Meet associate members and fellows from the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) and discover their unique passion for curiosity-driven research. Learn why interdisciplinary, open-ended research is more important than ever as the world seeks new solutions and breakthrough ideas.
Through the seminar series, we spotlight the unique opportunities provided by LIAS and learn more about the research and experience of our members.
Upcoming Seminars
Professor John Goodwin (Associate Fellow), University of Leicester: Adventures with Sociological Storytelling 13 May 2026, 12:00-1:00pm
The routes into sociology are many and varied, with the process of ‘becoming’ a sociologist widely considered in the reflexive journeys that established sociologists recount. Such auto/biographical stories reveal chance encounters, fateful moments, influential authors, guiding teachers, significant experiences, and more. For the last few years, I have systematically used autoethnographic storytelling to examine social class to consider how I (a working-class school failure from a mining community) became an academic sociologist. Such autoethnographic stories can be exploratory, used as starting or end points, and revelatory in form and process. In the presentation, I will use guiding questions from C. Wright Mills (What are the specific intersections of history and biography?) and Norbert Elias (How did I get here? How did ‘this’ come to be?) to examine three stories of class: Socks on the Settee (work), Learning to Read (school), Holidays By The Sea (holidays).
Past Seminars
Dr Sarah Gunn (Associate Fellow), University of Leicester: Building connections and support for people affected by Huntington’s disease 28 May, 2025, 12:00-1:00pm
Sarah is a clinical psychologist and a lecturer in clinical psychology. She has been working with families affected by Huntington’s disease (HD), a life-limiting, neurodegenerative condition, for over ten years. HD brings huge physical and emotional impacts for affected individuals and their loved ones, and two of the biggest problems reported by people from “HD families” are poor mental wellbeing and isolation. In this talk, Sarah will discuss the work she is undertaking to build networks and mental health support for people affected by HD and their families.
Dr Diane Levine (Associate Fellow) and Professor Linda Theron (Visiting Fellow Alumni) launched our first session with a discussion on what helps Africa(n) children and young people cope well when life is hard, including their journey to success, funded by their recently awarded Wellcome Trust Discovery Award.
In September Professor Sergei Petrovskiy (Associate Fellow) discussed his model which demonstrates how species extinction or survival following a climate change depends on the interplay between the magnitude of the climate change and the rate of species’ adaptive evolution.