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Prof Esther Leslie

Positions held:
  • Professor of Political Aesthetics, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Esther Leslie has research interests in political theories of aesthetics and culture and the poetics of science and technology, as well as animation, in an expanded sense. She has a particular focus on thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, including Walter Benjamin, T.W. Adorno, Kracauer, Bloch. Recent work includes a thorough and experimental history of Weimar radio and BBC exile history through the figure of Ernst Schoen. She is also frequently engaged to work with and in museumsÌý and galleries -Ìýrecently, for two examples, on a history of the impact of ICI in Teesside and in relation to extensive artistic research investigations of milk and dairy. She has written on animation in its narrow and broadest senses. and co-runs a research platform: Animate Assembly She is academic lead for a museum in Somers Town that focuses on histories of locality and questions of social justice.Ìý

    Her booksÌýinclude Walter Benjamin:ÌýOverpowering ConformismÌý(Pluto 2000), andÌýHollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant GardeÌý(Verso 2002),ÌýSynthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical IndustryÌý(Reaktion, 2005)ÌýandÌýWalter BenjaminÌý(Reaktion 2007),ÌýDerelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage(Unkant, 2014),ÌýLiquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid FormÌý(Reaktion, 2016) and, with Melanie Jackson,ÌýDeeper in the PyramidÌý(Banner Repeater, 2018) and The Inextinguishable (EVA International, Limerick, 2020). Deeper in the Pyramid was updated with the subtitle Share of Throat for a major exhibition on milk at Wellcome Gallery in 2023. In 2024, she published a study of the impact of a vast chemical co flomerate in the NE of England, as part of a research commission for MIMA - The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensim and the Environment (Palgrave). She also published Dissonant Waves: Ednst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century (Goldsmiths Press - with Sam Dolbear).

    She studied German and spent 2 years at the Free University in Berlin, which undergirds her translation practice. Her translations include Georg Lukacs,ÌýA Defence of 'History and Class Consciousness'Ìý(Verso 2002) andÌýWalter Benjamin: The ArchivesÌý(Verso, 2007),ÌýOn PhotographyÌý(Reaktion, 2015) and, with Sam Dolbear and Sebastian Truskolaski,ÌýWalter Benjamin The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness, (Verso, 2016).

    She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

    Ìý

    Highlights

    • Academic lead and founder of the People's Museum Somers Town:Ìý

    • Recent book

      Dissonant Waves
      Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th century
      By Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie

      Goldsmiths Press, 11 July 2023

      Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might.

      Dissonant WavesÌýtracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.

      An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a route into the world—and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.


    • Recent book

      The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment

      1 Sept 2023, Palgrave

      This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain- based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain’s industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm’s origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and social media posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of ICI. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives which emanate from the area. Through the lens of global narratives of industrial and philosophical innovation, it inquires into uncommon and diverse themes, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people’s lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products.

    • To celebrate Verso’s new edition of The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin, Esther Leslie (writer and translator of many books including The Storyteller, and Professor of Political Aesthetics at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, London) and Stuart Jeffries (journalist and author of many books including Grand Hotel Abyss) discuss the life and legacy of Walter Benjamin. From his relationship with his peers, the other members of the Frankfurt School, and his cultural heritage, to his use of, and feelings about, technological advancements, to his approach to storytelling, writing and language more broadly, join Esther and Stuart for this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of one of Western Marxism's most important philosophers.


      On Walter Benjamin's Culture and Barbarism, video commissioned by Culture Matters site



      Guest on Walter Benjamin: In Our Time, BBC Radio 4

      Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable philosopher and critic whose ideas, developed in the 1930s, became highly influential after his death while escaping the Holocaust.

    • Deeper in the Pyramid: Share of Throat with Melanie Jackson, in exhibition, Wellcome Gallery:Ìý30 March – 10 September 2023

      The exhibition included contemporary objects and artworks by Julia Bornefeld, Sarah Pucill, Hetain Patel, and Lucy + Jorge Orta, amongst others, as well as new commissions by Danielle Dean, Jess Dobkin, and Ilana Harris-Babou. It also features a 2023 iteration of ‘Deeper in the Pyramid’, Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie’s major project exploring milk’s seepage into every aspect of our daily lives.Ìý

    • SOME ONLINE LECTURES

      Device and Designs on Us

      A lecture at Bard Graduate Centre, 2019


      These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times

      a lecture forÌýthe Summer School as School in Pristina, August 2022


      Exhibition talk: Professor Esther Leslie on Bassam Al Sabah

      Glitter and gleam, reflection, particles, skins for sale, polygons: what makes up the lure of the digital world? What new beings are made and unmade in the pixel process? This talk explores the reflecting worlds and distorting mirrors of Bassam Al Sabah’s I AM ERROR – and asks whether, as Adorno mournfully and combatively suggested, ‘there is no right life in the false’?

    • Are We the Cows of the Future?
      The pastures of digital dictatorship — crowded conditions, mass surveillance, virtual reality — are already here.

      Read an opinion piece written for the New York Times inÌýJan 2021

      Listen to an interview about this work and my work in general: On 'Sustainability Now, from May 2021

    • Long Reads: Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin's Messianic Marxism
      Jacobin Radio

      Listen to a podcast here:


      More links to podcasts here:


    Office hours

    By email appointment: e.leslie@bbk.ac.uk

    Web profiles

    Administrative responsibilities

    • Co-director of the ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú Institute of the Humanities
    • Programme Convenor of MA Critical Theory
    • REF lead Unit 27

    Visiting posts

    • Visiting Fellow, SSEES, UCL,

    Professional memberships

    • Editorial board member of Historical Materialism: Researches in Critical Marxism

    • Fellow of the British Academy


    • Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2019

    • Staff Educational Development Association teaching acceditation, 1999

    • Editorial board member of Animation: An Interdisciplinary JournalÌý


    • Committee member, Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize CommitteeÌý


    Honours and awards

    • Fellow of the British Academy , November 2019
    • Ronald Tress Prize (jointly awarded) ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, October 2000
    • Hollywood Flatlands: Choice Outstanding Academic title , October 2003

    ORCID

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • marxism
    • Frankfurt School
    • Poetics of Science
    • Walter Benjamin
    • Modernism
    • colour
    • anarchism
    • Somers Town
    • radical aesthetics
    • Fascism and Nazism
    • critical theory
    • animation
    • robotics

    Research overview

    Esther Leslie’s chair, ‘Professor of Political Aesthetics’, at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú, yokes together subjects perhaps thought of as discrete in disciplinary terms, and neither of which she professes to teach within – Politics and Aesthetics. For her, the relay between these aspects has featured in much of her work – whether it is the exploration of how aesthetic innovations, art and culture, respond or react to liberatory revolutionary situations, or whether it is the ways in which an authoritarian regime turns aesthetics and art into a weapon of control, as something to be censored and policed, lest it threaten the social order. Much of her work on Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, on Nazi film and photography, on Stalinist Socialist Realism, on madness and expression, has tracked these connections. Through this work, she came to the theme of animation, which she has interpreted as a philosophically attuned form, inserting itself into political contexts in a variety of intriguing ways. Her more recent work, developing out of a fascination with colour in representation, has taken her political, aesthetic and interdisciplinary approaches into the study of technology and science, under the mantle of what she calls a poetics of science. Two aspects not always thought in tandem are again combined. One result of this was the study of synthetic dye production in Germany, where colour, artifice, politics, philosophy, company and art histories combine. A new book looks at the legacy of chemcial production in the Teesside region of the UK. Her earlier work on animation stuck with cel and model animation, but the shift of the industry into computer generation, and the suffusing of this CGI everywhere, led to investigations of liquid crystals, touchscreens and a highly expanded idea of what it means to be animated now. Newer work explores the poetics and politics of milk and butter production, the metaphorical impulses of Fog and Cloud Computing and what type of atmospheres they produce and are produced in.

    I am an editor of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxism:

    I edit a book series with Pluto Press, Marxism in Culture:

    I am on the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize CommitteeÌýwhich awards each year an accolade to one book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition:

    Ìý

    Research Centres and Institutes

    • ,

    Research projects

    Animate Assembly: Animation and New Life.

    Abstract

    ANIMATE ASSEMBLY is concerned withÌýhowÌýthe animate and the inanimate are arranged toward each other, what kinds of engagements this allows for, and which ones it disables. TheÌýASSEMBLYÌýcommissions contributors to produce entries for a speculative glossary of animation today, and takes shape through the dialogues and debates they prompt.

    Ìý

    Animation today has proliferated into fields of 3D simulation and computational models, in contexts ranging from economic modelling and ecological activism to architectural and city design, medicine and surgery, educational formats and military training programmes. It has become a significant visualization tool for artists, cellular biologists, financial analysts and urban planners alike. Digital animations intervene in life processes at both the level of individual bodies, to prolong and destroy life, and at the vast scale of planetary phenomena. The political contexts and consequences of animation have changed so that digital animation is now deployed in human rights tribunals, global activism campaigns and speculative future visions. Under these conditions, life is enmeshed in animation in the vast network of software, infrastructure and labour, which require studies far beyond the more limited and specific animation of the past, much of which unfurled in cinemas or on TVs. The expanded critical role of digital animation requires a reconsideration of the political and ethical implications of the animated image and a reimagining of what it means to propose animation as constitutive of life, with all the ontological and experiential resonances of this phrase: animation as a form of life, as a modelling of life, as a site for life-impacting decisions.

    Deeper in the Pyramid (2)

    Abstract

    A second iteration of the project Deeper in the Pyramid (first shown in various venues in London, Birmingham and Nottingham)Ìý has been commissioned by Wellcome Gallery, as part of an exhibition on Milk for March 2022.Ìý

    This project is commissioned and funded by Wellcome Trust

    Ìý

    Ìý

    Outcomes

    An extensive display with written elements in Wellcome Galleries for 6 months.Ìý

    Turbid Media

    Abstract

    Work on a monograph:ÌýFog, froth and foam – as matter and metaphors - accumulate: e.g. particulate fogs around industry, toxic foams drifting from bodies of water, fogged computer networks, microfoam-coffee and bubble teas, dangerous foams in cladding, ‘social bubbles’, visualisations of space-time foam. These are turbid – in Goethean terms, generative of vision. In modern terms, ‘turbid media’ is what physicists call muddy water or fogged air, with visible dust. Apprehended through the Goethean Truebe (conceived at the start of industrialism) and turbid media (as monitored in a postindustrial digital anthropocene), what effects and social potentials are produced by and through fogs, froths and foams.

    Outcomes

    monograph, 2023

    Abstract

    An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity.

    Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic, for those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution. The counterreaction was Nazism—and Schoen and his milieux fell victim to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might.

    Dissonant WavesÌýtracks the life of Ernst Schoen—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.

    An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of experimentation and friendship and the proposals that half-found a route into the world, and might yet spark political-technical experimentation.

    (authored with Sam Dolbear)

    Outcomes

    book, Goldsmiths Press/Sonics Series, May 2023

    Abstract

    A seminar series and a conference covering a varieties of bodily substances, including, urine, blood, mucous, vomit, breastmilk, sweat.Ìý

    Outcomes

    seminar series, conference, website.Ìý

    Abstract

    Research for an exhibition at MIMA, Middlesbrough, 2020-21.ÌýChemical City was a large thematic exhibition on the legacies of chemicals production in the Tees Valley. Starting with a focus on plastics manufacturing in the area, the exhibition travels through broader social, economic, material and ecological themes. It charts relationships between early experiments with synthetic fibres and dyes and contemporary innovations in more sustainable fashion through historical materials and contemporary design products. Artists’ painting, sculpture and film trace the impacts of twentieth century manufacturing on people and places.

    Ìý

    This project was funded and commissioned by MIMA

    Outcomes

    AsÌýcritical advisor on the exhibitionÌýI wrote and read three extended essays that frame the presentation. They can be read on the website orÌýlistened to on Soundcloud.

    I contributed to Chemical City – Then and Now, a digital publication that goes deep into the themes of the exhibition. Thoughts, memories, artworks, archival photographs and poems are gathered as reflections on a history that continues to impact on the lives of people today.ÌýIt can be read on the MIMA website.

    Abstract

    Jackson and Leslie’s collaborative publication The Inextinguishable is an ongoing exploration of milk, long associated with Golden Vein. Milk is a primal fluid, identified with care – yet it’s sensational qualities are captured by science in bio-political skeins of big data analysis in Ireland and internationally to make it one of the most technologized fluids on the planet.

    Ìý

    This project was commissioned and funded by the Limerick Biennale, 2020-21

    (with Melanie Jackson)

    Outcomes

    A newspaper with original research on milk production and associated themes, with articular reference to the context of Ireland.Ìý

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions external to ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:
    3
    Supervisions within ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú:
    13

    I have supervised many brilliant PhDs - topics includeÌýGerman sexology and English literature;ÌýSkyscrapers and Americanism; Iain Sinclair and psychogeographic hubs; the culture of Bloomsbury Squares; radical pedagogy; Stan Brakhage and dialectical aesthetics;ÌýWalter Benjamin and Friendship;Ìýthe Aesthetics of Resistance; grey literature; Adorno and forgetting; radical poetics.

    I am interested in projects that pursue various intersections between politics and aesthetics, in particular those with an anarchist or Marxist inflection. I am happy to consider art practice-based PhDs and experimental form. and have considerable experience in supervising and examining such work both at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú and at other institutions such as the RCA, Slade, Copenhagen Royal Art Academy and elsewhere.

    Current doctoral researchers

    • SIMON KING
      Nature of supervision:
      JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      Infrastructures for Creative and Critical Practice: Walking, Dialogue and Social Engagement
    • ADDISON FAN
      Nature of supervision:
      PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      Rotations: Kinetic Ontology of Contingencies and Critique of Mediated Circular Perception
    • ZOE DUKOFF-GORDON
      Nature of supervision:
      JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      Resisting Resistance: Exploring the Implications of the Feminist Post-Lacanian Subject in the Context of Activism
    • TOM GRAHAM
      Nature of supervision:
      PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR,
      Title of thesis:
      Adornoian Critical Model of the Concept of Satan as it Pertains to Aspects of the Satanic Panic

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • ELIZABETH JONES
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      What is Anti-Spectacular Literature? Opposition in contemporary literature to the Spectacle as defined by Guy Debord
      Awarded:
      2022
    • NIVEDITA NAIR
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Irony and Sincerity in Contemporary Film Cultures
      Awarded:
      2026
    • LEILA NASSERELDEIN
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Awarded:
      2022
    • SALLY O'REILLY
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Awarded:
      2020
    • PAUL INGRAM
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Philistinism, Anti-Art and the Avant-Garde.
      Awarded:
      2020
    • CLAUDIA FIRTH
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Peter Weiss: Aesthetics of Resistance.
      Awarded:
      2019
    • JACOB BARD-ROSENBERG
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Damaged Subjects of Modernity: Forgetting and Memory in the work of Adorno and Benjamin'
      Awarded:
      2022
    • MAGDA SCHMUKALLA
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Artistic Ruptures and their 'Communist' Ghosts. On the post-communist condition as threshold experience in art from and in Eastern Europe
      Awarded:
      2017
    • SAM DOLBEAR
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin and the Intersections of Criticality.
      Awarded:
      2019

    Teaching

    I teach on the MA Cultural and Critical Studies, BA Liberal Arts and BA English.

    Past and present modules include: 

    MA

    • Key Concepts in Cultural and Critical Theory
    • Time for Revolution
    • Theory of Clouds
    • Aesthetics and Cultural Theory
    • Critique of Everyday Life
    • Modernism and Vulgarity

    BA

    • Writing London
    • Production of the Human
    • Romanticism
    • Literature and the Politics of Feeling
    • Connecting the Arts
    • The Photographic
    • Back to the Future
    • Avant Garde Revolt and Reaction
    • Modernism and the City
    • Leaving the Twentieth Century
    • Literature and the Image

    I also teach on the London Critical Theory Summer School at ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú - since its start in 2009. I am now its co-organiser. Each year, in the last week of June and first week of July, we host a number of world-leading scholars, who, together with ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú academics, engage in an intensive two-week exploration of Critical Theory. Further details are here:

    London Critical Theory Summer School

     

     

    Teaching modules

    • The Novel: Writing the Modern World
    • The Post-War: 1945 to the present
    • Production of the Human
    • Literature, Empire and Race
    • Storytelling: Narrative Archetypes, Forms and Techniques
    • The Humanities and Social Sciences: Global Issues in Historical Perspective
    • Narrative Medicine
    • Connecting the Arts
    • Dissertation MA English and MA Medical Humanities
    • Becoming Modern: Literature and Culture 1800 to the Present
  • Publications

    Publications

    Artefact

    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2022) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) .
    • Leslie, Esther and Schmitz, E. (2022) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2003) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2001) .

    Article

    • Leslie, Esther (2025) . Crisis and Critique 11 (2), pp. 239-253. ISSN 2311-8172.
    • Leslie, Esther (2025) . Weird Economies
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 33 (67), ISSN 2000-1452.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (36), ISSN 1755-1560.
    • Leslie, Esther (2023) . Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 87 (2), pp. 38-51. ISSN 0036-8237.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . PWD - Philosophy World Democracy
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 14 (1), ISSN 1758-972X.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . British Art Studies (16), ISSN 2058-5462.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 25, ISSN 0418-3878.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . International Lexicon of Aesthetics ISSN 2611-5166.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . Third Text 33 (3), pp. 293-313. ISSN 0952-8822.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . Journal of Visual Culture 18 (1), pp. 3-29. ISSN 1470-4129.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . ALIENOCENE: Journal of the First Outernational
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Boundary 2 45 (2), pp. 243-244. ISSN 0190-3659.
    • Leslie, Esther and Candela, E. and Dicker, B. and Drew, B. (2018) . Journal of Visual Culture 17 (1), pp. 357-372. ISSN 1470-4129.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2018) . Studies in the Maternal 10 (1), pp. 8. ISSN 1759-0434.
    • Leslie, Esther and Anderson, K. and Hardt, M. and Menke, C. and ymm, +cö and Wahnich, S. (2018) . Crisis and Critique 4 (2), pp. 451-497. ISSN 2311-8172.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Technosphere Magazine
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Lunch 13,
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Culture Matters
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Salvage 6,
    • Leslie, Esther (2017) . Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema
    • Leslie, Esther (2017) . Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (3), pp. 230-243. ISSN 1746-8477.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2016) . Parallax 22 (4), pp. 427-436. ISSN 1353-4645.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . Pedagogy, Culture & Society 24 (4), pp. 517-524. ISSN 1468-1366.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . Pedagogy, Culture & Society 24 (4), pp. 517-524. ISSN 1468-1366.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2016) . Cabinet Magazine 62, ISSN 1531-1430.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . Radical Philosophy (192), ISSN 0300-211X.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . Early Popular Visual Culture 11 (1), pp. 28-40. ISSN 1746-0654.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . Nordic Journal of Aesthetics ISSN 2000-9607.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . Affirmations: Of The Modern 1 (1),
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . Afterall (33), ISSN 1465-4253.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . Societies 3 (4), pp. 414-426. ISSN 2075-4698.
    • Leslie, Esther (2009) . Modern painters 21 (1), pp. 28-30. ISSN 0953-6698.
    • Leslie, Esther (2008) . Radical Philosophy 152, pp. 21-30. ISSN 0300-211X.
    • Leslie, Esther (2008) . Animate
    • Leslie, Esther (2007) . ImageTexT 3 (2), ISSN 1549-6732.
    • Leslie, Esther (2007) . New Formations 61, pp. 34-48. ISSN 0950-2378.
    • Leslie, Esther (2006) . Tate etc. 7, ISSN 1743-8853.
    • Leslie, Esther (2006) . Transversal: machines and subjectivation 11, ISSN 1811-1696.
    • Leslie, Esther (2006) . Radical Philosophy 137, pp. 8-12. ISSN 0300-211X.
    • Leslie, Esther (2006) . Tate etc. 7, ISSN 1743-8853.
    • Leslie, Esther and Watson, B. (2006) . Dot Dot Dot 11,
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . Variant: Cross Currents in Culture 22 (12), pp. 33-34. ISSN 0954-8815.
    • Leslie, Esther (2003) . Jungle World: Die Linke Wochenzeitung
    • Leslie, Esther (1999) . New Formations: Hating Tradition Properly 38, pp. 110-124. ISSN 0950-2378.
    • Leslie, Esther (1998) . Journal of Design History 11 (1), pp. 5-13. ISSN 1741-7279.
    • Leslie, Esther (1997) . Historical Materialism 1, pp. 66-89. ISSN 1465-4466.
    • Leslie, Esther (1997) . New Left Review 226, pp. 128-135. ISSN 0028-6060.
    • Leslie, Esther (1996) . History Workshop Journal 41, pp. 235-239. ISSN 1363-3554.
    • Leslie, Esther (1996) . Things 4, pp. 83-101.
    • Leslie, Esther (1996) . Radical Philosophy 77, pp. 6-16. ISSN 0300-211X.

    Audio

    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . Jacobin.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . Venti Journal.

    Book

    • Joseph Lester, J. and Kahane, A. and King, Simon and Leslie, Esther, eds. (2024) . London, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9781032412610.
    • Dolbear, Samuel and Leslie, Esther (2023) . Sonics Series. London, UK: Goldsmiths Press. ISBN 9781913380564.
    • Jackson, M. and Leslie, Esther (2023) . London, UK ISBN 9781739343101.
    • Leslie, Esther (2023) . Pivots. London, UK: Palgrave. ISBN 9783031374319.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2018) . London, UK: Banner Repeater.
    • Leslie, Esther and Juarez, G. Juarez, G., ed. (2018) . Sweden: Rojal Förlag.
    • Lori, M. and Chalmers, C. and Evans, G. and Mooney, Stephen and Mudie, P. and Taberham, P. and Sheehan, R. and Hamblyn, N. Leslie, Esther and Lori, M., eds. (2018) . London, UK: John Libbey. ISBN 9780861967285.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2018) . London, UK: Banner Repeater. ISBN 9780992917654.
    • Leslie, Esther and Dolbear, Samuel and Truskolaski, S., eds. (2016) . London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781784783044.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . London, UK: Reaktion. ISBN 9781780236452.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . London, UK: Reaktion. ISBN 9781780235257.
    • Leslie, Esther (2014) . London, UK: Unkant. ISBN 9780956817693.
    • Leslie, Esther and Jackson, M. (2010) . London, UK: The Drawing Room and Matt's Gallery London. ISBN 9780955829925.
    • Leslie, Esther and McCail, C. (2009) . Stanley Picker Gallery Public Lectures on Art. 3, Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK: Centre for Useless Splendour. ISBN 9780956378231.
    • Leslie, Esther (2007) . Critical Lives. London, UK: Reaktion. ISBN 9781861893437.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . London, UK: Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781861892485.
    • Leslie, Esther (2004) . London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781844675043.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . Modern European Thinkers. London, UK: Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745315737.

    Book review

    • Leslie, Esther (2025) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2023) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) .
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) .

    Book section

    • Leslie, Esther (2026) . In: Feige, D.M. and Schweppenhäuser, G. (eds.) Kritische Theorie des Designs. Weissenhof Instituts. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. pp. 287-301. ISBN 9783837676570. (In Press)
    • Leslie, Esther (2025) . In: David, C. and Perrier, F. (eds.) Walter Benjamin in Exile: Between Experience and Poverty. Rennes, France: Editions PontCerq. ISBN 9782919648405.
    • Leslie, Esther (2025) . In: Blas, Z. and Jue, M. and Rhee, J. (eds.) Informatics of Domination. Durham, U.S.: Duke University Press. pp. 83-89. ISBN 9781478028383.
    • Leslie, Esther (2025) . In: Dolbear, S. (ed.) Commentaries and Interventions on Berta Lask, Thomas Müntzer: Dramatic depiction of the German Peasants’ War of 1525. Helsinki, Finland: Rab Rab Press. pp. 39.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: Tamari, T. (ed.) Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies: Animation, the Body and Affect. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. pp. 29-41. ISBN 9781529226188.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: Historisch-kritische Wörterbuch des Marxismus (HKWM): "Mitleid – Nazismus". Hamburg, Germany: Argument Verlag. pp. 1175-1186. ISBN 9783886194438.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: Eldridge, L. and Trivedi, N. (eds.) Robotic Vision and Virtual Interfacings. Technicities. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 323-332. ISBN 9781399523448.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: McRobbie, A. (ed.) Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination. London, UK: Intellect. ISBN 9781789389364.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: Ruiz, R. and Shields, R. and Schoenach, P. (eds.) After Ice - Cold Humanities for a Warming Planet. British Columbia, U.S.: University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 9780774869362.
    • Leslie, Esther (2024) . In: Kristensen, L. and Essvig, O. (eds.) Dead & Alive. Goeteborg, Sweden: Rojal.
    • Leslie, Esther (2023) . In: Fuke, O. (ed.) The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation. Title by Title. London, UK: Bloomsbury and BFI. pp. 151-156. ISBN 9781839025242.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . In: Denecke, M. and Kuhn, H. and Stürmer, M. (eds.) Liquidity, Flows, Circulation: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization. Diaphanes. pp. 165-180. ISBN 9783035804812.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . In: Shapiro, S. and Storey, M. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to American Horror. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 91-104. ISBN 9781009071550.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . In: Finke, M. and Nakas, K. (eds.) Fluidity: Materials in Motion. Berlin, Germany: Reimer. pp. 105-120. ISBN 9783496016724.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . In: Teige, K. (ed.) The Marketplace of Art / Commentary. Dijon, France: Les pressses du reel. ISBN 9789526938981.
    • Leslie, Esther (2022) . In: Strange Attractor. Lisbon, Portugal: Galerias Municipais/EGEAC. ISBN 9789898763716.
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) . In: Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781501351129.
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) . In: Electric Brine. Berlin, Germany: Archive Press. ISBN 9783948212490.
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) . In: Janeckova, H. and Kotatkova, E. and Kurik, B. (eds.) Animal Touch: Art, Labour and Emotion. Prague: ArtMap. pp. 32-47. ISBN 9788090787377.
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) . In: Waugh, P. and Botha, M. (eds.) Future Theory: A Handbook to Critical Concepts. London, UK: Bloomsbury. pp. 115-128. ISBN 9781472567352.
    • Leslie, Esther (2021) . In: Tambling, J. (ed.) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783319625928.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . In: Pryor, S. and Trotter, D. (eds.) Writing, Machine, Code: Modern Technographies. Open Humanities Press. ISBN 9781785420061. (In Press)
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . In: Giannakopoulou, G. and Gilloch, G. (eds.) The Detective of Modernity: Essays on the Work of David Frisby. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory. Routledge. ISBN 9780367192563.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . In: Hasham, L. (ed.) Heather Phillipson. London, UK: Prestel. ISBN 9783791359526.
    • Leslie, Esther (2020) . In: Hatherley, O. (ed.) The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs. London, UK: Open City. ISBN 9781916016910.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . In: Krajnc, M. and Baskar, N. and Kos, J. and Lovrenov, M. (eds.) Oktobrska revolucija in zgodnje-sovjetski film. Zbirka Jesenska filmska Å¡ola. Slovenia: Jesenskafilmskasola, Slovenska Kinoteka. ISBN 9789617013085.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . In: Bang Larsen, L. (ed.) Mud Muses – A Rant About Technology. Stockholm, Sweden: Museum of Modern Art/Moderna Museet. pp. 97-107. ISBN 9789198417753.
    • Leslie, Esther (2019) . In: Dirscherl, M. and Köhler, A. (eds.) Urban Microcosms 1789-1940. ilmr books. London, UK: Institute of Modern Language Research. ISBN 9780854572663.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . In: Bud, R. and Greenhalgh, P. and James, F. and Shiach, M. (eds.) Being Modern: The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century. London, UK: UCL Press. pp. 357-372. ISBN 9781787353930.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . In: Oberender, T. and Rosenberg, A. (eds.) Philippe Parreno: Gropius Bau Sommer 2018. Berlin, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig. ISBN 9783960983903.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . In: Scholz, S. and Vedder, U. (eds.) Handbuch Literatur & Materielle Kultur. Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. pp. 412-414. ISBN 9783110416497.
    • Jackson, M. and Leslie, Esther (2017) . In: Cohen, M. and Otomo, Y. (eds.) Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food. London, UK: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350029965.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Blättler, C. and Full, C. (eds.) Walter Benjamin Politisches Denken. Staatsverständnisse. Baden Baden, Germany: Nomos Verlag. pp. 111-134. ISBN 9783848734252.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Corby, J. (ed.) Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman. New York, U.S.: UR. pp. 152-161. ISBN 9780996004169.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Baur, A. and Leslie, Esther and Weber, M. (eds.) Better Than De Kooning. Germany: RAM Publications. ISBN 9783864421372.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Hiller, S. and Treister, S. (eds.) Monica Ross: Ethical Actions - A Critical Fine Art Practice. Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press. ISBN 9783956792021.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Ferguson, K. and Petro, P. (eds.) After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship. New Directions in International Studies. Rutgers University Press. pp. 151-165. ISBN 9780813584263.
    • Leslie, Esther (2016) . In: Pryor, S. and Trotter, D. (eds.) Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies. Technographies. London, UK: Open Humanities Press. pp. 191-207. ISBN 9781785420184.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . In: Pantenburg, V. (ed.) Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations. Cologne, Germany: August Verlag. pp. 95-109. ISBN 9783941360341.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . In: Anievas, A. (ed.) Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics. Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. pp. 216-235. ISBN 9789004262676.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . In: Influenser, referenser och plagiat : om Kraftwerks estetik = Influences, references and imitations : on the aesthetics of Kraftwerk. Goteberg, Sweden: Röhsska museet. ISBN 9789187039096.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . In: Bad Feelings. London, UK: Book Works. ISBN 9781906012588.
    • Leslie, Esther (2015) . In: Carfield Corr, H. and Epps, L. (eds.) The Very Last Time. London, UK: Ambergris Editions. ISBN 9780993393402.
    • Leslie, Esther (2014) . In: Beckman, K. (ed.) Animating Film Theory. Durham, North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press. pp. 25-36. ISBN 9780822356523.
    • Leslie, Esther (2014) . In: Fischer, L. and Fraser, I. and Gregg, R. and Uhlirova, M. (eds.) Birds of Paradise. Costume as Cinematic Spectacle. London, UK: Walther König. ISBN 9783863352181.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . In: Buchan, S. (ed.) Pervasive Animation. AFI Film Readers. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415807241.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . In: Jordan Wolfson, None (ed.) Ecce Homo/Le Poseur. Berlin, Germany: Walther König. ISBN 9783863354145.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . In: Lauschmann, T. (ed.) Startle. London, UK: London Film and Video Umbrella. ISBN 9780955876950.
    • Leslie, Esther (2013) . In: Bauer, P. and Kidner, D. (eds.) Working Together: Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s. Southend, UK: Focal Point Gallery. ISBN 9781907185052.
    • Leslie, Esther (2012) . In: Ossandón, J. and Vodanovic, L. (eds.) Disturbios culturales (Cultural Unrest). Santiago, Chile: Universidad Diego Portales.
    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . In: Schad, J. and Tearle, O. (eds.) Crrritic! Sighs, Cries, Lies, Insults, Outbursts, Hoaxes, Disasters, Letters of Resignation, and Various Other Noises Off in These the First and Last Days of Literary Criticism ... Not to Mention the University. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press. ISBN 9781845193423.
    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . In: Libero, A. (ed.) Spielraum: W. Benjamin et l’Architecture. Paris, France: Editions La Villette. ISBN 9782915456608.
    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . In: Wagner, B. and Grausgruber, W. (eds.) Tricky Women: Animations Film Kunst von Frauen. Vienna, Asutria: Schueren. ISBN 9783894727239.
    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . In: Loftus, B. (ed.) Sigismund's Watch. London, UK: Phillip Wilson Publishing. pp. 85-98. ISBN 9780856677090.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . In: Beaumont, M. and Dart, G. (eds.) Restless Cities. London, UK: Verso. ISBN 9781844674053.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . In: Andreotti, L. (ed.) Spielraum: W. Benjamin and Architecture. Thinking Space. Paris: Editions de la Villette. ISBN 9782915456608.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . In: Pusca, A.M. (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Change. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230580862.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . In: Radstone, S. and Schwarz, B. (eds.) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York, USA: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823232604.
    • Leslie, Esther (2009) . In: Furniss, M. (ed.) Animation - Art & Industry: A Reader. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey. ISBN 9780861966806.
    • Leslie, Esther and Wayne, M. (2009) . In: Bould, M. and Miéville, China (eds.) Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Lebanon, U.S.: Univeristy Press of New England. ISBN 9780819569134.
    • Leslie, Esther (2009) . In: Pajaczkowska, C. and White, L. (eds.) The Sublime Now. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 36-49. ISBN 9781443813020.
    • Leslie, Esther (2009) . In: Davies, C. and Parrinder, M. (eds.) Limited Language: Rewriting Design Responding to a Feedback Culture. Basel, Germany: Birkhauser. ISBN 9783034604604.
    • Leslie, Esther (2007) . In: Candlin, Fiona and Guins, R. (eds.) The Object Reader. In Sight: Visual Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415452304.
    • Leslie, Esther (2007) . In: Merck, M. (ed.) America First: Naming the Nation in US Film. London, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780415374965.
    • Leslie, Esther (2006) . In: Hansen, B. (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin Studies. London, UK: Continuum. ISBN 9780826463876.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . In: Economising Culture On the (Digital) Culture Industry. New York, USA: Autonomedia. ISBN 9781570271687.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . In: Burrow, M. and Farnell, G. and Jardine, M. (eds.) Readings Benjamin's Arcades. New Formations. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. ISSN 1905007132. ISBN 1905007132.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . In: Evans, C. and Breward, C. (eds.) Fashion and Modernity. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781845200282.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . In: Wayne, M. (ed.) Understanding Film Marxist Perspectives. London, UK: Pluto Press. ISBN 9780745319926.
    • Leslie, Esther (2005) . In: Cox, G. and Krysa, J. and Lewin, A. (eds.) Economising Culture. Autonomedia. ISBN 9781570271687.
    • Leslie, Esther (2004) . In: Steele, V. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Fashion and Clothing. New York, USA: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 9780684313955.
    • Leslie, Esther (2004) . In: Kellner, D. and Homer, S. (eds.) Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader. London, UK: Palgrave. pp. 195-209. ISBN 9780230523524.
    • Leslie, Esther (2003) . In: Hodgkin, K. and Radstone, S. (eds.) Regimes of Memory. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 172-185. ISBN 9780415511049.
    • Leslie, Esther (2002) . In: Koshlar, R. (ed.) Histories of Leisure. London, UK: Berg Publishers. pp. 61-77. ISBN 9781859735251.
    • Leslie, Esther (2002) . In: Beech, D. and Roberts, J. (eds.) The Philistine Controversy. London, UK: Verso Press. ISBN 9781859843741.
    • Leslie, Esther (2002) . In: Rosenberg, A. (ed.) Berliner Kindheit. New York, USA: Distributed Art Publishers. ISBN 9783882438123.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . In: Living in a material world. Coventry, UK: Coventry University. pp. 240-251.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . In: Osborne, P. and Benjamin, A. (eds.) Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press. pp. 304-308. ISBN 9781903083086.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . In: Curtis, T. and Dellar, R. and Leslie, Esther and Watson, B. (eds.) Mad Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture. London, UK: Spare Change Books. pp. 67-82. ISBN 9780952574422.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . In: Flett, K. and Renton, D. (eds.) The Twentieth Century, A Century of Wars and Revolutions?. London, UK: Rivers Oram Press. pp. 33-53. ISBN 9781854891266.
    • Leslie, Esther (2000) . In: Stair, J. (ed.) The Body Politic: The Role of the Body and Contemporary Craft. London, UK: Crafts Council. pp. 51-57. ISBN 9781870145992.
    • Leslie, Esther (1999) . In: Breward, C. and Aynsley, J. and Kwint, M. (eds.) Material Memories: Design and Evocation. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. pp. 107-122. ISBN 9781847881601.
    • Leslie, Esther (1999) . In: De-, Dis-, Ex-: The Optic of Walter Benjamin. London, UK: Black Dog Publishing. pp. 58-91. ISBN 9781901033410.
    • Leslie, Esther (1998) . In: Gange, J. (ed.) Art, Technology, Technique: Art, Criticism, Theory. London, UK: Pluto Press. pp. 17-33. ISBN 9780745313122.
    • Leslie, Esther (1998) . In: Harrod, T. (ed.) Obscure Objects of Desire: Reviewing the Crafts in the Twentieth Century. London, UK: Crafts Council. pp. 21-31. ISBN 9781870145671.

    Conference item

    • Leslie, Esther (2012) . The Penzance Convention, 2012, Penzance, UK

    Editorial

    • McKim, Joel and Leslie, Esther (2017) . Animation 12 (3), pp. 207-213. Sage. ISSN 1746-8477.

    Monograph

    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . London, UK: Veer.

    Other

    • Leslie, Esther and Souvlis, G. (2018) . London, UK: Historical Materialism.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . London, UK: Wellcome Trust.
    • Leslie, Esther (2018) . Paris, France: Revue Periode.
    • Leslie, Esther (2014) . Gallery 44 Gallery 44.
    • Leslie, Esther (2011) . Enclave Review 5, pp. 10-12. Cork, Ireland: Enclave Review.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . Los Angeles, U.S.: Hammer Museum and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing.
    • Leslie, Esther (2010) . Weimar, Germany: Kunst Spektakel Revolution.
    • Leslie, Esther (2009) . Animate Projects website Animate Projects.
    • Leslie, Esther (2003) . Chicago, USA: Chicago Public Radio.
    • Leslie, Esther . New York, U.S.: The New York Times.

    Video

    • Leslie, Esther and Jeffries, S. (2022) . YouTube.
  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Media

    I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

    • Frankfurt School
    • Marxism
    • Aesthetics
    • poetics of science
    • German history
    • Walter Benjamin
    • Adorno
    • Kracauer
    • technology and culture
    • chemical industry in history
    • community history
    • Somers Town
    • animation

    Outreach

    I co-founded The Peoples Museum Somers Town, which is located at 52 Phoenix Road, London NW1 1ES.Ìý I act as its academic lead. In October 2022, we were nominated as one of three projects for a Radical Changemakers Award by the Museums Association.Ìý

    Somers Town has a rich and extraordinary history. It has been home to reformers, rebels, world historical figures who cultivated here world-impacting ideas, such as Anarchism, Feminism, Chartism, Communism and Pan-Africanism. It is a place of significant housing schemes, such as the Polygon, the St Pancras House Improvement Society housing, and the two estates, Ossulston and Oakshott Court, both of which adopt a European idiom. Somers Town has been a spirited place – once bustling with markets and pubs. It has also, throughout its whole history, from the 1780s, been a place of migration, drawing in people from across the country, the European continent and the world.

    I curated our first exhibition - Lost and Found in Somers Town. Its website is here:Ìýhttp://lostfound.aspaceforus.club/

    We have a busy programmes of walks, talks, work experience - in which I am centrally involved. Our broader website is here:Ìý

    Slovenian TV programme made about my life and work, 2017

    I have worked with museums as an artist-researcher, as a writer and as an academic consultant. One exhibition in which I was lead consultant was Chemical City at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Its focus was on the impact of ICI and the chemical industry on the local area.Ìý The webpage, which has links to my research papers that formed the basis of the exhibitions approach is here:

    Co-director, ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú Institute for the Humanities, since 2016

    ÌÇÐÄlogoÈë¿Ú Institute for the Humanities

    ‘Companions in Somers Town’,Ìý 18 piece Poster Wall in Somers Town, February to May 2022

    Animate Assembly: A Glossary (with Edgar Schmitz, Verina Gfader, Anke Hennig and Caroline Sebilleau), presented at Bibliotech exhibition, April-May May 2022, Liverpool and Limassol


    Deeper in the Pyramid, a filmed performance lecture, with Melanie Jackson

    Ìý

    Translation work:

    Major translations


    Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness; Tailism and the Dialectic, Verso, London, 2000

    Walter Benjamin’s Archives, edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla, Verso, London, 2007

    ‘Letter from Walter Benjamin’, in Paul Nizan, The Conspiracy, Verso, London, 2011

    Walter Benjamin: On Photography, Reaktion, London 2015 (edited, translated and introduced)

    Walter Benjamin The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness, Verso, London 2016 (edited, translated and introduced, with Sam Dolbear and Sebastian Truskolaski)

    Various smaller translations from German into English –including Willy Brandt’s 1937 memoirs relating to his experience in the Spanish Civil War [available from Socialist Platform Archive, and on the Internet]; an academic text on Chinese ethnography; a paper on South African archaeology; Waldemar Bolze’s diary of his activities on the Huescan front in the Spanish Civil War, published in The Spanish Civil War: A View from the Left [ed. Al Richardson, Socialist Platform, London 1992]; translation of Oskar Lafontaine’s speech to SPD conference in December 1997, published in New Left Review 227, translation of Karl Radek on war and socialism and Karl Kautsky on ‘the oriental question’ and Rosa Luxemburg on 1905 for Revolutionary History. Rosa Luxemburg on Mehring’s Schiller for Revolutionary History.

    Media work

    • Interviewed on the Open University t.v. programme ‘Displaying Modern Art’, for the new Art History course, designed by Dr. Steve Edwards.Ìý
    • Interviewed on Chicago Public Radio, Odyssey programme, theme − The Politics of Popular Culture, 18 December 2003
    • The Verb, speaking on Walter Benjamin’s Archive, Radio 3, 16 January 2008
    • Interviewed and appeared in Flannery’s Mounted Head, a DVD film by Cathal Coughlan/Johnny Grogan, Eire/UK 2008
    • ‘Thought Cloud’, Head in the Clouds series, Radio 3, 26 February 2009
    • Interviewed on Walter Benjamin for Against the Grain, Pacifica radio, 24 March 2009
    • In Our Time, On The Frankfurt School, Radio 4, 14 January 2010
    • Walter Benjamin podcast, LRB/Verso, May 2016
    • ‘On Walter Benjamin’, Free Thinking, Radio 3, 23 June 2016
    • Walter Benjamin’s Arcades: Resonance radio, 27 July 2016
    • ‘The work of the translator and the legacy of Anja Bostock’, Studio (212), with Tom Overton, Resonance Radio, March 2018
    • Participant in Miranda Javid, Smoke Mixtape, screened at various venues, USA, 2018-19
    • Interviewed on FSK Radio Hamburg, for Frauenstreik discussion, 8 March 2019
    • Interviewed on RBB-Kultur, German radio on the resignation of Theresa May, May 2019.
    • ‘Are We the Cows of the Future?’, New York Times, opinion piece, 5 Jan 2021
    • In Our Time, Walter Benjamin, February 2022
    • Numerous radio broadcasts for the London Musician Collective’s radio station Resonance 104.4 FM. These broadcasts, which take the form of musically illustrated lectures, are titled Twinkle, Day-glo, Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend, Dreams, Rockets, Recycling, Junk, Spam and Leftovers, and Valentine. I have also participated in other shows on themes including madness, punk, cold and ice and pollution. Some work on May Day Radio: including piece on Falling Asleep

    Teaching workshops and Summer Schools

    • London Critical Theory Summer School, since 2009
    • Annual lecture at Royal Academy Schools, London, since 2010
    • PhD supervisor for RCA practice-based students since 2018
    • Copenhagen Art Academy, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers, 6 and 7 November 2018
    • Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture, 22 November 2018
    • Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, all art students, 29 November 2018
    • Taijuan University, China, Philosophy Department, October 2019
    • Academy of Social Science, Beijing, lecture to researchers on Walter Benjamin, October 2019
    • Tutorials, Nottingham Trent University, 29 January 2020
    • The New Centre for Social Research and Practice, 2021 (4 sessions on Turbid Media) online)
    • Summer School as School, Pristina, Kosovo, 4 sessions on Turbid Media, August 2021
    • Chosen as Mentor for Viola Ruehse, University of Continuing Education, Krems, Austria, under the programme: Career Mentoring III“, 2022-2025
    • Summer School as School, Pristina, Kosovo,Ìý6 sessions on Animating Elements: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Ether,ÌýAugust 2022

    Services

    • Other
      2020-01-06T00:00:00 to 2022-07-03T00:00:00

      academic researcher forÌýthe exhibition Chemical City, at MIMA, Middlesbrough

    • Other
      2021-11-05T00:00:00

      Academic lead for the People's Museum Somers Town