About
Wendy is an interdisciplinary researcher who works in a challenge-led and collaborative way to deliver high-impact and diverse outputs. Areas of specialism span politics, history, cultural studies and law to explore: ethics of co-productive research for social justice; creative methods that centre meaningful community-engagement and; preventative approaches to global social challenges that recognise root causes.
Wendy joined the Politics department in 2021 and has led impact-focussed and policy-oriented elements of innovative research grants. She is a Co-convenor with the Centre for People's Justice (2025-2030). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Centre pursues change-making research that responds to the public’s need and desire for fairer, safer and more inclusive societies. Wendy is also Co-lead of the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (MSPEC) (2024-2027) a consortium of three academic organisations led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). MSPEC brings together academics, policymakers, businesses, civil society and lived experience experts to offer independent, authoritative insight and analysis on contemporary forms of extreme exploitation, offering recommendations for more effective, evidence-based policy.
Previous to this, Wendy was a Postdoctoral Researcher with The Antislavery Knowledge Network (AKN) a major GCRF-funded project that aimed to inform more effective policy interventions in response to UN Sustainable Development Goal 8.7. Working with a network of partners across sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, DRC, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Kenya), the project explored ways to address extreme practices of exploitation – including forms of modern slavery and human trafficking - through support of creative and community-led approaches.
Wendy is currently completing a book-length monograph entitled Exhibiting Haiti: The Art of Postcolonial Politics which explores the role Haiti has played in pioneering the efforts of postcolonial nation-states to negotiate international relations through cultural diplomacy. She was also the recipient of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2016-2020) based at the University of Nottingham where she undertook a project entitled The Spectacle of Universal Human Rights: A Century of Intergovernmental Display at World's Fairs. Through deep-archival research she examined the visions of humanitarianism and development that the UN (and its predecessor, the League of Nations) have shaped and promoted over the last century.