About
Leighton Evans is Professor of Media Theory at Swansea University, where he co-leads the Media and Communication subject area. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Cultures at the University of Brighton and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ERC-funded Programmable City project at Maynooth University, Ireland. He received his PhD from Swansea University in 2013.
In recognition of his research and teaching excellence, Professor Evans was awarded the Dillwyn Medal for Social Sciences, Business and Education by the Learned Society of Wales in 2023, and a Swansea University SALT Excellence in Teaching Award, as nominated by his students.
His research is grounded in the philosophy of technology and critical media theory, with publications spanning social media, location-based social networking, smart cities, video games, virtual reality, the metaverse, and phenomenology. His core interests lie in how digital technologies mediate everyday experience, particularly through the transformation of natural phenomena into data, and the consequent normalisation of the digital. Drawing on continental philosophy—including the work of Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk, and Walter Benjamin—his work interrogates the co-presence of digital technologies in contemporary life.
Professor Evans was co-investigator on the Augmented City project with colleagues at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, funded by the National Science Institute of Poland (£120,000). He also led the M(AR)GAM project, an augmented reality project supported by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and developed in partnership with Neath Port Talbot Council and immersive studio Zubr. The project recreated the Victorian interiors of Margam Castle in bilingual, educational AR experiences for use on-site and beyond.
Professor Evans welcomes PhD applications in digital media, social media, virtual and augmented realities, media theory, and computational culture.