Clare Hammond is a British investigative journalist. Based in London, she works for non-profit Global Witness, where her recent work has exposed failings by Big Tech and issues relating to natural resources, conflict and corruption. In Myanmar, where she lived for six years until 2020, she was most recently the digital editor of Frontier, the country’s best-known investigative magazine. A Google News Initiative and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee, her reporting has won multiple awards. On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar, will be published by Allen Lane in 2024.
Liam Shaw is a biologist researching the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance. He is currently a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Durham. His main research uses DNA sequencing data to understand the ‘horizontal’ transfer of resistance genes between different species of bacteria.
His writing on science has appeared in the London Review of Books and the Morning Star.
His first book,Fossil Drugs: A Natural History of Antibiotics, will be published in the UK by Bodley Head.
Dr Owen Rees is Associate Lecturer in Ancient History at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he specialises in the transition of soldiers from civilian life to the battlefield and back again. His books on the topic of ancient Greek warfare include Great Battles of the Classical Greek World (Pen & Sword, 2016); Great Naval Battles of the Ancient Greek World (Pen & Sword, 2018); and Military Departures, Homecomings, and Death in Classical Athens: Hoplite Transitions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
Owen has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to conduct research on “Experiences, Definitions, and Identities of the Veteran in Classical Greece”, a fellowship he will hold at the University of Nottingham from 2023.
He is also the founder and lead editor of the website BadAncient.com, which brings together a growing network of specialists to fact-check common claims made about the ancient world and expose the prevalent pseudohistory in the modern day.
Owen’s first trade book, The Far Edges of the Known World: A New Perspective On Our Ancient Civilizations, will be published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2024 and by Norton in the US. In this major work, Rees steers us to a fresh look at the ancient world, turning our attention to the peripheries to tell the stories of everyday ancient people and showing how extensive archaeological excavations have shed new light on cultures that are often overlooked.
Joseph Sassoon is Professor of History and Political Economy and Director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Associate Member at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Trustee of the Bodleian Library.
His previous books include the prize-winning Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party (CUP, 2011), The Iraqi Refugees (Bloomsbury, 2010) and The Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics (CUP, 2016). His latest book is The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty (Allen Lane, 2022). His ancestors were forcibly separated from the Sassoons in the nineteenth century, but he is fluent in the languages they spoke and the obscure Judeo-Arabic script – indecipherable to previous historians – that they used in their private communications and which provide the foundation of the book. “Not only is this a powerful human story but it also carries contemporary resonance in a time when great fortunes are again being made”― Financial Times.
Dr Adjoa Osei is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian whose research is actively interdisciplinary, exploring themes that are at the intersection of Performing Arts, Brazilian Studies, Afro-Latin American Studies, and Francophone Studies. She completed a PhD at the University of Liverpool in Latin American Studies.
Prior to this, she undertook an MPhil at the University of Oxford in Portuguese Studies, funded by the Ertegun Scholarship in the Humanities, achieving a Distinction; and she completed a BA Hons in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Kings College London, University of London, achieving a First Class Honours with Distinction. She is a linguist, working in both Portuguese and French. Her research has also been published in the major refereed journal Atlantic Studies. She was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Library of Congress, Washington DC from 2018–2019 in recognition of the originality of her research.
Adjoa’s research is comparative and transnational in a broad Atlantic frame, exploring race in the context of Latin America, with particular focus on racialized and gendered experiences in art and performance in early-twentieth-century Brazil; and within Francophone Studies, concentrating on representations of race in artistic modernism in early-twentieth-century France and the USA. She is committed to working across languages and challenging Anglocentric approaches in Arts and Humanities research. As a BBC New Generation Thinker, Adjoa has a growing portfolio of public engagement and media work.
Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture as well as the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs. He was awarded the Cognitive Psychology Section Award from the British Psychological Society and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Psychonomic Society. In 2021, Morten was elected as a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. His work has been featured in many news outlets, including Washington Post, Scientific American, New Economist, Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, Der Spiegel, and Times of India. Morten has also appeared on BBC Radio Inside Science, BBC World, BBC Wales, ABC Radio Australia, and Danish Public Radio, among others.
The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, co-written with Nick Chater, was published Bantam Press in the UK and by Basic Books in the US – both in Spring 2022.
Mona Arshi is a poet and writer. She previously worked as a Human Rights Lawyer. Her debut collection Small Hands(Pavilion Poetry, 2o15) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Godswas published in April 2019.
Her poems and interviews have been published in The Times, Guardian, Granta and The Timesof India as well as on the London Underground. During 2021 Mona was poet in residence in a bird sanctuary in Cley Marshes, Norfolk.
Her debut novel,Somebody Loves You, was published in 2021 by And Other Stories. It was longlisted for Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize.
Sophie Gallagher was Deputy Lifestyle Editor at The Independent for two years until September 2021. Before that she spent three years as a journalist at HuffPost UK. She was voted the Lifestyle Journalist Of The Year at the most recent Words By Women awards. From 2017-2019, Sophie ran an editorial campaign to criminalise cyber flashing – the unsolicited sending of sexual images – which the Law Commission recommended the UK government do, crediting Sophie’s work.
Sophie is now a freelance feature writer and editor based in London working for the BBC, i, Independent, Grazia, and others, and is a magazine tutor on the Press Association NCTJ diploma. She is regularly asked to write op-eds on VAWG and is a commentator on radio and TV on this subject. Her first book, How Men Can Help, is an urgent look at the state of men’s violence against women in the UK, and was published by Wellbeck in July 2022.
Kanya D’Almeida is a Sri Lankan writer. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Jaggery and The Bangalore Review. She is the recipient of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her flash fiction is anthologized in the forthcoming Best Small Fictions (2021). She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her essays and nonfiction have appeared on The Margins, Al Jazeera and Truthout, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
