Participating PhD Researchers

Dámaso Randulfe is a senior lecturer and a coordinator of Critical and Contextual Studies at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University; an associate lecturer at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art; and an editor of Migrant Journal, a publication series on the spatial politics of human and other-than-human migrations. Dámaso’s work and various collaborative projects have been presented at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, Venice Biennale, Triennale de Milano, Architectural Association, Design Museum, Ivorypress or The Showroom. Dámaso is currently a LAHP/AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art researching entangled ecologies of vision and extraction.
Research Presentation: “Images Out of the Deep: Ecologies of Extraction and Regimes of Visibility

Oscar Farley is a writer and PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London, investigating abandoned websites and ruination on the internet. His work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, 3:AM Magazine and King’s Review, and exhibited/performed at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery and Corsica Studios.
Research Presentation: “The Heaven’s Gate Cult Website as a Study in Internet Abandonment

Catherine Comyn is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at King’s College London. Grounded in historical materialism, her work is centrally interested in intersections of finance capital and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming. She is the author of The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (ESRA, 2023) and a contributor to the volume The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance, and Inequality (Manchester University Press, 2023). She was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, of Māori and Pākehā descent, and relocated to the UK in 2018. She is a researcher at Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA).
Research Presentation: “Finance and the Social

Nika Mahnič
Research Presentation: “Programmable infrastructures and state (de)formation”

Wajiha Naqvi is a vocalist, song-writer and music researcher from Pakistan. She is a student of North Indian classical music and has been featured as a lead artist in Coke Studio Pakistan, one of the country’s premiere music shows. She has a Master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University with a background in the anthropology of sacred music from the Islamic world. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral degree in music at King’s College London where she focuses on the social histories and musical repertoire of hereditary North Indian classical and Sufi music practitioners living in Pakistan.
Research Presentation: “Qawwali Unbound: A study of Qawwali in Pakistan (1947- present) through the Qawwal Bachche

Alma Prelec is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London) and Stipendiary Lecturer in the Sub-Faculty of Spanish (Humanities Division) at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Central, she trained on the postgraduate course at the Oxford School of Drama and completed a BA and Clarendon-funded MSt at the University of Oxford, specialising in Golden Age and Contemporary Spanish theatre.From 2020-2021 she was co-editor of the MHRA journal, Working Papers in the Humanities, and she is currently editorial assistant at Contemporary Theatre Review. Forthcoming publications include ‘From Golden Age to Civil War: Stages of Spain in Yugoslavia’ inDaring Adaptations, Creative Failures and Experimental Performance in Iberian and Transnational Contexts (Liverpool University Press, 2023) and The Eyes, an English translation of Pablo Messiez’ Los ojos (MHRA New Translations, 2023). She has collaborated with various cultural institutions, including the London ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), the Theatre Times, and the Instituto Cervantes in London.
Research Presentation: “Travelling Players, Travelling Civil Wars: Spain and Yugoslavia on the Transnational Stage

Molly Wilson is a researcher in feminist performance practice. With a background in applied theatre, Molly obtained an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2020 in Arts, Creativity and Education. She is now undertaking a practice research PhD at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, in collaboration with Little Fish Theatre; her doctoral research is concerned with performative gender in digital spaces and the power of autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice.
Research Presentation: “Disrupting Digital Girlhood: exploring the performativity of female identity in digital space through autobiographical performance as socially engaged practice

Alex Hill information forthcoming.

Mykhailo Bogachov is a Ukrainian researcher and curator, interested in normativity in technology and art. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine. BA in Literature, MA in Philosophy (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, 2012-2018). Ph.D. student at H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, Ukraine. Assistant curator at Ukho Music, a curatorial agency specializing in contemporary classical, experimental, and improvisational music. Previously worked as a PR manager at several Ukrainian organizations for music and film, and as a freelance journalist in music and art criticism. Co-founder of Open Library of Fine Arts (Kyiv). Temporarily based in Germany (Leibniz Universität Hannover).
Research Presentation: “From Discourse Ethics in Digital Environments to AI Ethics and Performative Prediction

Brad Scott is a second year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London and the Natural History Museum. His research encompasses the global and colonial contexts of the Sloane Herbarium, probably the largest plant collection of its era in the world. Combining close readings of archival catalogues with digital humanities techniques, and case studies of specific collectors, his research explores the creation of plant knowledges in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Previously, Brad worked for 30 years in digital academic publishing, combining new product development with XML data design and workflow planning. He is also a field botanist, specialising in mosses.
Research Presentation: “Decolonising the Sloane Herbarium

Barbora Siváčková is a doctoral student at the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology SAS, in her research she deals with the issue of building and maintaining ethnological and anthropological digital image collections. Her thesis is focused on current approaches and trends in the design and construction of digital scientific collections in the humanities.
Research Presentation: “Digital scientific collections in ethnology and anthropology: their creation, usability in research and sustainability

Sarah Capes holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies and a master’s in Philosophy. In both instances, Capes focused particularly on issues of social injustice, with an MA culminating in a dissertation on universal moral duties in the context of international structural injustice. Capes has a PGCE in modern foreign languages, and a cosmopolitanist teaching style consciously grounded in the real world. Capes has assisted Leverhulme-funded research on Indigenous peoples’ food security in the international environmental regime, and has managed a research expedition in the Peruvian Amazon collecting biodiversity, climate change and community conservation data.
Research Presentation: “Indigenous Voices and International Environmental Politics: The Translation of Worlds between Communities and Conventions

Nic Farr is an LAHP-funded PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Their research focuses on examining practices of queer placemaking through a scenographic lens. They are also a visual artist and performance designer specialising in experimental and devised work, often made in collaboration with activist or community groups.
Research Presentation: “The Scenographics of Queer Placemaking