ‘real’ through effective performative action, and to work towards a more nuanced conception of the flexibility and resilience of Roman legal forms.
Outside of her doctoral research, she is also interested in digital humanities, Roman institutions, legal or otherwise, and the history of legal scholarship, especially the reception and reinterpretation of legal texts.

Email: Shekinah.Vera-Cruz@warwick.ac.uk

Dr Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher at SOAS where she studies the impact of authoritarianism on the land claims of nomadic communities in India. She was previously a doctoral researcher in International Law at the European University Institute in Florence. Her project, supported by the Nuffic-Beurs scholarship, proposed a multimedia, ethnographic re-articulation of the grammar and politics of cultural rights in international human rights law using counterhegemonic epistemologies. Her doctoral thesis was anchored on collaborative fieldwork with the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community based in southern India. Raghavi is actively engaged as a policy interlocutor through her work with ICOMOS and her consulting work with cultural rights collectives in India, Kenya, and Italy. She is interested in international human rights law, international criminal justice, cultural heritage law, epistemic injustice, the ethics of ethnographic research, and sensory approaches to legal meaning-making. 

Email: rv13@soas.ac.uk

Personal Website: https://www.socialifeoflaw.com/raghavi-viswanath

Artist, designer, educator and human rights lawyer, Suleyman Wellings-Longmore is a graduate of Harvard Law School and most recently the Royal College of Art, where he studied Painting as a Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship recipient. His creative practice is concerned with what his work does in the mind of the viewer – using the sensory, almost physical, experience of optical illusions to both force confrontation with and wrestle autonomy from the observer, whilst interrogating themes of representation, perspective and change. Perception and representation are as much components of the science of optics as they are daily facets of the human experience. In combining optical illusions and figuration - fusing painting with sculpture, design and textiles to centre the unseen, he invites the viewer to question where and how such communities and ideas exist then cease to remain within our individual and shared psyches. Human rights work provides the foundation for him to artistically investigate social issues, and art develops the creativity and empathy vital in fighting for positive change. 

Email: info@suley.art

Personal Website: www.suley.art