Steering group

Jana is a 4th year Politics student, and as Woman Liberation Officer this year she's focused on creating ore leadership opportunities for women and improving mental health and wellbeing support, particularly for survivors of gender-based violence. She's also keen to work on intersectional issues.

Katya Amott is Vice President Education at the Edinburgh University Students’ Association for the 2025/2026 Academic Year. Her main priorities are ensuring that students’ academic experience is not only protected, but improved. This includes tackling the awarding gap, advocating for better transparency in university communication with students, and supporting interdisciplinary learning. Katya recently graduated with a MA Hons in Russian Studies.

Her research interests span the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries in global, world and transnational perspective, as well as postcolonial, archive, museum, and memory studies. She is currently interested on the psychiatric treatment of queer desire and gender during the Cold War, and some of her research will be published in her forthcoming book, Aversion Therapy: Sex, Psychiatry and the Cold War (Cambridge).

Dr Wannes Dupont is an Associate Director of GENDER.ED. 

He previously taught at Yale-NUS College (Singapore), Utrecht University (Netherlands), and the University of Antwerp (Belgium). His work, publications, and teaching primarily concern the European and global history of sexuality, and the intersections of biopolitics and religion.

At IASH, he supports the work of visiting scholars and helps to present regular events across the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and beyond.

Her work is driven by an interest in the relationship between design and identity and is increasingly motivated by a commitment to social justice.

She is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Principal Investigator of the project Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives. Her work demonstrates the importance of understanding gender politics at the intersections of caste, class, race/ethnicity and religion in women’s and social movements, in development policies and practice, in everyday social relations, and in the global dynamics of knowledge production.

Hemangini is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the School of Social and Political Science. She has a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. She researches and has teaching interests in transnational feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and gender and sexuality in the South.

Hemangini is also an ‘Annual Research Showcase’ and ’16 Days Blogathon’ Event Lead, and the Co-Convener of ‘Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World.’

She is one of the Co-Directors of GENDER.ED, and is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Sociology, School of Social and Political Sciences. 

Her research explores the socio-legal regulation of (primarily) women’s bodies, the politics of knowledge production, and feminist utopian thinking. She is particularly interested in reproductive and sexual governance and justice, and prefigurative policy reform.

Rachel originally trained as an archivist, and now manages archivists, librarians, and curators responsible for the University’s cultural heritage collections and welcomes IASH fellows to the Centre for Research Collections at the University. Rachel is Chair of the UK UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

Her research is concerned with histories of women and gender in modern Britain, as well as with histories of policing and surveillance, crime, deviancy, childhood, youth and sexuality.

As Dean of Research, she is keen to promote research and engagement on issues of gender and sexuality across all of the arts, humanities and social sciences disciplines covered in the College.

Meryl’s research interests bridge the intersection of gender politics, party politics, territorial politics, and institutional approaches to the study of politics.

Her academic thinking and writing focuses mainly on the ethics and politics of work in a global context. In particular, she is interested in the role of difference (primarily, race and gender) in the emergence and distribution of new forms of work. More recently, she has been thinking about the eugenicist underpinnings of discourses on technology.

Ewan has helped build the award-winning map of Scottish witch trials – the Scottish Accused Witches project – using WikiData.

Lesley’s research interests lie in the general areas of the sociology of punishment and the sociology of law and deviance. Particular interests include: youth crime and juvenile justice; gender justice and community well-being; the politics of crime control; and comparative criminal justice. She is Co-Director (with Susan McVie) of theEdinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, and directs the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Dr Zubin Mistry is a Lecturer in Early Medieval European History. He is a historian of early medieval Europe between 500 and 1000 whose work focuses in particular on reproduction.

His research uses topics like abortion and infertility to think about religious beliefs, legal regimes, political culture and medical practice.

Zubin was the interim Associate Director for Semester 1 of 2025/26, whilst Wannes Dupont was on research leave.

She is interested in film’s engagement with religion and spirituality, representations and constructions of gender in visual culture, the Iranian performing arts and religion, contemporary expressions of Islam in art and material culture, and Persian literature.

Dr Kaveri Qureshi is one of the Co-Directors of GENDER.ED and a Senior Lecturer at the Global Health Policy Unit, which lies within Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science.  

Rae holds a Ph.D. in Critical Human Geography from York University and his work explores the contestations of living, and forms of resistance and belonging, amongst multiply-marginalized LGBTQ+ people.

Her background is in Art History and Visual Cultural Studies, and their present research interests concern (post-)phenomenology, horror, and the non-human turn in new media.

Laura’s research explores the margins of peace processes and conflict-affected societies and their intersections with the politics of inclusion. She is particularly interested in local peace processes, ethnopolitics, and women, peace and security.