UCL Institute of Advanced Studies

The Institute of Advanced Studies is a research-based community at London's UCL. The IAS fosters and develops a range of themes and research priorities.

UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences was founded in 2015. It is based at the heart of UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus in a suite of rooms in the Wilkins Building South Wing. The IAS is a research-based community of scholars comprising colleagues and doctoral students from across UCL as well as visiting fellows and research collaborators/interlocutors from the UK and in

ternationally. The IAS is committed to critical thinking and engaged enquiry both within and across conventional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and aims to provide a creative and generative context in which to question and dislodge habitual practices and modes of thought. In particular, in the context of a major multi-disciplinary university, the IAS harnesses UCL’s extensive expertise across the humanities and social sciences, to investigate received wisdom, to bring the aesthetic and the political into dialogue with one another, to foster collaborative cutting-edge research, to identify and address the urgent ethical and intellectual challenges that face us today, and to confront our responsibilities as citizens of an increasingly contracting and inter-connected world, exploring our place (historically as well as spatially) within it. It provides a home to the collective ‘area studies’ research groupings at UCL but at the same time opens the historical configurations of region and place to question under the rubric Area Studies Re-Mapped or ‘Area Studies without Borders’. It also houses a number of specialist Research Centres. These include UCL’s newly established Health Humanities Centre, enabling the formulation of research questions that incorporate but also move beyond reigning medical priorities to explore human health in the broadest terms, bringing historical, literary, legal, technological, material, philosophical, anthropological and aesthetic issues into debates around what constitutes the ‘human’ and how ‘health’ may be broadly conceived. The IAS similarly hosts the new UCL Centre for Collective Violence and Genocide Studies, a multi-disciplinary research initiative investigating historical and contemporary instances of collective violence and their legacies as well as building relevant archives (oral and physical) that enable research on perpetrators, victims and processes of collective violence and conflict resolution in different geo-political contexts, and the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social & Cultural Complexity. UCL’s Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII) also has its new home in the IAS, and cross-disciplinary initiatives such as teaching and research networks on gender and LGBTQ issues are provided with a base from which to operate and interact. Each year the IAS identifies specific themes for the organisation of research-led events and encounters. For for 2016-17, these are Planetary Futures and Sense and Sensation, whereas in 2015-2016 they were Materialities and Technologies; Identities and Voices; Conflict, Confrontation and Justice; and Health and Humanities. Through collaboration with colleagues and dialogue among researchers both within and beyond UCL, future themes will be developed and research-orientated initiatives will shift and adapt in a spirit of collective and collaborative endeavour. Visiting members of the IAS will be invited to participate in our deliberations and designs so that together we create a dynamic and responsive framework in which to speak, to write and to act.

19/06/2026

Becoming a Novelist in Post-Brexit Britain
23 June 2026, 5:30pm–7pm
Four Italian Women on Writing, Identity and the Contemporary Novel.

Becoming a Novelist in Post-Brexit Britain Four Italian Women on Writing, Identity and the Contemporary Novel.

15/06/2026

Radical Ecology presents (as part of London Climate Action Week): Wedding Songs & Agit Prop
24 June 6-8pm
An evening of performance, reading, reflection and collective encounter bringing together artists, writers, musicians and activists whose work engages questions of racial justice, environmental justice, memory, displacement and repair.

Radical Ecology presents (as part of London Climate Action Week): Wedding Songs & Agit Prop Wedding Songs & Agit Prop is an evening of performance, reading, reflection and collective encounter bringing together artists, writers, musicians and activists whose work engages questions of racial justice, environmental justice, memory, displacement and repair.

15/06/2026

IAS Book Launch: Biography of a Revolution; The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt
22 June 6-8pm
Tracing the long genealogy of Egyptian feminist organising across the twentieth century, she shows how women's resistance to both state & domestic violence created the political conditions for 2011.

IAS Book Launch: Biography of a Revolution We are welcoming Lucia Sorbera for the launch of her book Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt.

12/06/2026

Racial Capitalism and the Urban: Racial dynamics in Brazilian cities
16 June 2026, 5pm-6:30pm
The second lecture in the series examines how racial classification shapes peripheral urbanisation in Brazil, with Professor Renato Emerson dos Santos.

Racial Capitalism and the Urban: Racial dynamics in Brazilian cities The second lecture in the 'Racial Capitalism and the Urban' series examines how racial classification shapes peripheral urbanisation in Brazil, with Professor Renato Emerson dos Santos.

08/06/2026

TONIGHT!
FLIGHT PATHS: Of Avian Lives and Human Survival
Creative-Critical Readings and Translations in English and German
8 June 2026, 6pm–7:30pm

FLIGHT PATHS: Of Avian Lives and Human Survival Creative-Critical Readings and Translations in English and German

01/06/2026

The more things change - Digital Humanities in a tumultuous world UCLDH is delighted to welcome Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage(Edinburgh), to give the 2026 Susan Hockey Lecture.

29/05/2026

IAS Book Launch: The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures
2 June 2-4pm
Instead of disaster narratives, author Xiaofan Amy Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies.

IAS Book Launch: The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures Please join us in celebrating the launch of Xiaofan Amy Li's book The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures.

29/05/2026

The more things change - Digital Humanities in a tumultuous world UCLDH is delighted to welcome Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, to give the 2026 Susan Hockey Lecture.

22/05/2026

IAS Book Launch: Sonic Relations. Devotion and Community in Turkey's Eastern Borderlands
3 June 6-8pm
Stefan Williamson Fa' first monograph examines how sound shapes religious and communal life among Shi‘i Muslims living in Turkey’s eastern borderlands, foregrounding the powerful role of vocal poetic recitation in cultivating connections not only among humans but also with the unseen.

IAS Book Launch: Sonic Relations We are welcoming Stefan Williamson Fa to the IAS to present his first monograph Sonic Relations. Devotion and Community in Turkey's Eastern Borderlands.

20/05/2026

IAS Book Launch: Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment
21 May 6-8pm
We welcome the authors, Hans Demeyer and Sven Vitse, for the launch of their book, a comparative study of contemporary fiction in neoliberal ruins.

IAS Book Launch: Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment We welcome the authors, Hans Demeyer and Sven Vitse, for the launch of their book, a comparative study of contemporary fiction in neoliberal ruins.

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