Ronan McDonald is the author of The Death of the Critic (Continuum, 2007). Born in Dublin and educated there and at the University of Oxford, he is now a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading and the Director of the Samuel Beckett International Foundation. His other books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002) and The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007) together with numerous essays and […]
Speakers and Panellists
previous speakers
Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor was a television producer and science writer. For 30 years, he made science documentaries for television, working initially on Tomorrow’s World and later for the BBC’s Horizon series, and he is the author of Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human (OUP, 2009). […]
Graham Aitken
Graham Aitken is a student at the University of Leeds, and a member of Students for a Sensible Drugs Policy. […]
Darryl Bickler
Darryl Bickler is a lawyer and help found the Drugs Equality Alliance, a not for profit organisation based in the UK aimed at challenging the administration of drug laws. […]
Dolan Cummings
Dolan Cummings is an Associate Fellow of the Academy of Ideas, part of the committee that programmes the annual Battle of Ideas, and a regular participant at the festival and other AoI events. He has a particular interest in religion and politics, especially in the USA and India. He is also one of the co-founders of the Manifesto Club, a campaign group for freedom in […]
Yvonne Crowther
Yvonne Crowther is the Volunteer Youth Manager at the Cardinal Community Enterprise Project in Leeds, and is a graduate in Youth & Community Studies from Leeds Beckett University. […]
Cath Follin
Cath Follin is Head of City Centre Management and Markets at Leeds City Council and the Trustee and Mentor at Emmaus Leeds, a charity that gives homeless people both a home and employment. Cath has an MA in economics from the University of Leeds. […]
Phil Hadfield
Phil Hadfield is a graduate of the Universities of Keele and Cambridge, and holds a PhD from the University of Durham. He is on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds, a leading international Centre for Criminological research. Phil was formerly a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, a Research Associate at the University […]
Stuart Waiton
Stuart Waiton is a sociology and criminology lecturer at Abertay University and is author of Scared of the Kids: curfews crime and the regulation of young people (2008) and The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics (Routledge, 2009). Stuart explores key themes like the modern forms of criminalisation in society, amoral panics and the over regulation of everyday life. Stuart is a columnist for the Glasgow Herald and a regular […]
Kenan Malik
Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. His main areas of interest are the history of ideas; history and philosophy of science; history and philosophy of religion; political philosophy; ethics; and the history and sociology of race and immigration. He is the author of From Fatwa to Jihad: the Rushdie Affair and its legacy (Atlantic, 2009), shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, Strange Fruit: why both sides are […]