The Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies

Virtual seminars

Meet associate members and fellows from the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) and discover their unique passion for curiosity-driven research. Learn why interdisciplinary, open-ended research is more important than ever as the world seeks new solutions and breakthrough ideas. Through the seminar series, we spotlight the unique opportunities provided by LIAS and learn more about the research and experience of our members. 

Forthcoming seminars

Profile for Professor John GoodwinProfessor John Goodwin (Associate Fellow), University of Leicester:
Adventures with Sociological Storytelling
13 May 2026, 12.00pm-1.00pm

The routes into sociology are many and varied, with the process of ‘becoming’ a sociologist widely considered in the reflexive journeys that established sociologists recount. Such auto/biographical stories reveal chance encounters, fateful moments, influential authors, guiding teachers, significant experiences, and more. For the last few years, I have systematically used autoethnographic storytelling to examine social class to consider how I (a working-class school failure from a mining community) became an academic sociologist. Such autoethnographic stories can be exploratory, used as starting or end points, and revelatory in form and process. In the presentation, I will use guiding questions from C. Wright Mills (What are the specific intersections of history and biography?) and Norbert Elias (How did I get here? How did ‘this’ come to be?) to examine three stories of class: Socks on the Settee (work), Learning to Read (school), Holidays By The Sea (holidays).

Book your place for the seminar

Previous seminars

Building psychological therapies, connections and support for people affected by Huntington’s disease

Dr Sarah Gunn, clinical psychologist and lecturer in clinical psychology, discusses the work she is undertaking to build new psychological therapies, networks and mental health support for people affected by Huntington’s disease and their families.

Our Shared Research Journey

LIAS Fellow Alumna Professor Linda Theron and LIAS Associate Member Dr Diane Levine discuss their research aiming to understand what helps Africa(n) children and young people cope well when life is hard, including their journey to success with a newly awarded Wellcome Trust Discovery grant.

Understanding Phanerozoic Mass Extinctions: How Mathematical Modelling Can Contribute?

Professor Sergei Petrovskiy (School of Computing and Mathematic Sciences) discusses his model which demonstrates how species extinction or survival following a climate change depends on the interplay between the magnitude of the climate change and the rate of species' adaptive evolution.

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