Louis explores the spatial relationships, urban processes and political forces that shape the forms of everyday life
My work investigates the cultural and historical modalities of financial capitalism with a critical focus on the spatial aesthetics of architecture, music and urbanism.
With a training in urban geography, architectural history, philosophy and literature, I am theoretically engaged with the methodological problems and transdisciplinary opportunities cities generate both as objects of cultural study as well as urban processes in constant flux.
These interests have generated a wide range of research into the urban modalities of architecture, music, cinema and literature. The overall aim of which is to understand how the spatial transformations of social life represent, at the level of everyday life, patterns of change in the material and unconscious infrastructures of urban economic power.
I am the Programme Leader for the Visual Cultures PhD Programme and a member of the curatorial research collective ‘freethought’ and the study ensemble Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective.
Academic qualifications
PhD in Geography, University College London 2016
MSc in Architectural History, University College London 2008
BA in English Literature and Philosophy, University of East Anglia 1996
Teaching and supervision
I am the primary supervisor of the following MPhil-PhD projects :
Dele Adeyemo ‘The Last Dark Continent’ (CHASE-AHRC funded)
Lynnée Denise 'Turntable Epistemology: Sound System Migration and the 1980s Black Queer Sound' (CHASE-AHRC funded)
Nastassia Nasser 'Into the Fault Zone - Excavating the Architectonics of Occupation' (CHASE- AHRC funded)
Xavier Acarin 'The Social Museum of Barcelona - Urban Performativity and the Ecology of Knowledge'
I convene the following modules as well as supervise and advise on PhDs for the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA)
MPhil-PhD Visual Cultures / MRes Visual Cultures
VC71021A: RESEARCH METHODS
MA Contemporary Art Theory
VC71014C/B: SPATIAL BIOPOLITICS
BA History of Art
VC53102A: ANIMATING ARCHITECTURE
VC53110A: URBAN REVOLUTIONS
