I am a generalist public international lawyer, who not only works on a wide range of particular sub-disciplines within the field of international law but is also committed to exploration of those aspects, concepts and areas of the field that connect it together as a field of study and practice. I have worked and published on the law relating to the use of force, the law of armed conflict, international criminal law, international dispute settlement, the law of international organizations, particularly of the United Nations, the immunities of states and state officials, international human rights law, and international economic law.

I am a social anthropologist and designer whose work is situated at the intersection of visual, material and economic anthropology, textiles and ethnoecology. I am interested in the relationships that craftspeople have with the environments from which they extract and use resources during commodity production. I identify historical and contemporary links that concern the exploitation of ecosystems, workers and underrepresented communities. I have carried out ethnographic work with Harris Tweed weavers in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland (2015) and received a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2021) with a thesis based on twelve months of apprenticeship-based fieldwork with natural dye craftspeople on the island of Amami Oshima, southern Japan. A monograph based on my doctoral thesis will be published by Duke University Press in 2025 titled Dyeing with the Earth: Textiles, Tradition and Sustainability in Contemporary Japan. My new research explores the intersection of textiles and agriculture in diverse geographies - the UK, USA and India. Using comparative ethnography, I am seeking to understand how small-scale producers of natural fibres and dyestuffs are adapting their practices in the context of challenging environmental, social and economic conditions. I ask whether a grassroots approach to regenerative land stewardship and aspirations to work more ethically and sustainably might trickle up, impacting the wider fashion and textiles industries at scale.

In the same way that having a body-schema allows humans and other animals to effectively control and monitor their physical bodies, having a mental self-model — a simplified description of one’s cognition and perception — allows agents to better control and monitor their mental states. I use a combination of behavioural testing, human neuroimaging and computational modelling to study how humans use this self-model to efficiently represent, learn, and flexibly adapt their behaviour to changing environments. Among the questions that keep me and my group busy are: what are the cognitive benefits of having an internal representation of one's own perception and cognition, and what happens when this representation is disturbed, biased, or not fully developed (for example, in young children)? In what way does a self-representation interact with memories of one's own actions and experiences, and with the feeling of being in control over one's actions? To what extent do people represent their own minds over and above a generic representation of minds? What is the scope of the human capacity to represent the hypothetical possibility of being someone else, and how does this capacity interact with moral decision-making and ethics?