Giddens, Thomas

My work traverses critical, comics, and cultural legal studies, taking a particular interest in epistemology and visuality. I completed my PhD in Law at the University of Exeter in 2012, the same year in which I took up my first academic post as Lecturer in Law at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Situated within traditions of critical legal theory, law and philosophy, and law and literature, my thesis focused on questions of responsibility and epistemology in a work of graphic fiction—Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s critically acclaimed Watchmen. 

Since completing my PhD, I have continued to develop my interests around interdisciplinary and critical legal method, publishing a number of articles and book chapters examining jurisprudential questions through legal readings of visual cultural texts, culminating in the publication of my monograph On Comics and Legal Aesthetics (Routledge 2018). In 2013 I also founded the Graphic Justice Research Alliance, an international interdisciplinary research network for anyone working on the broad intersections of law and justice and comics of all kinds. My current work continues the concern with visuality within the broad remit of the critical legal humanities, seeking to examine the written texts of law as visual and material artefacts, focusing on the historical development of law reporting and law’s typographical practices and visual design as well as broader questions of judgment. 

I am on the editorial board for the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Law and Literature, and The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship - and for the latter I co-edit an on-going special collection on Graphic Justice.

My teaching areas include English Criminal Law, English Law of Obligations, and Jurisprudence/Legal Theory. I am interested in supervising students working on anything within the broad range of critical legal humanities and cultural legal studies, particularly those working on popular and visual culture or questions of method and epistemology.