International Fellowships 2025 awards
Ms Rachele Svetlana Bassan
IF25\100903
UK Sponsor: Professor Paulina Kewes
‘Theatre without Borders: Drama in Transnational Caroline Culture’
University of Oxford
£253,099.47
This study examines the impact of continental culture —particularly from France, Italy, and Spain, key forces in early modern Europe — on Caroline theatre (1625-1649), reframing its role as a locus of cultural interaction amid religious conflict (e.g., the Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648), European political shifts, and an economic climate leading to the first trade wars of the 1650s. Through a multidisciplinary approach that integrates textual analysis, archival research, inter-arts and performance studies, this research examines how Caroline theatre absorbed and adapted international cultural discourse to shape its identity.
This study focuses on the Caroline court and English Jesuit Colleges on the Continent (St Omer, Douai, Rome) as centres of cultural exchange, encompassing theatre, art, poetry, and music. The dramatic production of the court of Charles I and his French consort Henrietta Maria (principally masques and plays) was shaped by continental spectacle and literature, and by royal and aristocratic patronage. Meanwhile, Jesuit Colleges appeared oriented towards continental Europe and the wider world. Jesuits, active global missionaries and educators, had developed effective strategies to merge continental influences with local traditions to promote evangelisation and cultural hybridity. The English colleges on the Continent were thus centres of globalised cultural exchange, producing plays for a cosmopolitan milieu. These colleges also educated lay recusants from England and Wales, and whether overtly or obliquely, Jesuits and their works engaged with Caroline England’s cultural affairs, including cultural diplomacy.
Drawing on studies of the international influences on Caroline court drama and Jesuit theatre, this project challenges insular views of seventeenth-century English culture. It highlights the shared transnational quality of the Court and Colleges’ dramatic productions, extending beyond theatre into a broader artistic and intellectual milieu that shaped the aesthetic and ideological landscapes of these institutions. The research also aims to show how these productions could occasionally intertwine, and how this transnational quality could influence public drama as well. Understudied works in English and Neo-Latin are prioritised as case studies for analysis and compared with selected canonical texts. Additionally, this study examines performance documents — including promptbooks and archival records — detailing the production and reception of these plays. Furthermore, these records are compared with archival materials from continental repositories, for instance in Italy and Belgium, to uncover transnational influences in theatrical practice. Examining these productions in their transnational contexts suggests that theatre likely served as a medium for engaging with broader ideological, religious, and artistic discussions across Europe.
Dr Mathieu Beaudouin
IF25\100701
UK Sponsor: Dr Marieke Meelen
‘Unveiling Tangut Syntax: At the Crossroads of Comparative Linguistics and Computer-assisted Annotation’
University of Cambridge
£250,400.59
Recent discovery and documentation of endangered modern relatives of Tangut within the Horpa language family have advanced our understanding of Tangut, the extinct language of the Western Xia Empire (1038–1227). However, Tangut syntax remains undescribed—a notable gap for both philologists and linguists. In this project, I address the difficulties resulting from the absence of native Tangut speakers and the challenge of eliciting negative data by integrating computational and comparative approaches. By focusing on four key dimensions of Tangut syntax (finite and non-finite clauses, complementation, relativisation, and reported speech), I aim to develop an automatically annotated corpus, enabling reproducible analyses and making a lasting contribution to Sino-Tibetan linguistics, Tangut studies, and the documentation of endangered Horpa languages.
Ms Hanny Ben-Israel
IF25\101106
UK Sponsor: Professor Bridget Anderson
‘Historicizing Labour Unfreedom: Palestinian Workers in Israel (1967–1987)’
University of Bristol
£258,458.00
Following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967, Palestinian workers from these territories were incorporated into the Israeli economy. By the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of Palestinians were employed in Israel, confined to the most precarious and low-wage sectors of an increasingly stratified labour market. While existing scholarship has examined the political economy of this labour incorporation, it has yet to be analysed through the lens of labour unfreedom or situated within broader global histories of colonial labour governance.
This project addresses both of these gaps by offering a socio-legal history of Palestinian labour unfreedom under occupation. It focuses on a formative two-decade period, from the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war to the First Intifada (June 1967 – December 1987). This period remains relatively understudied in scholarship on the occupation, which has largely focused on the turbulent post-Oslo era. Much of the literature has examined the shift that followed the First Intifada, when Israel transitioned from a policy of economic incorporation to one of separation, revoking Palestinians' relative freedom of mobility. This shift led to the intensification of movement restrictions, including frequent closures and a rigid permit regime. By contrast, this study examines the earlier period, exploring how specific modes of labour governance functioned as mechanisms of control and subordination, even under conditions of relative mobility.
The research has two key aims:
1) To analyse the legal and bureaucratic frameworks and mechanisms – civil, military, formal, and quasi-formal – devised to govern Palestinian employment in Israel between 1967-1987 and to examine their relationship to labour unfreedom.
2) To contextualise these frameworks within a broader historical genealogy of labour unfreedom, primarily British colonial labour governance in Mandate Palestine.
Drawing on cross-disciplinary research in socio-legal studies, history, postcolonial studies, and political economy – and grounded in extensive original archival research – this study closely examines the mechanisms through which Israel governed Palestinian workers during the first two decades of the occupation. It positions labour and its governance as central instruments of subjugation within the broader architecture of occupation. The research further situates these mechanisms within broader historical genealogies of labour unfreedom. By applying the lens of labour unfreedom, this project offers a new socio-legal and historical interpretation of Palestinian employment in Israel under occupation, proposing to understand the case of Palestinian workers as both historically specific and emblematic of enduring colonial legacies of labour unfreedom.
Dr Francesca Colangeli
IF25\100224
UK Sponsor: Professor Corisande Fenwick
‘Tracing Medieval Glass Economies: Southern Italy's Role in the 8th to 13th-Century Mediterranean Networks’
University College London
£262,373.71
The late 1st millennium CE marks a major transformation in the Mediterranean glass economy with distinctive glassmaking technologies emerging in Christian Europe (recycling natron glass) and the Islamic Mediterranean (plant ash glass) however the interaction between these technologies remains disputed. Southern Italy, where Christian and Islamic regimes coexisted and intersected, sits at the crossroads of these technologies, offering the ideal locale to explore when, how and why glassmaking technologies evolved.
This project aims to understand medieval southern Italy's glass economies (8th-13th century), using new evidence from eastern Sicily, Campania, and Lazio. By employing high-resolution chemical analyses (LA-ICP-MS), I will identify markers of local production and trace the sources and technological practices behind glassmaking in these regions. Through the integration of typological, chemical, and spatial data, I will examine glass consumption patterns, demand, and manufacturing practices across various political regimes.
The results will provide the first comprehensive framework for understanding the interface between different glassmaking worlds in medieval Italy, offering new perspectives on trade and technology transfer between Byzantine, Lombard and Islamic regions, as well as their connections with broader Mediterranean and European economies.
Dr Anna Floris
IF25\100635
UK Sponsor: Professor John Geoffrey Henry Hudson
‘ISLES: Ius commune Scholarly Legacy Explored in Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearics’
University of St Andrews
£227,776.00
As legal doctrines crossed medieval Mediterranean waters, how deeply did they anchor in the courtrooms of island territories? To answer this question, the ISLES (Ius commune Scholarly Legacy Explored in Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearics) project investigates a fundamental yet understudied aspect of European legal history: the relationship between legal scholarship and judicial practice. Focusing on three Mediterranean island territories under the Crown of Aragon during the 15th and 16th centuries, this research addresses how theoretical legal knowledge developed in elite academic centres translated into practical application in courts across jurisdictional levels.
The strategic selection of Sardinia, Sicily, and the Balearic Islands provides bounded "laboratories" with consistent institutional frameworks yet distinct local legal traditions, offering ideal conditions for examining how legal pluralism operated in practice. Through vertical analysis within each territory's judicial hierarchy and horizontal comparison across territories, ISLES illuminates the mechanisms by which specialised knowledge moves from scholarly production to institutional implementation.
The ISLES project combines traditional archival research with digital humanities techniques to produce the first systematic empirical study of ius commune's influence on judicial practice across multiple Mediterranean jurisdictions. The findings will contribute significantly to theoretical discussions about centre-periphery dynamics in legal development and the historical role of scholarly elites in shaping institutional practices — themes that remain relevant for understanding knowledge transfer processes in contemporary contexts.
Mr Suryansu Guha
IF25\100232
UK Sponsor: Dr Kay Dickinson
‘The Fall of the ‘House of Prasad’: The Making of a Service Economy and the Unmaking of Indian Film Technology’
University of Glasgow
£223,711.00
My project constructs an institutional history of India’s largest film processing and post-production facility—Prasad Film Laboratory—within the broader and largely unexplored history of sound and video post-production in India. By documenting the analogue and digital film processing innovations undertaken at Prasad Labs between 1970 and 2000, I demonstrate how the growth of the global service economy compelled the lab to transition from being pioneers in Indian film technology to a provider of ‘low-end’ Hollywood film restoration services. At the same time, I argue that the post-industrial reorganisation of media labour does not erode indigenous technological innovation; rather, they subsume and reconfigure it within global supply chains, reinforcing racialised hierarchies of cultural and technical labour.
My research intervenes in the paternalistic attitudes that inform the sociological theory of the international division of cultural labour that predicts ‘design’ and ‘conception’ work to take place in the Global North, while relegating execution and assembly to the Global South. Building on the decolonial turn in design history research, my work pushes back against what design historians now identify as “the dominant, lopsided representation of the history of design as occurring primarily in Western Europe and the United States” (Adamson 2011, p. 2). My history of Prasad Labs challenges dominant narratives of Asian laboratories as compliant adopters of designs developed elsewhere. Furthermore, I demonstrate how simplified profiles of work like ‘design’ and ‘dust-busting’ allow transnational capital to maintain hegemony over its intellectual property while extracting value from peripheral labour markets marginalising their contributions.
I will construct the history of Prasad lab’s design and innovation efforts through interviews with former engineers and technicians, extensive analysis of documents, stills and other ephemera in the lab’s archival holdings. I will undertake rigorous participant observation of the lab’s restoration operations to account for the global disparities in media work.
The outcomes of my research are both scholarly and practical. Firstly, it will contribute to a more inclusive historiography of cinema and technology, advocating for a transnationally attuned understanding of filmmaking as a racialised process. Secondly, it aims to improve the material conditions of both British and global media workers by addressing issues of fair wages, job security, and worker recognition through collaborations with the advocacy networks that influence national policy. Ultimately, my research will culminate in a book and a video essay, ensuring its accessibility to both academic and advocacy communities, thereby bridging historical inquiry with contemporary labour activism.
Dr Adeline Heck
IF25\100883
UK Sponsor: Dr David Elwyn Evans
‘Literary Authors as Opera Librettists in Nineteenth-Century France’
University of St Andrews
£236,569.16
In nineteenth-century France, opera libretti formed the basis for a lucrative industry for which professional librettists, often working in teams, contributed the bulk of the texts set to music. Libretti could be adaptations of literary works, well-known tales, or original stories, but what they had in common was that they were usually formulaic. As such, they have long been seen as utilitarian objects hardly worthy of serious study either by musicologists or literary scholars. And yet, despite the genre’s reputation for poor artistry, successful and aspiring literary authors alike consistently tried their hand at writing libretti throughout the period. Only in France did published authors write for the opera in such high numbers. Celebrated novelists like Victor Hugo, or Jules Verne, as well as famous poets like Paul Verlaine and Gérard de Nerval all wrote libretti that have since been neglected. With this research project I will propose innovative new frameworks for looking at these marginalised texts afresh, making a significant contribution both to the study of those literary authors and to the vibrant interdisciplinary field of opera studies.
In the opera world, literary authors from other genres were amateurs working in an area in which they did not necessarily have broad experience. They wrote libretti either for extra income, or because they hoped to make a name for themselves with more accessible works. I will interrogate how opera libretti allow us better to understand two conflicts that defined artistic production during the nineteenth century, a time of rapid industrialization and increased bourgeois influence in matters of taste: aesthetic value vs. public appeal, and artistic vs. popular success. One of my hypotheses is that these writers left a mark on the genre: through their intervention, libretti became increasingly daring on a formal level — adopting free verse, or prose in a serious opera — and more concerned with realism. By investigating libretti written by literary authors, I ask: what are the generic and stylistic differences between libretti written by these literary authors and those written by professional librettists? Does the nature of collaboration between composers and writers change with a literary professional at the helm, and in which ways does it impact vocal, musical and performance issues? This project not only sheds new light on the libretto as an intermedial genre at the intersection of literature and music, but also on the multiple tensions at play in putting on musical stage productions.
Dr Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi
IF25\100971
UK Sponsor: Professor Maziyar Ghiabi
‘Building for Holistic Healthcare: A Global Health History from Within, 1860s-1970s’
University of Exeter
£238,972.86
Nurturing the body, mind, and soul through the built environment is considered with great attention in the context of efforts to promote holistic healthcare design. But little is said about different meanings of the categories of body, mind, and soul across time and place. The literature that has investigated historical examples of hospitals with respect to holistic design has also disregarded the potentials of these diverse meanings. This project is the first major study to address this lacuna to refine some of our basic assumptions about built-environment determinants of health and understand the insights this offers to holistic healthcare design.
The research and analysis encompass two main parts: the first focuses on Britain's leading role in the 19th- and 20th- century transformation of ideas concerning hospital design; and the second turns to the uneven extension and application of these hospital design ideas beyond the British world. Five hospitals in Britain and Britain’s colonial/postcolonial worlds between the 1860s and the 1970s are taken as paradigmatic case studies: the Royal Herbert Hospital (Woolwich 1866), the Princess Margaret Hospital (Swindon 1959-1966), the Iranian Hospital (Dubai 1970s), the Aga Khan Hospital (Nairobi 1950s), and the Aga Khan Hospital (Karachi 1970s). I examine ideas and practices underlying their design and planning to address 1) How were categories of body, mind, and soul defined and redefined in hospital design history? 2) What insights these diverse meanings can offer into the deeply historical and situated understandings of the interaction between people and their surroundings? In addressing these two questions, I seek to 1) problematise narratives around holistic healthcare in hospital design research; 2) theorise built-environment determinants of health with diverse meanings of body, mind, and soul; and 3) formulate an interdisciplinary and counter-hegemonic historical approach to the hospital of the future. The analysis is based on multi-sited archival research in the UK, Pakistan, the UAE, and Kenya, supplemented with digital online sources, bringing into dialogue with one another three major strands in the historiography: contemplating histories of body, mind, and soul, exploring the relationship between architecture and emotions, and writing counter-hegemonic global health histories.
The significance of the project lies in its potential to offer a deeper understanding of built-environment determinants of health in accordance with the British Academy 2023-2027 Strategic Plan. Besides a monograph and two articles, a co-authored collaborative article with my sponsor is planned to maximise the impact of the project in this regard.
Dr Rami Jreige
IF25\100347
UK Sponsor: Dr Karim Pierre Yves Thebault
‘Rigour in Physics’
University of Bristol
£252,103.77
The Rigour in Physics (RiP) explores the complex notion of rigour as a means to understand the tension between mathematics and physics. Traditionally, it is assumed that mathematics serves as a tool for physics, where physics borrows mathematical concepts. However, recent discussions suggest that physics also contributes to mathematical advancements, a perspective explored in my PhD thesis.
A significant point of contention between mathematicians and physicists is the perceived lack of rigour in the mathematical proofs presented in physics. Critics argue that results in physics are often heuristic rather than rigorously proven, leading to the view that physicists' proofs do not meet the stringent standards of mathematical rigour and should be regarded as theoretical rather than definitive.
Despite this criticism, the notion of rigour is not uniformly defined within mathematics. Edward Witten's 1989 proof of the invariants of Jones knots exemplifies the tension surrounding rigour. Witten’s proof has been critiqued, notably by Jaffe and Quinn, as not being mathematics since it is rooted in Quantum Field Theory, raising questions about the evolving nature of rigour and its applicability across disciplines.
Physics traditionally relies on experimental validation rather than mathematical rigour. While physicists may not adhere to the same rigorous standards as mathematicians, the current landscape complicates this distinction. Theoretical and mathematical physics continue to advance without experimental verification, prompting a re-evaluation of the necessity for rigour in physics. The project will argue that while rigour may not be as stringent as in mathematics, it is still essential for ensuring the reliability of physical theories.
The primary aim is to investigate whether a notion of rigour exists in physics that parallels that in mathematics and to determine the extent to which such a notion is necessary. The project will challenge the belief that rigour is absolute and explore the possibility of degrees of rigour in physics, given its reliance on experimental validation.
To achieve these objectives, the methodology involves examining mathematical examples where physical concepts contribute to proofs, focusing on Witten's proof as a central case study. The project will also explore the utility of rigour in both mathematics and physics, questioning whether rigour is necessary in mathematics due to its lack of external verification and how this might inform the understanding of the concept in physics. Ultimately, RiP seeks to bridge the gap between the philosophies of mathematics and physics, addressing the role and function of rigour in both fields.
Dr Bonaventure Munganga
IF25\100977
UK Sponsor: Professor Sophie Fuggle
‘Climate, Culture and Meaning: Rethinking Time, Place and Knowledge in Congo Rainforest Fiction’
University of Liverpool
£255,110.06
This interdisciplinary project is the first to study francophone fiction about the Congo Tropical Rainforest alongside multilingual archived stories and oral histories from the region to gain a better understanding of Indigenous environmental knowledges. It will combine critical theory with the literary studies’ method of close reading, discourse analysis and archival research to unpack how this corpus creates ecologies which blend with local ways of being and knowing. This project will demonstrate how fiction about the Congo Rainforest suggests a reconceptualisation of time as a repeating cycle, in which place and all living beings are interconnected. It will also highlight the crucial role of local environmental knowledges and their oral transmission in understanding these concepts of time and place. Revealing the environmental preoccupations of these texts helps demonstrate their ability to encourage readers to reflect on connections between humans and non-humans (such as animals and plants). This project, therefore, highlights literature’s potential to shape attitudes toward other species and to promote Indigenous worldviews that see humans as part of larger, interconnected ecosystem, essential challenges for climate justice and for sustaining our planet and all its life forms.
Ms Laura Popa
IF25\101017
UK Sponsor: Professor David James Maxwell
‘A Global History of the Bible Woman, 1857-1918’
University of Cambridge
£245,867.61
This research project explores the history and agency of Bible Woman as a native missionary figure within World Christianity. Bible Women were native female evangelists employed to spread Christian teachings, distribute Bibles, and educate local women in literacy and scripture. Initially emerging in London through Ellen Henrietta Ranyard's London Bible and Domestic Female Mission in 1857, the role rapidly expanded across Europe and the Global South through missionary networks, particularly those associated with the British and Foreign Bible Society. It centres on a series of case studies: the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission, 1857-1916, the American Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, 1869-1914, and the Evangelisation Committee of the Waldensian Church in Italy, 1860-1915.
The study has three main objectives. First, it investigates the partnership between the London Bible and Domestic Female Mission and the Bible Society, focusing on the Society's strategies for Bible distribution and the Bible Women’s motivations for engaging in this mission. The Bible Society subsidised the work of Bible Women, facilitating their expansion beyond London into European cities and colonial territories.
Second, the project examines the complex relationships between foreign Protestant missionary women and native Bible Women in colonial contexts. While the historiography of missions has addressed the history of Bible Women, particularly as key agents in conversion and as representatives of bourgeois respectability and class formation across the Global South, this project instead explores their active agency as ‘middle figures’ in cross-cultural encounters. It asks if and to what extent one could consider these interactions as processes of cultural negotiation, in which native women reclaimed agency according to local needs.
The third objective contextualises the role of Protestant women philanthropists in supporting Bible Women, particularly through female-led missionary societies and auxiliary organisations that provided financial resources and logistical support. The Bible Society relied on these women-run organisations, which demonstrates the crucial yet underexplored role of gendered philanthropy in sustaining missionary efforts.
By integrating gender, class, and transnational perspectives, this project historicises the agency of native women in World Christianity. Drawing on archival materials from the Bible Society Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, Waldensian Archives, and the Drew University Library, this research aims to advance our understanding of how the Bible Woman figure evolved globally and to what extent can be an analytical tool to define what a Bible Woman was in in different historical contexts, such as the British Empire, Italian nation-state, and colonialism.
Dr Junbin Tan
IF25\100652
UK Sponsor: Professor Henrietta Katherine Harrison
‘Political Afterlives: Kinmen’s War Dead and the Rethinking of Battlefield History and Contemporary Taiwan Strait Relations’
University of Oxford
£250,276.31
This research is about Kinmen, a Taiwanese island territory merely two miles from China and 100 miles from Taiwan Island. I focus on the Battle of Guningtou, fought on Kinmen in 1949 as part of the Chinese Civil War. This event separated Kinmen from China’s Fujian province and made Kinmen the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan)’s battlefront against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 to the 1990s. Kinmen’s demilitarization and subsequent economic collapse in the 1990s forced its local government to forge ties with Fujian. This led to travel and commerce between Kinmen and Fujian since 2001, and transformed Kinmen from Taiwan’s battlefront to a border-crossing with China. These interactions place Kinmen in a difficult position amid China’s attempts to lay claims on Taiwan, many Taiwanese’s advocacy for international recognition of Taiwan’s statehood, and increasing tensions at the Taiwan Strait.
My research centres on people’s changing relations with and interpretations of the Guningtou Battle’s war dead—human remains and ghosts, divided along political lines—, through which I examine their re-perception of the Guningtou Battle, the Chinese Civil War, and current Taiwan Strait relations. The Guningtou Battle was a key historical moment when the territorial and ideological divides between China and Taiwan were drawn. Fixed identities were ascribed to both living and dead soldiers despite the forced conscription of some men and soldiers’ shifting allegiances during the war. My research, however, examines people’s changing relations with the war dead as privileged occasions to understand how received historical ideas are rethought and political divides unsettled. My attention to the rethinking of established histories circumvents today’s political climate where China’s claims-making and Taiwan’s assertions of sovereignty both demand certainty. I aim to understand: 1) how people’s emotionally poignant interactions with the war dead become politically important, 2) how their interactions prompt the re-thinking of histories and articulation of post-conflict futures, and 3) how these practices develop within but also hold the capacity to intervene in political economic processes at the Taiwan Strait.
This project contributes to research on the politics of war deaths, social memory and reflections on history, and the making of post-conflict futures. It also advances our understanding of Taiwan and China, and post-Cold War societies. More broadly, I offer a perspective on how humanities and social science scholars can respond to the increasing polarization of political identities today, e.g. the Gaza War, the Russian-Ukraine War, and the Korean peninsula.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.