CAVR People: Directory of Experts

Dr Zubin Kanga (Music) is a performer and composer who specializes in new interfaces for music performance. He leads the Cyborg Soloists project, which unlocks new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments.

Dr Jonathan Packham (Music) is a composer who works with experimental technologies in performance, especially to explore spatial/architectural components of composition. His projects include live-generated video scores in virtual environments using VR headset technologies.

The research of Professor Johannes Zanker (Psychology, Emeritus) provides insight into visual perception, including in 3D virtual reality and online settings, as well as in both physical and virtual art installations.

Professor Polly Dalton (Psychology) investigates human attention, awareness and experience in multisensory contexts. She studies these topics both from a theoretical perspective and also in more applied contexts, such as piloting aircraft, operating vehicles remotely and interacting with immersive technologies.

Dr Shzr Ee Tan (Music) is an ethnomusicologist focusing on East and Southeast Asia. Dr Tan’s work reveals the role of music, social media and other technologies in the negotiation and formation of identity, especially how inequalities and marginalities play out in new media.

Professor James Williams (French) is an expert on French/Francophone and European film. His work includes studies on directors Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard, and questions of identity through contemporary African Cinema and Queer World Cinema. Professor Williams is also Director of the Centre for Visual Cultures.

The expertise of Professor Daniela Berghahn (Media Arts) expertise lies in contemporary European and global art cinema. Her work includes new insight into exoticism in world cinema, and migrant cinema, alongside more historical work into the cinema of East Germany.

Dr George Guo (Media Arts) focuses on the social, cultural, and economic underpinnings of media business in a transnational and transcultural context. He directs the MA in International Media Management, drawing on his work investigating the cultural and economic implications of transnational media flows. 

Professor Steve Downes (Music) focuses on analysis, history and aesthetics of music. He writes on Central and Eastern European (especially Polish) music since 1800, and songwriters like Burt Bacharach, Carole King and Barry Manilow. His work addresses music marginalised or devalued by dominant historical and critical discourses.

Dale Gent (Media Arts) is an expert in games development. Beyond specific implementation in games, Dale also works on the integration of video game technologies in virtual production.

Dr Tim Summers (Music) works on music in video games and themed environments. His current research involves music and identity in games (especially queer and gender theory) and is exploring ways of better understanding and using music in theme parks.

Dr Laryssa Whittaker (Media Arts) focuses on audience engagement with immersive technologies and new forms of culture. She has led research on VR exhibition in home, library, and cinema contexts. She has also conducted research on live virtual and hybrid music performances in gaming platforms and metaverse spaces.

Professor Szonya Durant (Psychology) directs the Virtual Reality Lab and is an expert on visual perception. Her work explains how spatial and temporal contexts change our visual perception. She shows how eye movement and neuron response affect our perception of time, space and motion.

Alex Kirstukas (Music and Drama) is completing a PhD studying connections between live performance and early film. He is an expert on British and French popular culture of the long nineteenth century, with a particular interest in the work of Jules Verne.  

Professor Henry Stobart (Music) specializes in music of the South American Andes, especially Bolivia. His work explores the cultural politics of heritage, including the role of digital media. More broadly, he is an expert on methodologies of ethnographies and musical fieldwork.

Dr Hannah Platts (History) is an historian and archaeologist with a focus on ancient Rome. Her work uses digital and immersive technologies to recreate fragile and fragmentary historic sites and artefacts, bringing past eras to life for today’s audiences.

Dr Simone Gigliotti (History) is an expert in Holocaust Studies, with a specific interest in themes of place, time and transit. Her work explores the Holocaust in cinema and she teaches the Holocaust through the use of digital technologies like maps to show moment and displacement of people.

Professor Julie Brown (Music, Emerita) focuses on the cultural and media histories of twentieth-century music, with specific expertise in the cultural and technological contexts of silent and transition film performance. She has restored music that was lost from early films, and staged live performances of music not heard for over 100 years. Julie founded the Centre for Audiovisual Research and served as its first director.

Rich Hemming (Electronic Engineering) is completing a PhD in electronic engineering and psychology. He focuses on procedural audio and sonification in augmented reality (AR). His work explores how spatialised and dynamic audio can enhance audience engagement, and accessibility for visually impaired users.

Professor Hannah Thompson’s expertise includes audio description (the verbal provision of visual information for blind people), especially in museums and galleries. Her work applies techniques from translation studies to help audio describers in the theatre ‘translate’ characters on stage.

Professor Anica Zeyen (Management) uses her research to enhance economic participation and societal inclusion for disabled individuals. She uses methods including artistic co-creation in podcasts, exhibitions and documentaries. Her goal is to gain profound insights into the diverse and lived experiences of disabled people globally.

Professor Dan Rebellato (Drama) is a playwright and researcher. A highly esteemed dramatist for radio, with over 30 plays for BBC Radio, his creative work is complemented by academic research on contemporary theatre.

Professor Mark Berry (Music) is a Professor of Music and Intellectual History with a specific expertise in opera (especially German opera). His work shows how political, philosophical, theological and aesthetics concerns manifest musically and dramatically on the stage. He is also an active critic, regularly reviewing opera.

Dr Tom Parkinson (Music) is a composer and sound designer working in television, film, radio, and has written over 80 scores for the stage. He works collaboratively with dramatists and choreographers. Tom’s theatre productions have been performed in 20 countries and his music has been featured across the BBC.

Professor Victoria Mapplebeck (Media Arts) is a BAFTA award winning artist and film director. Victoria’s films explore autobiographical stories which ask universal questions about our relationship with technology, parenting, health and wellbeing. To address these issues, she uses smartphones as the primary medium for shooting her films.

Dr Richard Wright (Media Arts) is a visual artist whose work includes digital animation and interactive pieces. His work has included animated films about historical figures like Louis XIV and Thomas Watts, alongside other critical and creative work that explores the aesthetics of digital cinema. 

Professor Li Zhang (Computer Science) is an expert in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and evolutionary computation. Professor Zhang’s work often applies machine learning technologies to audio and visual sources, including the analysis of emotions in voices and computer generation of anime images.

Dr Andy Woods (Media Arts) focuses on audience insight, especially by developing new psychological audience insight techniques, especially with regard to multisensory perception. His current work includes exploring web-based online audience research/testing.

Dr John Regan (English) blends his interests of digital technology and eighteenth-century European literature: he shows how digital tools, from smartphones to algorithms and network visualisations, can change how we read, write and interpret literature. 

Dr Will Montgomery (English) researches poetry and poetics. His interests include rhythm across media, and has created albums of music and sound art, such as collaborative audio work made with the poet Carol Watts.

Caitlin Rowley (Music) is an experimental composer, artist and performer. Her work often dissolves the boundaries between music, art and text. Her projects include developing new electroacoustic instruments, video pieces and virtual installations in online environments.

Dr Nina Whiteman (Music) is a composer, vocalist, and multimedia artist. She explores new sounds and ways of presenting music. Whether inspired by escape rooms and mazes, or sounds of the natural world, her work probes relationships between the environment and new technologies through interdisciplinary/multimedia approaches.

Dr Rhys Davies (Media Arts) is a sound designer and artist. He has collaborated with several visual artists in gallery exhibition work, developing his ideas around post-production design. His theoretical research examines the use of sound in the modernist avant-garde, particularly in the work of the Italian Futurists.

Dr Nathan James Dearden (Music) is an award-winning music creator whose music regularly features in concerts and broadcasts across the UK and overseas. He explores parody in music, and music as a form of social commentary. Recent work includes music accompanying archival footage of a lost Welsh community, ‘The day following’.

Polly Dalton

Rhys Davies

Nathan James Dearden

Dale Gent

Zubin Kanga

Tim Summers (Director)

Laryssa Whittaker

James Williams

PGR Rep (To be appointed)