To celebrate the Centenary 2020 and invest in the next generation of researchers, the School offered Scholarships to two outstanding PhD applicants in 2020.

Human, physical geography and beyond

Wiktor Hansson and Zoonii Kayler have joined us to work on two very different strands of research that illustrate the breadth of research and interests in the School;  respectively ethico-aesthetics and environmental genomics, exploring fashion and early life on the planet.

Wiktor’s research interests cut across art history, geography, and philosophy, with a principal focus on affect, and art-science encounters, and is conceptually centred on the notions of Nothingness and ethico-aesthetics.

The working title is Technics of Becoming — Towards a Techno-Ethological Approach to Dressing. The central theme or tension, both in terms of scale and theoretical focus, is ‘Something out of Nothing’, which points to both a pragmatic tool of exploration in my reassessment of paleoanthropological theories on hominisation, dress and art; to diffractive readings on Nothingness, as threaded through Whitehead, Barad and Nishida; to the minor, affective fluxes of aesthetic encounters in everyday life. 

Zoonii completed her BSc in Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry at King’s College London. Here she was introduced to computational biology’s application to modelling gene regulatory networks. This niche led her to pursue an MSc in Bioinformatics at Queen Mary’s University. During this time she worked on an alignment tool for genomic data at the Blizard Institute.

At Bristol, Zoonii will be working with Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo; using metagenomics to study nutrient cycling.  She will bed focussing, at first, on biofilms and sediments in lakes of the Peruvian Andes