Ivan Leudar was born in 1949 in Czechoslovakia which he left in 1971 declining to live under Stalinism.  He studied Psychology in London and has also lived in St Andrews, Edinburgh and Manchester.  He taught psychology for 27 years at Manchester University and was also heavily involved in the trade union AUT. He left the University three years early in January 2011 as an emeritus professor of historical psychology to focus on scholarship and to try his hand more intensely at visual arts.  He continues academic work, researching possibilities for analytical historical psychology and developing concepts for psychology which would take people’s engagement with the world seriously.