Esther Leslie

Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University of London. Her research interests include Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include European literary and visual modernism, the ‘everyday’ and value, memory and history, madness and expression and digital aesthetics.

She is author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) and Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007). Her translations include Georg Lukacs, A Defence of ‘History and Class Consciousness’ (Verso 2002) and Walter Benjamin: The Archives (Verso, 2007).