The Cluster F Theory Podcast

Caroline A Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with science. She has also worked as a curator, including three exhibitions at MIT's List Visual Arts Center: Hans Haaken , Video Trajectories , and...

Sarah Ditum is a journalist for The Sunday Times and has also written for The Guardian, New Statesman, Grazia and UnHerd. She writes columns and features about politics, culture and lifestyle including topics such as violence against women, gender identity and cancel culture. Her book Toxic: Women, Fame and The Noughties, about misogyny in celebrity culture during the 2000s, was published in 2023...

David Chater is an award-winning British broadcast journalist who has worked in international television news for over 40 years. He has reported for Independent Television News, Sky News and Al Jazeera English from pretty much every conflict you can think of. He's reported on the Falklands War, the Yugoslavian Homeland Wars, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War, the Sri Lankan civil war, the wa...

Jason Farago is a critic at large for the New York Times, writing about culture and its place in the wider world. His writing has taken him from wartime Kyiv to the Olympic stadiums of Tokyo to dance parties in Johannesburg. He also is the co-creator of Close Read , a criticism series that delves into a single cultural work, detail by detail. Before joining the Times, he served as a US art critic...

Nimco Ali OBE is co-founder and CEO of The Five Foundation , a global partnership to end female genital mutilation. Nimco is an activist, author and a survivor of FGM. Her tireless work has put FGM front and centre in the feminist campaign to end violence against women and girls. Nimco was awarded an OBE for her trailblazing activism in 2019. In the past 10 years, Nimco was awarded Red Magazine’s...

Vid Simoniti is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool, where he also directs the MA in Art, Philosophy and Cultural Institutions. Before joining the department at Liverpool in 2018, he was the inaugural Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge. Vid's academic work bridges philosophy, political thoughts and arts critic...

David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film at Harvard and the department's current chair. He previously held the chair in Art History at Yale and was a curator at the ICA in Boston . He's one of the editors of leading art and theory journal, October . David is one of the most important, if not the single most important, theorist, critic and historian of 20th century and con...

Thank you for listening to The Cluster F Theory. If you don’t already subscribe at Substack, please sign up on our page in order to receive an email when new episodes are released. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it or review it wherever you listen and share it with your friends. Thank you! Tracy King is a writer, producer and consultant based in both Birmingham and London. She has written f...

Thank you for listening to The Cluster F Theory. If you don’t already subscribe at Substack, please sign up on our page in order to receive an email when new episodes are released. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it or review it wherever you listen and share it with your friends. Thank you! Anna Kornbluh is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she founded Inte...

Richard Wiseman holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and has published over 100 academic papers examining the psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck and self-development. He has written several popular psychology books (including The Luck Factor and 59 Seconds ) that have been published around the world. Richard...

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award. His third, C, was a 2010 Man Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. Tom is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and of the essay collection Typewriters Bom...

Richard Bacon has been a household name for over 25 years in the UK. As a tv presenter he's known for shows such as Blue Peter , Top of the Pops , The Big Breakfast and Good Morning Britain . As a radio presenter he's been on pretty much every channel you can think of. He's started his own production company, Yes Yes Media, creating and producing tv shows, including the very popular I Literally Ju...

Katrin Tiidenberg is a Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School at Tallinn University in Estonia. She has held fellowships at Durham University, Aarhus University and Microsoft Research New England. Katrin's research focuses on the hows and whys of people's online and social media practices with a particular emphasis on visuality, sex and politica...

Adam Thirwell is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Among his best-known books are Lurid & Cute , Politics , Multiples and Kapow! . His latest novel is The Future Future , which Salman Rushdie described as "A dazzling performance, unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year". He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, received a Somerset M...

Professor Carrie Lambert-Beatty is a contemporary art historian. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard. She's the author of some of the most influential arts writing of the 21st century, including the award-winning book Being Watched, Yvonne Rainer in the 1960s and the essay, Make Believe: Pa...

Caroline Criado Perez is a writer, broadcaster, speaker and feminist campaigner. She successfully campaigned to put a woman on the British £10 note in 2013 and campaigned to put a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square in 2018 thereby making Parliament Square a little bit less of a sausage fest. Her book 'INVISIBLE WOMEN: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men' was a Sunday Times...

Professor Hanneke van Laarhoven is professor of translational medical oncology at the University of Amsterdam and head of the Department of Medical Oncology of the Amsterdam University Medical Center. She is a world-renowned specialist on gastrointestinal cancer, but her interests reach far beyond the body, including psychology, AI, philosophy and theology. She is also known for helping develop th...

Professor Sophie Scott CBE is the Director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, as well as the Head of their Speech Communications Group. Her research interests include the neural basis of vocal communication - how our brains process the information in speech and voices, and how our brains control the production of our voice. She is also interested in the expre...

Philippa Perry- or to use her proper title, Philippa, Lady Perry - is an author, psychotherapist and artist. She has written several books including a graphic novel titled 'Couch Fiction: a Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy', the #1 Sunday Times Best Seller 'The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read...' And her current book called 'The Book You Want Everyone You Love To Read...' She has presented variou...

Our guest today is Martin Surbeck. An assistant professor in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Surbeck is one of the world’s foremost experts in primatology. He is interested in questions of social behavior in animals: competition but also cooperation, a skill and strategy often considered unique to humans. His main research object? Apes and monkeys, chimpanzees and bonobos especially, o...

Catherine Ashton, or The Right Honourable, The Baroness Ashton of Upholland, LG GCMG PC was created a life peer by Tony Blair in 1999. In the Blair government she was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills, and in the Ministry of Justice. During Gordon Brown's government she became Leader of the House of Lords, Lord President of the Council, the Briti...

Andy Nyman is a multi-award winning actor, director, writer, author and magician. As an actor his credits include things such as playing Winston Churchill in ‘Peaky Blinders’, and Dan in the Oscar winning film 'Judy'. He starred in Charlie Brooker's 'Dead Set'. Has appeared on stage on Broadway and in the West End in shows such as ‘Fiddler on The Roof’, ‘Assassins’, ‘Hangmen’ and ‘Ghost Stories’,...

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a biblical scholar and broadcaster. She is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter in the UK. Her research is on ancient Israelite and Judahite religions, and portrayals of the religious past in the Hebrew Bible. Her most recent book deals with ancient constructs of God's body, it’s called ‘God: An Anatomy’. It won the PEN He...

Professor Bruce Hood is Professor of Developmental Psychology in Society at the University of Bristol in the UK. His research focuses on cognitive development in children, spatial representation and action, the origin of adult magical reasoning from children’s natural intuitions and for the past several years has been running a course at Bristol called the Science of Happiness. Apart from his acad...

Artist Annabel Daou was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, she is now living in New York. Her work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech, and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper- and tape-based constructions, sound pieces, and performances explore the language of power, intimacy, and self-encounter across time and space. Her works involve friends, acquaintances, and random s...