Nidesh Lawtoo is professor of Modern/Contemporary European Literature and Culture at Leiden University, Netherlands. He previously led the ERC project Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism, and he is the author of several books inaugurating a new theory of mimesis at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and politics, including The Phantom of the Ego (2013), Conrad's Shadow (2016), (New)Fascism (2019), and Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious (2023).