Esther Leslie
is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Synthetic
Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso, 2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.