Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. It deals with the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant-gardes, animation, color, and madness. Her books include Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) and Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016), among others.