Crofton Black
Writer
Crofton Black is a researcher and writer. He has worked extensively on corporate outsourcing by militaries and intelligence agencies and is a leading expert on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation programme. He was previously an investigator at the NGO Reprieve and since 2014 has worked at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.
He studied English and Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and has a PhD in the history of philosophy from the Warburg Institute, London. He was formerly a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His doctoral thesis, "Pico's Heptaplus and Biblical Hermeneutics", examined the Genesis narrative and models of allegory and cognition in the Middle Ages, through the work of Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. His current work explores the use of open source data to find traces of hidden operations by governments and the private sector. His interests include censorship and the construction of knowledge and evidence, covert logistics networks, propaganda and historical interpretations of and responses to terrorism and witchcraft.
By following the seemingly mundane bureaucratic paper trail of the War on Terror, Photographer Edmund Clark and investigator Crofton Black uncover secrets the government would rather keep hidden.