The Donald Winch Fund Fellowship
Professor Innes Keighren
SRF25\250006
Citizen of the World: The Global Lives of William Macintosh, 1737–1813
Royal Holloway, University of London
£72,226.00
This project is about the lived experience of global history and one individual’s efforts to shape British imperial policy in the Caribbean, North America, India, and continental Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. Using a unique and unstudied personal archive, seized in Avignon during the French Revolution, the project reveals the central role played by William Macintosh (1737–1813)—as legislator, traveller, best-selling author, spy, and self-proclaimed citizen of the world—in many of the most significant political events of his lifetime. In following Macintosh’s restless global mobility and recurrent self-reinvention, the project reveals his previously unrecognised involvement in debates over subjecthood and sovereignty in Grenada, corruption and mismanagement in British India, and Britain’s counterrevolutionary activities during the French Revolutionary Wars. Macintosh’s remarkable life offers a new panorama of the eighteenth century and reveals novel possibilities for connecting the micro and the macro in the writing of global history.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust
Professor Dominic Abrams
SRF25\250410
The Psychology of Social Change
University of Kent
£56,461.72
Political, social, economic and environmental upheavals are pervasive across the globe, a trend that appears to be accelerating. But what do people make of this complex socio-political environment? Why and when do they act to influence it? I have gathered large volumes of data on this question across a 10-year period, from a range of groups and variety of social change issues. I have developed a new theory (the IDEAS model) that focuses on people's social identification with social movements, their personal circumstances and capacities, and pursuit of social change. The fellowship would consolidate and develop the theory, conducting empirical tests of its hypotheses, and connecting it with larger societal processes through which people engage with social change. This deeper and wider analysis will result in at least four substantial papers, establishing a research agenda that embraces questions of social cohesion, social inclusion and the role of trust and leadership.
Professor Shaheen Ali
SRF25\250191
Adjectival Constitutionalism and the Plural Shari'a: Exploring the 'Islamic' in constitutions of the Muslim World.
University of Warwick
£59,659.78
This ambitious project seeks to destabilize existing discourse on ‘Islamic’ constitutionalism and the place of Shari’a in constitutions of Muslim majority countries. Demonstrating the plurality of ‘Islamic’ constitutions by locating this descriptor within varied socio-cultural, historical and political contexts of the Muslim world, it questions its uncritical application. Informed by Frederic Schaffer’s elucidation of social science concepts, historical records, constitutional provisions and case law from countries representative of the various schools of juristic thought in Islam - including Pakistan (Hanafi), Kuwait (Maliki), Malaysia (Shafa’I) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Hanbali) – will be explored in the pursuit of this ambition. A path-breaking monograph will be the main product with important implications for governance, democracy and the rule of law in the Muslim world. Present day socio-political developments in the Muslim world and their continued struggles for constitutional governments demonstrates the timeliness of this project.
Professor Mukulika Banerjee
SRF25\250252
The Politics of Tax
London School of Economics and Political Science
£62,591.00
Democracy and taxation are inextricably linked; citizens pay tax and governments are accountable for expenditure, tying them in a social contract. Research shows that progressive taxation, accountability and transparency generate better civic and democratic culture. India, the world’s largest democracy and the fourth largest economy, however, has a regressive tax regime where an indirect consumption tax generates as much revenue as direct income tax, placing a greater tax burden on poorer citizens. But despite high voter participation, there is curious little discussion of the lack of transparency and accountability of the government and the tax regime. Through ethnographic research, this project proposes to investigate popular perceptions about tax and its relationship to politics and its implications for democracy and civic culture. Drawing on growing research on the anthropology of taxation - tax morale and tax subjectivity, understandings of the social contract and non-tax ‘practices of giving’ - will be studied.
Professor Sarah Hamilton
SRF25\250297
Beyond transformation: Europe in the tenth century
University of Exeter
£34,946.60
My project is to write a new religious and cultural history of a period when what constituted Europe was in flux: the years between 900 and 1000 CE. It will revise the current consensus which focuses on developments in the former Carolingian kingdoms (Germany, France, northern Italy) and treats them as normative for the whole European experience, and as marking either the end of the (long) post-Roman era or the beginning of the classical Middle Ages. Broadening out the focus to compare cultural and religious developments across a wider range of groups and places beyond the former Carolingian empire’s boundaries, each with their own histories and chronologies, will allow me to reconsider these accepted views. By investigating the different religious and cultural networks which stretched far beyond the former Carolingian empire, it should also enable a new understanding of what constituted Europe in this period.
Dr Arthur John Hughes
SRF25\250089
A Digital Linguistic Atlas of pan-Gaelic dialects: Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man
University of Ulster
£57,464.68
This pioneering project will fill a major gap in the linguistic heritage of the British Isles by providing a long-overdue structured digital archive of pan-Gaelic dialects in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. It is doubtful if such an extensive survey can ever be repeated due to the sharp contraction in traditional Gaelic-speaking hinterlands of these islands. A Digital Linguistic Atlas of pan-Gaelic: Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man (DLAPGD) consists of 421 structured sentences presenting a comparative overview of the Gaelic verb, regular and irregular, in the key tenses and moods. Archive provides authentic oral and transcribed record of 100 Gaelic speakers: 60 from Ireland, 40 from Scotland plus two reconstructed responses for Manx. In addition to a sound archive in its own right, DLAPGD will also provide a tool for future voice regeneration for local manuscripts, folklore collections and regional literature.
Professor Guido Rebecchini
SRF25\250040
Displacement, Transformation, Destruction: Towards a Material Culture of the Sack of Rome of 1527
Courtauld Institute of Art
£69,229.00
This project takes an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Sack of Rome in 1527 by examining it through a material lens. Drawing from material culture, art history, historical anthropology, and political and cultural history, the project focuses on practices of desecration, defacement, destruction, displacement, and re-utilisation of objects and their constitutive materials. Through an analysis of archival, literary, and material evidence, this study will transform our understanding of the Sack by demonstrating how violence against objects and artworks subverted the cultural, artistic, religious, and political life of Rome, and led to a radical transformation of the city’s identity within a profoundly reshaped European political geography. Conceived alongside an important exhibition, this project will disseminate to diverse audiences a new approach to the Sack and shed new light on practices that have shaped (and sadly continue to shape) human behaviour at times of conflict, war, and loss.
Dr William Rossiter
SRF25\250116
The Lives of Pietro Aretino (1492-1556): The Art of Scandal in the Italian Renaissance
University of East Anglia
£53,668.00
Pornographer, blasphemer, deviant. These were some of the charges levelled against the sixteenth-century author, celebrity, and publicist Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), one of the most notorious and influential figures of the Italian Renaissance, yet little known today outside of specialist circles. This biography illustrates Aretino’s significant contributions to the development of Italian literature and art criticism, and his place within the history of political spin, self-publicity, and public diplomacy. As a self-made and repeatedly re-made man, the biography not only includes the facts of Aretino’s extraordinarily eventful life, but also the fictions – the revisionist histories and untruths that Aretino and his contemporaries disseminated – to produce a biography that speaks to our own information crisis and measures it against early modern weaponisation of print technology. By affording lies historical coordinates, the lives of Aretino allow a different story of the Renaissance to be told, a story of disinformation and self-promotion.
Dr Martin Smith
SRF25\250160
The End of prehistory: Bringing the people of Iron Age southern Britain into focus.
Bournemouth University
£29,438.75
The modern county of Dorset holds the richest and best preserved record of life in Britain surrounding the ‘end of prehistory’, brought by the Claudian invasion in AD 43. Successive excavations conducted by the Durotriges project have uncovered an extensive archive of human burials spanning multiple generations and linked by unique social relations. In order for this important project to reach its potential the excavated human remains require detailed study. The application of modern standards and methods will obtain detailed osteobiographical life histories, in addition to 3D rendered visualizations of a complex and changing diachronic burial record. Full analysis of both these and additional burial groups in the region will unlock the possibilities for comprehensive archaeological, genetic and anthropological synthesis of the wider dataset, to provide the most clear and nuanced view of this ‘society in flux’ that has yet been attained.
Dr Claire Whitehead
SRF25\250147
Russia's First Female Crime Writers, 1860-1917
University of St Andrews
£59,273.30
The project recovers and examines the work of the first women to write crime fiction in Russia. Female authors have been instrumental in developing crime fiction globally, but little is known about their role in popularising the genre in late imperial Russia (1860-1917). Crime fiction is always an effective barometer of a society's pressures and preoccupations. In the era of the so-called ‘Great Reforms’, when Russia attempted to modernise itself but nevertheless remained strictly patriarchal, female-authored crime fiction represents a privileged source of critical reflection. The project studies five forgotten female writers, including Kapitolina Nazar’eva (1847-1900) and Aleksandra Sokolova (1833-1914), and considers their work in terms of social history and literary practice. It redresses the marginalisation of women writers and of ‘genre’ fiction in canonical studies of Russophone literary development. Outputs will include a monograph, podcast episodes, academic and non-specialist presentations and a workshop on early global female crime writers.
Dr Keira Williams
SRF25\250334
Mighty Man and the Southern Beats
Queen's University Belfast
£62,043.00
Charlie’s Place was a Black nightclub in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that hosted famous African American performers of the mid-twentieth century. It also featured locally famous interracial dance couples who perfected moves to the latest music. Inside the club, white supremacist patriarchal rules did not apply, and a subculture centered on music, dance, and defiance of Cold War racial, gendered, and sexual conformity thrived in the late 1940s. It was a tightly-knit Beat community in the deep South, with “Beat” referring to beach-bum bohemians and to the thumping rhythm of the new rhythm and blues. To those in power, this community represented multiple threats to traditional hierarchies—so much so that the Ku Klux Klan attacked in August of 1950. Mighty Man and the Southern Beats tells the story of the development of this rebellious subculture on the postwar Carolina coast, using Charlie’s Place as a case study.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.