Directors

David Herd is a poet, critic and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales. His work is at the intersection of literature and human rights. He has published widely on the politics of human movement and on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics and has held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University and the Writing Center Gloucester, MA.

Based in the School of International Relations, Dr Natasha Saunders is a political theorist working on forced migration. Her work has examined resistance/activist movements by refugees and asylum seekers, and the historical development, and politics, of ‘the refugee problem’. Her current research focuses on digitised border controls and the ethical and human rights challenges that they pose.

Affiliated Researchers

Dina Nayeri’s critically acclaimed books, essays, and stories are published in 20+ countries and taught in schools across Europe and the US. Who Gets Believed? (2023) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In reviewing it, The Guardian called her “a master storyteller of the refugee experience.” The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won Germany’s Geschwister Scholl Preis. The Observer called it “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.” A fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and winner of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize,  Dina’s essays and stories have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Granta, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and many other publications.  She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard Business School, and Princeton and is now a Reader at the University of St Andrews

---

Anthony F Lang, Jr (Tony) is a Professor of International Political Theory in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He was an assistant professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, Egypt from 1996-2000. From 2000-2003, he served as a programme officer at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Prior to arriving in St Andrews in 2004, he taught courses at Yale University, Bard College and Albright College. He is currently the editor of the Journal of International Political Theory and was one of the founding editors of Global Constitutionalism and serves on the editorial boards of Ethics & International Affairs and Human Rights Review. He created the Centre for Global Constitutionalism (now the Centre for Law and Global Governance) at the University of St Andrews. He has served as a consultant to the UNODC on ethics in higher education and the UK Ministry of Defence on the legal and ethical use of force. He has published three single authored books and edited or co-edited ten others and published numerous articles and book chapters. His scholarship sits at the intersection of politics, law and ethics at the global level. He has written about global constitutionalism, universal values, the just war tradition, political responsibility, international law, Middle East politics, and human rights. His publications can be found here.

---

Nicki Hitchcott is Professor of French and African Studies in the School of Modern Languages. She is a specialist in postcolonial literatures in French and English, particularly fiction from sub-Saharan Africa. Funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the RSE, her research has focused on West African women’s writing, migrant fiction, cultural  responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Belgian colonialism, and ecotexts. She published 3 single-authored monographs, a further 9 co-authored/co-edited volumes, and over 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. She is currently working with Alice Karekezi (University of Rwanda) and John McInally (St Andrews) on the stories of Métis children abducted from the former Belgian empire in Africa.

---

Rahul Rao is Reader in International Political Thought in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He has research interests in postcolonial and queer theory and the politics of South Asia and is embarking on a new project that engages with the more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences. He is the author of three books: The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (Pluto Press, 2025), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (OUP, 2020), and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (OUP, 2010). He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.