Manuel Arias Maldonado is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Malaga (Spain). He has been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Berkeley and a visiting researcher in Munich and New York. He has published a book in Spain about the sentimentalisation of politics and a number of papers on the digitisation of social life. His latest books deal with the Anthropocene and the Covid-19 pandemic.

© Marco Abram
Éric Baudelaire is a French artist and filmmaker who was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2019 for Un Film dramatique, shown during the Night of Ideas. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice in several media ranging from printmaking, photography and the moving image to installation, performance, and letter writing. Since 2011, he directed and produced feature films that have circulated widely in film festivals such as Un Film Dramatique (2019), Also Known as Jihadi (2017) and Letters to Max (2014). He is a laureate of Fluxus Art projects.

Tinneke Beeckman became an independent writer after a career in the academic world. She has a PhD in moral sciences from the University of Brussels (VUB), which she followed by postgraduate studies in philosophy and culture (ULB). In 2012, she published her book Door Spinoza’s lens, in 2015, Macht en Onmacht. Een verkenning van de hedendaagse aanslag op de Verlichting and recently Machiavelli’s Daring. She gives lectures on philosophy, and writes columns for De Standaard.

Fay Bound Alberti is a reader in history at the University of York and the co-founder of the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Queen Mary University of London. She has published extensively on the histories of emotion, medicine, gender and the body. Her books include Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (2010), This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (2016) and A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (2019).

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at the American Scholar and a 2019 New America Fellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Harper’s to name a few, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

Stephen Clark has worked for the European Parliament for nearly 30 years, in a career spanning legislative, financial and organisational roles, and, since 2007, the field of communication. He pioneered the use of social media by EU institutions, before taking charge of developing Parliament’s visitor facilities and managing communication campaigns, notably ahead of the 2014 and 2019 elections. He now oversees the network of Parliament’s national Liaison Offices across Europe.

Anastasia Colosimo is a Professor of political theology at Sciences Po Paris. She also holds a law and criminology degree from Pantheon-Assas University and was a visiting scholar at the University of Columbia in 2014. She won the Elina and Louis Pauwels award for her essay Les bûchers de la liberté, published by Stock in January 2016.

© Jay Brooks

Angèle David-Guillou is a French composer, musician and producer and a 2020 laureate of Diaphonique, a Franco-British fund for contemporary music run by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni. She has toured internationally and has worked on a number of collaborations with an eclectic array of musicians, including The Go! Team, Pete Astor and Mark Fry. On independent label Village Green, she has released three full-length albums (A Question of Angles, En Mouvement, Kourouma) and two EPs (Sans Mouvement, Mouvements Organiques).

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot is head of the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy at Danube University Krems (Austria) and founder of the European Democracy Lab in Berlin, a think-tank generating innovative ideas for Europe. She has worked at and directed several European research institutes and think tanks. Her work received numerous honorable awards and many of her books hit best-selling marks in Germany and have been widely translated and published throughout Europe.

Marie-Claire Isaaman is CEO of Women in Games. She engages with businesses and organizations in the games and educational sector. She was awarded the GameRome Diversity Award in 2018. She is an ‘Industry Fellow’ for InGame a Creative Industries Cluster Programme [AHRC and UKRI] 2019. And Project Director for a Business-led innovation in response to global disruption, Innovate UK, competitive grant for the Women in Games 2020/21.

➡️ Exclusive: watch an interview of Marie-Claire Isaaman

Clémentine Lalande is the CEO of Once Dating Group. A graduate of the Ecole Centrale in Paris and the Technische Universität in Berlin, Clémentine began her professional career as project leader at the Boston Consulting Group. After gaining experience with some private equity and venture capital companies in 2016, she chose to leave the consulting world to join a school friend in developing a dating app, Once.

Sandra Laugier is Professor of philosophy at the University Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne and Senior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project, DEMOSERIES. She has extensively published on ordinary language philosophy, moral philosophy, gender studies (ethics of care), radical democracy and civil disobedience. Her recent work focuses on the ethics and politics of TV series. Her latest book La Société des vulnérables (with former Minister for Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem) was published in 2020.

© Valerie Archeno
Camille Morineau is the co-founder and director of AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), a French non-profit organisation dedicated to the creation, indexation, and distribution of information on women artists of the 20th century. She has worked for twenty years in public cultural institutions in France, including ten years as curator of the contemporary collections at the musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris).

Patrice Naiambana is an award winning performing artist and the founder of Tribal Soul, a laboratory for critical dialogue and the exploration of African Diaspora performance aesthetics. He is currently developing The Decolonial Salon, a story lab in partnership with the Arcola Theatre. As a performer, he has worked extensively in world class arts organisations – notably with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Globe, The Royal National Theatre, and appeared in In Exile, a Channel 4 sitcom andin critically acclaimed productions Tree (Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah, creators) and Barbershop Chronicles (Inua Ellams, writer).

Pap Ndiaye is a Professor of history at Sciences Po Paris. His areas of interest are the history and sociology of African Americans and people of African descent in France. He has recently authored an official report on discriminations and diversity at the Opéra de Paris. His books include La Condition noire: essai sur une minorité française (2008); Les Noirs américains: en marche pour l’égalité (2009); Le Modèle noir: de Géricault à Matisse (2019).

Chi-chi Nwanoku is Professor of Double Bass Historical Studies at the Royal Academy of Music and the founder, artistic & executive director of Chineke! Orchestra and Chineke! Junior Orchestra, first orchestra mostly composed by BAME musicians. Chi-chi is a trustee of the London Music Fund, Tertis Foundation, a Council Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society. She was voted to the Powerlist of Britain’s 100 Most Influential Black People 2019 and 2020.

Olivette Otele is Professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol. She is a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. Her area of research is colonial and post-colonial history and the histories of people of African descent. Her latest books include a monograph, African European: an untold History and an edited volume, Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies, both published in 2020.

© Alexandre Guirkinger
Laure Prouvost was born in 1963 in Moulennbreak, Albania. She lives and works in an underwater mobilhome to research tunnel engineering, currently in the Channel. She practices making video, boobs, sounds and tea cups, objects and installation. Here a long list of museums and institutions. A line, interesting things, a coma, a line, a list of residencies and prizes. A selection of solo projects including: a Melting Into Another in Lisbon, an Occupied Paradise in Aalst, Deep See Blue Surrounding You in Venice and Toulouse, a Waiting Room with objects in Minneapolis, a New Museum for Granddad in Milano, A tearoom for Grandma in Derry, a karaoke room in Brussels, a new octopus ink vodka bar for Gregor in Rotterdam, A travel agency for an Uncle in Frankfurt, a lobby for love among the artists in the Hague and Luzern… tea bags, and wet floors and tentaculees.
Laure Prouvost represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2019. She is a laureate of Fluxus Art projects.

Samir Puri completed a PhD at Cambridge University in International Relations, worked at RAND, and then the Foreign Office. He became a lecturer in King’s College London, and in 2020 a Senior Fellow at the Singapore’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. His book, The Great Imperial Hangover is a distillation of these following varied perspectives: from the academic to the practical; from the personal to the political; and from the descendants of the colonized to those of the colonizers.

Lionel Shriver is a writer and journalist. She is the author of National Book Award finalist, So Much for That; the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World; and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapted in 2010 in the eponymous film starring Tilda Swinton. Her work as journalist has appeared in The Guardian and the New York Times; the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. Her latest book Property. Stories Between Two Novellas was published in 2018. Her latest book The Motion Of The Body Through Space was published in 2020.

Pierre Singaravélou is a Historian and a Professor of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne University and a British Academy Global Professor at King’s College London since 2019. He has extensively published on colonialism, imperialism and globalization. He recently co-directed a docu-series Décolonisations (2020) and will release a documentary on China in 2021.

© Catherine Hélie – Éditions Gallimard

Leïla Slimani is a writer and journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights. she is the first Franco-Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for Lullaby, which remained in the top 10 of best-selling novels for seven weeks after it was published in the UK, in a translation by Sam Taylor. Her first novel, The Ogre’s Garden, won the Prix La Mamounia. In 2017 she was appointed by President Macron to promote French language and culture.

Robert Tombs is a historian. His books include Paris, bivouac des révolutions (Libertalia, 2014) and La France et le Royaume-Uni: Des ennemis intimes (Armand-Colin, 20212), written with his wife Isabelle Tombs. He has also written about The English and Their History (Penguin, 2015), and is a frequent commentator on history and politics, including Brexit, the subject of his new book, This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe, due to be published by Penguin in January 2021.

© Christa Holka
Fatoş Üstek is an independent curator and writer, and former director of the Liverpool Biennial. She is jury member of the Turner Prize 2020 and an external member of the acquisitions committee for the Arts Council Collection (2018-2020). She is also a founding member of the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA), a trustee of Art Night, and a member of the International Association of Art Critics UK.

© Cheryl George
Christie Watson is an award-winning writer and has been a nurse for over 20 years. The Language of Kindness was published in 2018 and was a number-one Sunday Times bestseller, and her latest book The Courage to Care was published in September 2020. Christie holds an honorary Doctor of Letters for her contribution to nursing and the arts and is Patron of the Royal College of Nursing Foundation. She is Professor of medical and health humanities at the University of East Anglia.

Louis Williams is a Danish-British macroeconomist who, after studying at Cambridge, took up employment as an economist at Credit Suisse. Then, after a brief break living abroad, studying Mandarin and teaching English in Wuhan (China), he helped launch an artificial intelligence fund and macroeconomic consultancy business in London. Building on this economic research undertaken at both Credit Suisse and xAI Asset Management, he released his first book, An Optimist’s Brexit: A Millennial’s Vision.