Lydia Cole

Dr Lydia Cole is an Assistant Professor at the University of Sussex. Her research interests span several fields of International Relations, including aesthetic politics, critical peace and conflict studies, and feminist international relations. She is particularly interested in the politics of representing war and peace, with her research situated across the following key strands—Curating Peace: She is currently developing a project on peace curating in the United Kingdom, examining the ways that exhibitions and museum collections shape public knowledge of peacemaking in the United Kingdom. Her previous work on this theme has focused on activist curating in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), exploring the ways that the arts, including visual, street, and sound art, promote forms of social contestation and transformation. Her research in BiH was part of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Art of Peace’. Conflict Textiles: She has previously worked closely with the Conflict Textiles collection, commissioning and co-curating a series of textile art exhibitions including Stitched Voices (Aberystwyth Arts Centre) and Threads, War and Conflict (The Byre Theatre, St Andrews). She continues to work on textile politics as part of my work on peace curating. Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: Developing on doctoral research on the framing of conflict-related sexual violence in BiH, she continues to write on the politics and ethics of ‘seeing’ conflict-related sexual violence in global politics.