Dr Nick Brooke wins Students’ Association Teaching Excellence Award

In April 2025, the School of IR’s Dr Nick Brooke was awarded the University of St Andrews Students’ Association Teaching Excellence Award for Outstanding Innovation in Teaching. Dr Brooke received the award for his development of a new Senior Honours module on Political Violence in Popular Culture that engages students with a range of depictions of political violence in cultural materials from early twentieth century novels like The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, to the classic depiction of counterinsurgency in the Battle of Algiers, to more modern materials like 24 and The Act of Killing.

The module encourages students to think about how depictions of violence in popular culture affect and shape popular understandings of key forms of violence, and how this can affect public discourse around world events and state responses.