Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School
Connal is Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School, a Deputy Director of the University of Kent’s Centre for Critical Thought, and Co-Director of the annual Kent Summer School in Critical Theory (Paris). Connal’s interdisciplinary humanities research combines law and jurisprudence with visual culture and political theory. He has qualifications in linguistics and law, and practiced law with the Australian Government Solicitor in Melbourne, mainly in the area of property law, which he teaches at Kent Law School along with Critical Legal Theory and, from 2018, “Art, Law, Politics”. His doctorate was on the relation between law, representation and visuality in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and he has authored numerous articles on themes bridging law, art and visual culture: on cinema and the representation of the animal, masks and personhood, public art and public law, the spectacle of protest, and praxes of self-representation in art. He is also the translator of several texts in Italian political thought, including Roberto Esposito’s monograph Categories of the Impolitical (Fordham University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a project on the “Authority of the Artist”. The project asks whether artists who act politically sometimes to so with their own sui generis kind of authority—and if so, whether there is something historically specific about that kind of authority today; from the point of view of neoliberalism, the political economy of art and labour, and the political theology of government and “action”. Also a sometime musician, he has particular interests in performance, sound art, and conceptual art.
