Esther Leslie

Esther Leslie FBA (b. 1964) is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London.^[1][2] She has taught at Birkbeck since January 2000. She has written on Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Kracauer and the Frankfurt School, and explored themes such as animation, chemical industries, including IG Farben and Imperial Chemical Industries, liquid crystals, fascism and culture, Weimar radio, screen and digital cultures, Marxism and Anarchism, fashion, design and craft, Romanticism, and Black radicalism in Somers Town.

Leslie was formerly a Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of East London and also taught on the contextual studies programme of the Art School at Middlesex University and in Communication Studies at London Guildhall University. She oversaw the final period of the MRes/PhD programme of the London Consortium, on which she had taught a course on Cold with Steven Connor.

Leslie was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.^[3] She is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.^[4] She is one of the developers of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Animate Assembly, which provides an expanded glossary of animation

Leslie is a co-director and academic lead at the People's Museum: Somers Town founded by Diana Foster.^[5][6] She helped to curate the lead exhibition - Lost and Found: Somers Town, which opened in May 2022.^[7] She is a founding editor of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxism. For several years, she was on the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. She was an editor of Revolutionary History, a journal of Trotskyist history, inter alia. A career-spanning interview is hosted on various sites, including the Verso blog. Her partner is Ben Watson. She is the granddaughter of Charles Lahr.