Symposium: Thinking With Emergencies

Emily Baker is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies and was Director of the BA programme in Comparative Literature 2022-2025. Her research is concerned with the interface between 'fiction' and 'reality,' in particular the way cultural producers re-cast historical events in fiction to shed light on their concerns in the present. Her first monograph was entitled Nazism, The Second World War and the Holocaust in Latin American Fiction, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. She is currently researching Latin American and global ecofiction and working on a monograph project provisionally entitled The Environmental Imagination and Environmental Action in Contemporary Culture.

Before coming to UCL she held posts as Lecturer and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Robinson College, University of Cambridge and Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
 

Bruna Della Torre received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Universidade de São Paulo, where she was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature.

In 2023, she was awarded a Horkheimer Fellowship at the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University, Humboldt Universität, Akademie der Künst (Berlin) and Goethe Universität and a Lecturer at Universidade de Brasília. Bruna has teaching experience in higher education in literary theory and comparative literature, sociology, and philosophy. Her research focuses mainly on the Frankfurt School, Marxist theory, Feminist Studies, Fascism studies, Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature, and Latin American Critical Theory. 

Robert Folger is a historian, cultural scientist and Ibero-Romance scholar. He is a professor at the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Heidelberg and one of the directors of the Käte Hamburger International Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), established in 2021.

Nicola Miller is Professor of Latin American History. She is interested in the intellectual, cultural, political and international history of the Americas, in comparative and transnational perspectives; and in nationalism and national identity, especially in the Americas. Her current research focuses on the history of knowledge in Latin America.

Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at University College London. He has held visiting and honorary positions at the Universities of Siena, Oxford, Roma Tre and Cagliari, Sapienza University Rome and the British School at Rome. He is co-investigator for the five-year AHRC-funded research project “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia” and Academic Director of the UCL Cities Partnerships Programme in Rome. His research interests focus on modern and contemporary literature in Italian, English and German, speculative fiction, posthumanism, and narratives of catastrophe and global existential risk. His publications include Human Reproduction and Parental Responsibility: Theories, Narratives, Ethics (2021, with Simona Corso and Virginia Sanchini); Rethinking the Animal-Human Relation (2019, with Stefano Bellin and Kevin Inston); The Good Place: Comparative Perspectives on Utopia (2014, with Matthew Reza); The Eloquence of Ghosts (2010); Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture (2009, with Pierpaolo Antonello).

John Sabapathy is Professor of History and works on the comparative history of Europe/Christendom primarily in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also works on the Anthropocene (the period in which humans became geological forces globally), and co-convenes UCL Anthropocene – a major initiative in this area.

His monograph Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170-1300, a study of English officers in a European context, won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for 2015. An edited collection on Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism was published in 2020. He is an editor at The English Historical Review.

Eduardo Altheman C. Santos received his Master’s and PhD in Sociology from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, where he was also a post-doctoral teaching fellow. He has held international affiliations at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (host: Thomas Lemke) and Duke University (host: Fredric Jameson), in addition to being a former research fellow at CAPAS in the 2024-25 cohort.

His research interests include the Frankfurt School (especially Herbert Marcuse), critical theory (broadly construed), platform capitalism, Marxism, critical neoliberalism studies, ideology critique, fascism and authoritarianism, and the work of Michel Foucault.

Jenny Stümer joined CAPAS from Aotearoa New Zealand, where she received her PhD from the University of Auckland and subsequently taught media, film and communication for several years. Her research to date explores the politics of affect, investigating the contestation of political atmospheres through cinema and art practices, most often with reference to politicized spaces such as borders, walls and other enclosures and more recently with an increasing interest in the politics of temporality. Her particular interests lie in film, art and visual cultures negotiation of world breaking and world making in the context of politicized imaginaries.

Jenny’s work has appeared in Cultural Politics, New Global Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Parallax, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Visual Culture and Cultural Critique among others. Her  book Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, Art (Bloomsbury Publishing) treats political walls as media or affective screens that make legible the politics of their making through the investments, feelings, and narratives they inspire and reflect. The book explores the psychological and affective tissues of border imaginaries through fictional films and documentaries as well as photography, graffiti, and performance art in order to probe expressions of the ‘walled life’ that is experienced and contested in the shadows of these fences, walls, and borders.

Oxana Timofeeva is a researcher at the Universität der Künste Berlin and a member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat".  Her books include Freud’s Beasty Boys: On Sex, Violence, and Masculinity (2025); Solar Politics (2022), How to Love a Homeland (2020), History of Animals (2018), This is not That (2022), and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009). Her new book On the Soul is forthcoming in 2026.