Katherine Angel is Senior Lecturer in English and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (Verso, 2021). Her previous books are Daddy Issues (Peninsula Press, 2019) and Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin, 2012).
Katherine Angel – © – Liz Seabrook
Martha is co-founder and Director of Foxglove, a UK based non-profit that investigates, litigates and campaigns on issues concerning technology and social justice. Martha was previously Chief Operating Officer of Open Rights Group and prior to that Head of Operations for the human rights charity Reprieve. Martha is also a trustee of Fair Trials International and EDRi.
Martha Dark – © – Foxglove
Constance Debré trained and practised as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Constance has written Play Boy, which won the Prix de la Coupole in 2018, and Nom (2022). Her second novel Love Me Tender won the Prix Littéraire des Inrockuptibles in 2020, and is her first book to be translated into English.
Constance Debré- © – Pierre-Ange Carlotti, Flammarion
Sandrine Dixson-Declève is an international and European climate, energy, sustainable development, sustainable finance, complex systems thought leader. She is currently the co-president of the Club of Rome and divides her time between lecturing, facilitating difficult conversations and advisory work on climate change and sustainability.
Nicole Fernández Ferrer is a specialist of films and videos by and about women. In 2003, she relaunched the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Centre which had been created in 1982 by Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder. The Centre has become a major actor in the preservation and creation of audiovisual documents concerning the history of women, their rights, fights and creations.
Nicole Fernández Ferrer – © – Raphaëlle Giaretto
Catherine Fieschi is the Director of the London-based think tank Counterpoint. She is also a Senior Adviser to the macro-advisory firm MAP, and a Research Fellow at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre. Her main focus is on populism and contemporary forms of mobilisation and her most recent book is Populocracy (Agenda, 2019).
Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson is Britain’s greatest Paralympic athlete. She competed in five Paralympic Games winning 11 gold medals, 4 silvers and 1 bronze and is acknowledged as one of the most gifted and courageous sportswomen of her generation.
With a particular focus on sport, disability, health, welfare and youth development she has made significant contributions to debates on welfare reform, assisted dying and sports governance.
Ted Hodgkinson is Head of Literature and Spoken Word at Southbank Centre. Formerly online editor at Granta magazine and a literature programmer at the British Council, he co-edited The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North. He is a trustee of English PEN and chaired the International Booker Prize in 2020.
Tansy E. Hoskins is an award winning author and journalist who investigates the global fashion industry. This work has taken her to Bangladesh, India, North Macedonia, and to the Topshop warehouses in Solihull. She recently published her third book The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion.
Tansy Hoskins – © – Sarah Van Looy
Ivan Jablonka is a French historian and writer. His work focuses on the Holocaust, gender violence, masculinity and new forms of historiography. In 2016, he received the prestigious Prix Médicis. He is currently Professor of Contemporary History at Université Paris XIII, editorial director of the collections La République des idées and Traverse (Éditions du Seuil), and one of the editors of the online magazine La Vie des Idées. His latest book translated into English is A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice (Penguin).
Ivan Jablonka – © – Hermance Triay
Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His latest book is the international bestseller The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum.
Roman Krznaric – © – Kate Raworth
Sandra Laugier is Professor in philosophy at the University Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne and Senior Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. 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.
Sandra Laugier – © – Astrid di Crollalanza, Flammarion
Jean-René Lemoine – © – Jean-Louis Fernandez
Jean-René Lemoine is a playwright, director and actor. His plays have been performed in many theatres, including the Comédie-Française. His artistic work is centred on the ‘Logos’: a word unfolding a thought, but also deeply rooted in the body. He tirelessly questions the notion of inner exile and human relationships’ vertigo. His play Face à la mère, translated into English as part of Cross-Channel Theatre, a programme of the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, will be premiered in London next season.
Pierre Mathiot has been the Director of Sciences Po Lille since 2007, where he created an inclusive programme for students from marginalised communities (PEI), and is a Professor in Political Science, specialised in public policy analysis. He was the special counselor to the French Minister for National Education in charge of the “priority education” project from 2015 to 2017. He is currently in charge of the reform of the baccalauréat for the French government.
Holly McQuillan has 18 years of experience in researching, writing, consulting and designing in the field of sustainable fashion and textiles. She is the co-author of Zero Waste Fashion Design, and her current research explores the design and development of complex interconnected fibre-yarn-textile-form systems as a means to transform how we design, manufacture, use, and recover textile-based forms.
Chloé Moglia is a suspensionist Performer and the Director of the Rhizome company. Her shows and performances play with the body, slowness, the laws of physics and vertigo. Defending an embodied thought, as much as a sensitive physicality, she strives to deploy attention and acuity by linking physical practice, reflection and sensibility.
Chloe Moglia – © – Didier Olivré
’Funmi Olonisakin is Vice-President International, Engagement and Service at King’s College London. She is also Professor of Security, Leadership and Development at the African Leadership Centre in the School of Global Affairs at King’s. In her role as Vice-President IES, Professor Olonisakin seeks to facilitate the deployment of King’s assets (including knowledge, scholarship and talent in service of society) locally, nationally and internationally, to enable transformative and lasting impact.
Pierre Paslier is a London-based Innovation Design Engineer who has spent his career exploring the intersection of design and technology. After completing his studies at the Royal College of Art’s Innovation Design Engineering programme and INSA Lyon, Pierre co-founded Gravity Sketch and Notpla, a startup which currently focuses on finding solutions to the global plastic crisis through packaging made from seaweed. Notpla won Prince William’s £1,000,000 Earthshot Prize in 2022.
Abraham Poincheval is a French artist and insatiable explorer. Whether by crossing the Alps while pushing a capsule he used as his shelter, or by enclosing himself for a week in a rock, his expeditions require total physical commitment. The sculptures he conceives are laboratories allowing him to experience time, enclosure or immobility.
Abraham Poincheval – © – JC Lett
Guillaume Poix is the author of several plays performed in France and abroad and published by Editions Théâtrales. A former student at the École normale supérieure, he published a highly acclaimed first novel in 2017, Les fils conducteurs (Wepler-Fondation La Poste prize 2017; Folio, 2019) and Là d’où je viens a disparu (2020; Frontières-Léonora Miano prize 2021).
Guillaume Poix – © – Philippe Bretelle
Justine Porterie is Global Head of sustainability and DEI at Depop. She leads Depop’s efforts to embed and champion environmental and social impact matters both internally and externally. Prior to joining, Porterie held sustainability-focused roles at PwC, Unilever and EY, and founded her own secondhand fashion start-up Outstand.
Will J. A. Serfass aka roscius is a London-based French composer, niche live performer and DIY producer combining improvisation with live vocal sampling, incredible percussion and piano skills. He launched his debut vinyl WMD#1* in 2015 and Nomadic Recordings in 2019, before creating the Mesh Collective over lockdown. He collects handmade instruments, from West Africa, South America or Asia and is now a regular at Glastonbury and Wilderness Festival.
roscius – © – Gregory Rubinstein
Zadie Smith is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Novelists. Her first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of The Whitbread First Novel Award, The Guardian First Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Zadie Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and was a tenured Professor in Creative Writing at New York University (NYU).
Zadie Smith – © – Dominique Nobokov
Gabrielle Stemmer is an editor, director and literature graduate who uses the Internet’s large archive box as a playground and research field. She has directed several short films and recently finished a web series for Arte, Women Under Algorithms, to be aired in 2023. She has collaborated as an editor with Bertrand Bonello (Coma) and Céline Devaux (Everybody Loves Jeanne).
Bruno Tertrais is Deputy Director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, the main French think-tank on international security issues, and an advisor for Geopolitics at the Institut Montaigne. His areas of expertise include geopolitics and international relations, strategic and military affairs, nuclear deterrence and non-proliferation, US policy and transatlantic relations, security in the Middle East and in Asia.
Lisa Vanhala is a Professor of Political Science at University College London. Her expertise lies in the politics of climate change with a current focus on loss and damage, climate litigation and the intersections of climate change and human rights.
Professor Dilys Williams is founder and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, a University of the Arts London Research Centre, based at the London College of Fashion. She explores fashion as a conduit for living well together into education, business, public and political spheres. As Special Advisor to a UK House of Lords All Party Parliamentary Group, and via the UNFCCC Fashion Charter Advisory Panel, she brings climate and social justice considerations into key discourses.
Georgina Wright is Senior Fellow and Director of Institut Montaigne’s Europe Programme. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, associate of the Institute for Government in London and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey.
Tim Beasley-Murray is Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture and Vice Dean, responsible for promoting the Arts and Humanities, at UCL. He has just finished a book on games – literary and academic – and the way that they can get serious.
Clare Finburgh Delijani is Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths University of London. She has written and edited many books and articles on theatre from the UK, France and the French-speaking world, including a special issue of Théâtre/Public on the Situationist International (2019), The Great Stage Directors: Littlewood, Planchon, Strehler (2018, with Peter Boenisch).
Fiona Harvey is an award-winning journalist who has covered the environment since 2004, at the Financial Times and The Guardian, where she had interviewed major world figures such as Ban Ki-moon, Tony Blair, Jose Manuel Barroso, Noam Chomsky, Prince Albert of Monaco and Sir David Attenborough. She has twice won the Foreign Press Association award for Environment Story of the Year, and was named in the 2020 Woman’s Hour Power List of 30 top UK women, focusing on Our Planet.
Sarah Kent is Chief Sustainability Correspondent at The Business of Fashion. She is based in London and oversees BoF’s coverage of labour rights and fashion’s impact on the environment. She created and launched the BoF Sustainability Index, which benchmarks big brands’ progress towards ambitious environmental and social targets.
Simon Kuper is a Financial Times columnist who lives with his family in Paris. Born British, he recently acquired French citizenship too. His books include Football Against the Enemy, Soccernomics, The Happy Traitor, Barça and most recently Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK.
Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor in Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford, where she was also Director of the Oxford Internet Institute from 2011 to 2018. She is Programme Director for Public Policy at The Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. She is author of six books including Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Political Studies Association prize for best politics book, 2017).
David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He has been President of the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society and the British Society for Philosophy of Science. His books include Theory and Meaning (1980), Philosophical Naturalism (1992), Philosophical Devices (2012), Knowing the Score (2017) and The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience (2021). He is currently working on causation.
Sophie Pedder is Paris bureau chief for The Economist, and author of Révolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation (Bloomsbury, 2018; 2019). She was educated at Oxford University and at the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. In 2006, she won the David Watt prize for journalism.
Louise Perry is an author and journalist. She is a columnist at UnHerd magazine and a features writer at the Daily Mail. In 2022 she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
Louise Perry – © – Vanity Studios