Brad Evans

During 2016–2017, Evans led a series of conversation on violence for the opinions section of the New York Times engaging in conversation with a number of renowned thinkers including Simon Critchley, Bracha Ettinger, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Bernstein and Simona Forti. Evans has continued this series in the Los Angeles Review of Books, with conversations featuring Oliver Stone, Russell Brand, John Akomfrah, Elaine Scarry, Malcolm London and Marina Abramovic.

Having previously held positions at the University of Leeds and the University of Bristol, Evans has also been a visiting fellow at the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, New York (2013–14) and distinguished society fellow at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (2017).

Evans grew up in the Rhondda mining valley communities of South Wales. His father became seriously ill before Evans's birth and the family was dependent on state welfare, and lived for a number of years on the notorious Penrhys social housing estate, a place of violent crime, drug abuse, theft, arson and widespread social depravation. They later moved to the village of Ton-Pentre where he lived until the age of eighteen. Evans said later that his youth had a formative impact on his understanding of structural and everyday violence, along with the importance of a critical education. Whilst inspired as a child by an illustrated copy his parents bought of Hans Christian Anderson fables, Evans suggested that his interest in reading only developed when we was around sixteen years old. This changed after reading Stephen King's Salems Lot: "Growing up in the isolating former mining valleys of South Wales, it was a book that resonated on so many levels. Indeed, having already been scared witless by the movie that was the first horror film I watched – especially the scene of the floating child at the window, it was also the book, which taught me that words on pages are simply a point of entry into the more enriching and sometimes more terrifying life of the mind".

Having attended Treorchy Comprehensive School, Evans initially pursued a career in fashion and design before going on to study at the University of Leeds, where he subsequently completed two master's degree programs in the fields of development economics and international relations. His PhD, titled "War for the Politics of Life", dealt with forms of resistance to liberal regimes of power, during which he spent visiting the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico. This experience led him to theorise about the ethics of (non)violence, arguing that violence itself is not the result of "differences" but rather it is the result of forced homogenisation. Such understanding on the nature of the human condition has led him to argue that Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is the best book of political theory ever written: "Lewis Carroll is such a captivating thinker, who manages to break down the false and unhelpful binaries that set apart poetic vs. technical modes of thinking. Not only is Wonderland such a timeless book, I mean is there a better character to capture the politics of Trump than the Queen of Hearts – she utters therefore its true – but the way the book deals with questions of power, arbitrary violence and the transformation in subjectivities is truly exceptional. Moreover, Carroll allows us to rethink the very terms of resistance and revolution, for what are Alice’s greatest weapons, after-all, if not the power of her imagination? If we lack resistance to the present, it’s precisely because we don’t have an alternative vision of the world".

In 2011, Evans founded the Histories of Violence project that has grown to have a global user base spanning 148 different countries. His co-directed movie "Ten Years of Terror" (with Simon Critchley) screened in the Solomon K. Guggenheim, New York during September 2011.[1]