My research focuses on the history of lay religion in the Iberian Peninsula from the Late Roman Empire to the end of the Visigothic kingdom in 711. The idea of 'lay religion' - religion as experienced by people who were not clerics – draws us away from institutional histories of religion, and adds an important social dimension to our understanding of a period in which socio-economic and cultural history are too often kept apart. The central questions centre on how laypeople and clerics made their different claims to power in the religious sphere, and how the nature of their conflicts and collaborations changed over time. This entails thinking critically and historically about the very concepts of 'religion', 'superstition', 'secular' and so on - all of which had the capacity to be used fluidly and polemically.

I work in philosophy of language and neighboring fields. For more information and publications, please visit https://mandelkern.hosting.nyu.edu/.

The emergence and diversification of complex life is the most fundamental biological transition in the history of the Earth. I use fossils to chart the evolution of eukaryotes (those organisms with a membrane-bound cell nucleus), multicellularity, cellular differentiation, and animals, through the Proterozoic Eon (2.5–0.5 billion years ago). Understanding how changing fossil diversity correlates to environmental changes—and the Proterozoic Eon sees some of the largest in the Earth's history—is vital to determining evolutionary drivers.

Not only do I seek new fossils that provide this important palaeobiological information, I critically interrogate the nature of the fossil record. Before the terminal Proterozoic advent of biomineralisation, fossilisation is confined to poorly understood and unusual circumstances that preserve organic remains. I use novel analytical techniques on fossiliferous strata to understand the conditions conducive to preservation. Such research is crucial to our ability to robustly interpret the temporal and ecological range of fossil organisms. It can also provide new insights into their original chemistry and biology.

Website: https://palaeobiology.web.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-ross-anderson

My research sits at the intersection of antiracist political theory and Critical Theory, including that of the German Frankfurt School, French poststructuralism, and the British Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. I am currently working on a book project focused on Frantz Fanon's sociogenic method of antiracist critique. Drawing in part on my doctoral thesis, I argue that the failure to theorize 'race' has substantial consequences for continental political theory including but not limited to understanding the reproduction of racial injustice. I have also written on the politics of voice and visibility in the U.S. and Northern Ireland. More broadly, I am interested in feminist thought, social epistemology, and continental philosophies of self and Other.

My research, at the intersection of history and literature, has two related strands: recovering the perspectives and experiences of ancient women—and reconsidering how we might access those perspectives—and working outwards from the study of individual relationships to re-examine larger-scale social structures. I am particularly interested in the complexities of emotional and bodily intimacy in exploitative relationships, and in the potential for approaching epigraphic texts commissioned by women as instances of women's self-writing.