Esther Leslie

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the Department of English and Humanitites at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests include Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Her books are Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), and Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002),Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) and Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007), Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014). Her translations include Georg Lukacs, A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’(Verso 2002) and Walter Benjamin: The Archives (Verso, 2007). Her next book is on the poetics and politics of liquid crystals.