I am a Reader/Associate Professor of Law at the School of Law, University of Warwick, UK, where I research and teach intellectual properties at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I study legal forms and techniques in their political, cultural and social contexts by drawing on scholarship in social and literary theories, historical epistemology, political economy, and science and technology studies.

I have a crossdisciplinary training and professional background in law, politics, history of sciences, and science and technology studies. Prior to joining Warwick Law School, I was a Reader in Law at Kent Law School. Before Kent, I worked as an Assistant Professor of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, where I researched epistemic relations between scientific and legal classifications.

My research interests are crossdisciplinary and are particularly in intellectual properties, knowledge techniques, transmissions and practices, construction of values and valuation practices, novelty and creativity, and legal and social theory.
Examples of my past work are: an analysis of patent knowledge organisation and the material infrastructure that sustains it; the digital mediation of intangible knowledge; a critique of patent value and valuation; an analysis of financialisation and assetisation of patents; an essay on the meaning of climate justice in the context of representations in climate data in legal adjudicatory setting; theorisation of legal materiality; legal and political assessment of IP obligations during the Covid-19 pandemic; the cultural function of patents in the capitalist economy.

In the context of legal theoretical scholarship, I have studied and advanced a notion of materiality specific to law, drawing upon scholarship from history of science and media theory. Together with my colleague, Dr Sara Kendall, I led the Arts and Humanities Research Council-sponsored Legal Materiality Research Network from 2017-2020.

My policy-oriented work builds upon interdisciplinary theoretical and historical IP scholarship, providing a deeper context towards a more equitable policy outcome. In my recent work, I collaborated with IP law colleagues on the TRIPS waiver, an initiative at the World Trade Organisation to temporarily waive IP obligations on medicines and technologies needed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. The work resulted in a widely-cited research article and an open letter in support of the TRIPS waiver, which was signed by over one-hundred intellectual property scholars worldwide.

I am Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP; 2023-28). In the past, I have also served in the Organizing Committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (ASLCH), from 2018-2023.

I serve on the Editorial Boards of Economy and Society and Journal of Cultural Economy.

I earned my PhD in Law at the European University Institute, Florence, with a thesis that considered the implications of human gene patenting on the legal conception of human personhood. For my undergraduate degree, I read Government and Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and also graduated from there with a Distinction from the Masters of Laws (LLM) programme. I was a visiting research fellow at University of California at Berkeley (2002-3) and LSE (2013).

During my times outside academia, I have been trained in classical music and in financial modeling. Both involve very different sensibilities, but they have proven useful in my research projects.

Here are some of the events that I (co-)organised: