Funded by
Professor R Archer
Professor of Spanish, University of Durham
The Literature of Misogyny and Profeminism in Medieval Spain
Professor Robert Archer intends to use his Senior Research Fellowship to write a monograph on misogynistic and defence-of-women literature from the mid thirteenth to mid sixteenth centuries in Spain. This monograph will draw on material from various traditions of literary misogyny and ‘defence’ that have not previously been considered in a global context: the exemplum tradition, sermonistic prose, narrative, lyric, treatise; and will cover texts from the two main Hispanic literary languages of the period. This will be the final and most major of the publications arising from a large project establishing a database from a corpus of over a hundred, mostly literary, texts ’ largely substantial prose works, but also encompassing texts of varying length in verse ’ which draw on the misogynistic tradition and on the equally important parallel tradition of ’defence literature’. These texts are concerned wholly or partly with arguments against women generically or in their favour.
Dr J Black
Senior Lecturer in Law, London School of Economics
The Nature of Regulation
The award of a Senior Research Fellowship will help Dr Julia Black to ensure significant progress on a major piece of research which seeks to develop a detailed conceptual analysis of contemporary regulation. The analysis will draw on the perspectives and theories of a number of different disciplines and on a wide range of empirical examples, and will take a critical look at the emerging discipline of regulatory studies. The research will examine four central and interlinked issues in contemporary regulation: the design of regulatory techniques; the institutional structures of regulation; responses to and effects of regulation; and the sources and nature of regulatory legitimacy. It will also take a reflexive approach to regulatory studies, and ask what are the parameters of regulation as a concept and as an activity; what role do normative values play in contemporary regulatory studies; what it would mean for regulatory studies to be truly inter-disciplinary, as opposed to multi-disciplinary; and finally what is the nature of the relationship between legal and regulatory studies.
Dr N Britten
Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology, Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’ School of Medicine, King’s College London
The Sociology of Doctor-Patient Communication about Medicines
Since 1990, Dr Nicky Britten has been developing a programme of research about the sociological aspects of prescribing, medicine taking and pharmacy practice, focusing particularly on doctor-patient communication. The award of the Senior Research Fellowship will enable Dr Britten to complete the analysis of a large qualitative data set, and in particular will allow her to develop the sociological aspects of doctor-patient communication. This will contribute to the further integration of sociological theory and empirical investigation using this database of general practice consultations. Dr Britten’s goal is the development of empirically and theoretically robust analyses of doctor-patient communication which contribute to the sociological literature and which also contribute to improvements in clinical practice, disseminated to a sociological audience in the first instance.
Professor O Figes
Professor of History, Birkbeck College
Russian Culture and the Development of the Russian National Identity
The award of the Senior Research Fellowship will enable Professor Orlando Figes to complete a major and pioneering study of the Russian cultural identity since 1700. The ‘search for Russia’ will be its central theme. Professor Figes will explore the many different ways in which the idea and the (self-conscious) national style of ‘Russia’ has been invented and reinvented in literature and art, architecture, music, philosophy and theology, history, ethnography, geography and mythology. The research will also explore how the ideas of Russia developed in these fields defined that nation’s cultural self-identity. This is an important moment for Russia ’ which must redefine itself as a nation state after the collapse of Communism ’ and the cultural traditions which this book will excavate will be an essential source of that identity.
Dr A McDermott
Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham
A Scholarly and Critical Edition of Johnson’s Dictionary
The well-established and successful project to produce a scholarly and critical edition of Johnson’s Dictionary is approaching the end of its second phase and the award of the Senior Research Fellowship to Dr Anne McDermott will enable her to make a final push to see it through to publication. Dr McDermott will work on the examination of manuscript and archive material and on tracking down the more problematic sources for the illustrative quotations in Johnson’s Dictionary. The results of this work will be used to provide full bibliographic information of the sources, both in the edition used by Johnson and in a modern edition.
Dr J Soskice
Lecturer in Divinity, University of Cambridge
Naming God
Dr Janet Soskice intends to use the Senior Research Fellowship to write up her Stanton Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion, 14 public lectures delivered over the last two years at Cambridge. They concern ‘naming God’. The very idea of ‘naming God’ it is said contains within itself the form of its own impossibility. According to the consensus of classical monotheism, to understand the term ‘God’ (not a proper name) is to understand that God cannot be named without making God an object. This fundamental dilemma of religious language is both philosophical and mystical, and has been understood as such over many centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Mr N Wood
Research Fellow, University of Westminster
Science and Civilisation in China: Ceramic Technology
The award of a Senior Research Fellowship to Mr Nigel Wood will enable him to have an uninterrupted spell to complete, integrate and help edit the ceramic technology volume of Science and Civilisation in China for CUP. The book is intended to describe the development of Chinese ceramic technology from the Neolithic period to the present day. It will also attempt to place China’s ceramics within the context of world ceramic history, and examine their influence on the development of ceramics beyond China itself. Mr Wood’s own contributions to the project will mainly address the practical and technological aspects of the subject.