Keynote Speakers

Prof. Christopher Smith, Executive Chair, AHRC

Professor Christopher Smith was previously Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews where he was also Dean of Arts (2002 to 2006), Provost of St Leonard’s College and Dean of Graduate Studies (2006 to 2009), and Proctor and Vice-Principal (2007 to 2009), before being seconded as Director of the British School at Rome, the UK’s leading humanities and creative arts research institute overseas, from 2009 to 2017.

From 2017 to 2020 he held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship on The Roman Kings: A Study in Power and held visiting positions in Erfurt, Princeton, Otago, Pavia, Milan, Siena, Aarhus and Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Professor Smith’s research explores constitutionalism and state formation with particular emphasis on the development of Rome as a political and social community, and how this was represented in ancient historical writing and subsequent political thought. He is the author or editor of over 20 books and in 2017 he was awarded the prestigious Premio “Cultori di Roma”. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Academia Europaea.

Prof. Barbara Bolt

Professor Barbara Bolt is a Professorial Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. She is a practising artist and art theorist with special interests in new materialist theory, ethics and artistic research. Her research addresses the dialogue between theory and practice and between digital and analogue painting seen through the lens of New Materialisms. Her publications include two monographs Art Beyond Representation (2004) and Heidegger Reframed (2011) and five co-edited books, The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education (2019), Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts Research (2014), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (2013), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (2007) and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007). She has successfully completed 30 graduate researchers engaged in artist research during her career. Her artwork can be found on Instagram @barbara_bolt

Michelle Williams Gamaker

Michelle Williams Gamaker is an artist working in moving image. She interrogates cinematic artifice, deploying characters as fictional activists to critique the imperialist storytelling in 20th-century British/Hollywood studio films. She is joint-winner of Film London’s Jarman Award 2020 and is the recipient of FLAMIN’s Production Award for Thieves, her first film in Fictional Revenge. Her latest film The Bang Straws (2021) recently screened at Whitechapel Gallery’s The London Open 2022 and also at BFI LFF Experimenta, winning best experimental film at Aestehtica’s Short Film Festival (2021). Williams Gamaker is a British Academy Wolfson Fellow, researching Fictional Activism as Narrative Reparations.

Campbell Orme

Campbell Orme is a London-based product designer and creative director for experiential hardware and software, currently working as a research product design lead at Meta Reality Labs Research. He and his team focus on identifying and building emergent use cases for Extended Reality (XR), as the world shifts from screen-based interfaces to ‘ubiquitous spatial computing’ over the coming years and decades. Prior, he has worked variously as a creative director on music startups; interactive installations; the first magazines for iPads; and maps of New York (now held in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art) at agencies that have included BERG, Moving Brands, Pentagram and R/GA. He’s spoken at international events and educational institutes around the world and has contributed to online and print publications and tech patents. When not staring at a screen or waving a camera around, you can find him running reasonably long distances at an OK pace, or arguing the finer points of Swedish death metal.

His talk will have the title: Ghost Cars, Talking Objects and Genius Loci: between insights, intentionality and intuition, figuring out how to get to answers when designing product experiences