Dr Rafe McGregor is a world-leading expert in the relationship between crime and popular fiction. He has published six books on the subject, beginning with Narrative Justice in 2018. His seventh is Reducing Political Violence: Narrative Accounts of Crime and Harm (Januar7 2026). From February 2021 to July 2026 Rafe has been an investigator on the Croatian Science Foundation’s Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art, which has received over €200,000 in funding.
The aim of the project is to explore the value of narrative representation for the communication of knowledge, the enrichment of ethical life, and the creation of social cohesion. He describes the project in more detail…
Aesthetic education is the thesis that the cultivation of aesthetic or artistic sensibility develops psychological and political harmony and Aesthetic Education Through Narrative Art is an investigation of the impact of narrative representations on social cohesion. In social scientific terms, aesthetic education is a theory of the relationship between contemporary culture and social justice. The six-year project is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (UIP-2020-02-1309) and led by Dr Iris Vidmar Jovanović (University of Rijeka), with myself, Dr Mario Slugan (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Joerg Fingerhut (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), and Dr David Collins (University of Cambridge) as co-investigators.
The interdisciplinary investigation is conducted from three perspectives – philosophical aesthetics, narrative criminology, and cognitive science – and focused on three themes: narrative and knowledge, narrative and ethical life, and narrative and social cohesion. The project has produced more than sixty monographs, articles, chapters, and reviews, a full list of which is available on the project website.
