Professor Michael Banissy
MCFSS25\250014
Digitally-mediated affection: Evaluating Wellbeing Benefits and Individual Differences in Touch and Technological Substitutes
University of Bristol
£120,656.00
Affection and social support are crucial for mental and physical health, contributing to psychological, physiological, and relational health. Yet, many people increasingly report a lack of social connection and affection in their lives, which can negatively impact their well-being. This research programme investigates how digitally mediated affection can address these issues through technologies such as soft robotics and haptics. It includes three main components, with a focus on how individual differences interact with well-being outcomes: 1) examining the effects of missing physical touch on well-being, 2) evaluating how technological substitutes for affective touch can support health, 3) engaging the public through talks and events. By exploring how digital innovations can enhance social connections and considering individual variations, this project aims to offer solutions for improving emotional support and well-being while raising awareness about the transformative potential of technology in bridging gaps in social affection.
Dr Jose Bellido
MCFSS25\250038
Intellectual Property in a Decolonising World (1945-1968)
University of Kent
£140,857.92
Science and culture are regulated by international law with responsibility shared between two major international agencies of the United Nations: the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). UNESCO’s remit is very broad, encompassing education, economic development, heritage, and more recently, open science. WIPO is primarily focused on protection of private economic rights, with the agency playing a central role in securing international patent and trade mark registration and an impactful role in setting minimum standards for global copyright. There has been no significant study of how and why distinctive UNESCO and WIPO demarcations of responsibility arose in the twentieth century and how this coincided with independence and decolonisation movements in Africa and Asia. This project will provide the first monograph exploring the tensions that emerged from trying to reconcile Post WW2 humanitarian aspirations of nation states with international intellectual property protection.
Dr Harriet Boyd-Bennett
MCFSS25\250027
A Woman in the Machine: In Search of Daphne Oram
University of Nottingham
£143,637.18
This project proposes a new, more diverse history of electronic music. Premised on the case study of the previously overlooked but seminal role that the British composer, inventor and engineer Daphne Oram (1925- 2003) played in the development of electronic music, the ramifications of the project will move beyond the illumination of a musical life. First, it will propose new methods for the development of a more inclusive music history. Second, it will investigate how we can harness this historical and historiographical knowledge to engage girls with music technology today. These outcomes will be interventions towards a renewed feminist musicology in theory and practice. Third, the project will apply a feminist musicology to the field of music technology—something that has until now been overlooked, despite the rapid growth of music technology in higher education and the recent flourishing of feminist studies of technology in other disciplines.
Dr Vladimir Brljak
MCFSS25\250051
Bright Space, Dark Space, New Space: Premodern Cosmologies and Modern Questions
Durham University
£139,322.08
Today, we look up at the dark night sky and know that we are looking into space: space as it always is, beyond our planet's atmosphere. Equally, we know that the bright day sky is an optical effect caused by sunlight’s interaction with this atmosphere. For centuries, however, it was the other way round. Night was merely Earth's shadow, projecting into a bright universe beyond it: 'the circling canopy', as Milton describes it, 'Of night's extended shade', temporarily obscuring 'happy climes that lie / Where day never shuts his eye'. While other comparable transformations - from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe - have been extensively studied, the shift from bright to dark space remains nearly lost to history. Tracing it from antiquity to the present, the project offers the first sustained study of this phenomenon and its immense and ongoing cultural significance.
Professor Henrique Carvalho
MCFSS25\250039
Just Sentences: Narrating and Rewriting Criminal Law’s Aesthetic Injustice
University of Warwick
£138,184.66
The criminal justice system finds itself overstretched and riddled with scandals around wrongful convictions, abuses of power, and failures to prevent harm and recidivism. This crisis of legitimacy is magnified by an overreliance on criminal law to solve social problems around violence and insecurity on the one hand, and the law’s seeming inability to deliver justice, either to victims or to defendants and convicts, on the other. Although central to understanding and overcoming contemporary challenges, this imbrication of need and incapacity remains undertheorised in current scholarship. Drawing on my longstanding interdisciplinary work in criminalisation and punishment, this project deploys an innovative methodology to explore the role of narratives of justice in criminal legal judgments. It seeks to advance a more socially just understanding of criminal responsibility and punishment through critical analysis and participatory engagement. The project will engage legal professionals, policymakers, academics and the public through opportunities for reflective practice.
Dr Simon Coffey
MCFSS25\250033
Historicising Language Education
King's College London
£151,543.42
The Fellowship is to enable the writing of a monograph called Historicising Language Education. This book will be the first of its kind, an ‘applied linguistic historiography’ in which historicity is presented as a new optic through which to gain a clearer understanding of the mental maps which shape our professional and scholarly landscapes. The history of language and learning teaching remains a niche field of research on the margins of applied linguistics, struggling to find its application in a field characterised by ‘recentism’ and atemporality. Using Foucault’s (1969) ‘discursive formation’ framework to ‘apply’ historical perspectives to contemporary concerns such as linguistic nationalism, nativism, and gender normativity, the project presents language education as a social and historical practice. Given its focal setting the book will also provide the first longue durée account of French teaching in England, organised thematically to retrace the intertextual echoes that shape our current epistemological frames.
Dr Hannah Cornwell
MCFSS25\250067
Performing Diplomacy in the Roman World: Space, Culture, and Identity
University of Birmingham
£127,691.20
With ongoing disruptions and crises on local, regional and global scales, the conventional framing of diplomacy, as a dialogue between sovereign states, appears increasingly untenable and unhelpful. This project challenges this framework of ‘modern diplomacy’ by shifting the focus to the social practices and spaces of diplomacy in the Roman world as a form of performance, within which the cultural, symbolic negotiation of power was just as important as any formal diplomatic content. Through an examination of literary sources, inscriptions, material culture and topography, this project reveals the stories of how identities and communities negotiated with the Roman state across changing socio-political fields (c. 300 BCE-c. 100 CE). Alongside an academic monograph, a programme of public engagement activities, including a dialogue with colleagues from other disciplines, will demonstrate how thinking about diplomacy as performance broadens and deepens our understanding of how and through what means humans negotiate and mediate estrangement.
Dr Niamh Cullen
MCFSS25\250057
Radical Parents: Protest politics and new ideas about parenting and children in the long 1970s
Queen's University Belfast
£143,696.00
This project reassesses the place of family in late twentieth-century Italian and European radical politics. Since the 1920s, the Italian right has made use of the rhetoric of family, from Mussolini to post-war Christian Democracy. In response late 1960s and 1970s feminists and New Left activists appeared to reject the family as an institution of patriarchy and capitalism, although the reality was more complex. By means of a re-examination of feminist and activist histories, this project will demonstrate that a new understanding of the parent-child relationship emerged after 1968. Two articles will examine: 1) how fascism politicised motherhood, creating a complicated legacy for 1970s feminists and 2): how feminist and New Left activism related to parents and children, arguing that 1968 represented an important moment for the liberation of children. The articles lay the scholarly groundwork for a book using group biography to explore parenting and activism in trans-European context.
Dr Sarah Dustagheer
MCFSS25\250066
Shakespeare and the Legacy of the British Empire
University of Kent
£151,988.38
This project examines Shakespeare performance – in professional, amateur and educational settings – from key locations in the life of the British Empire. The book of the project, which OUP have expressed strong interest in for their public-facing series, will cover six indicative case studies and interrogate the playwright’s evolution from cultural tool of the Empire to global icon. It argues that the largely unanalysed performance history of colonial Shakespeare complicates this alleged evolution, and reveals undocumented examples of complicity, resistance and hybridity between colonised and colonisers. It offers a unique contribution to critical debate on Shakespeare’s entanglement with the colonial project and how that legacy has an impact on contemporary culture. In sharing research with teachers, sixth-formers and the public via an educational film, exhibition and workshops, the project contributes to current debates around antiracist Shakespeare pedagogy, the decolonisation of curriculums and the Empire’s legacies in today’s 'culture wars'.
Dr Alice Evans
MCFSS25\250026
The Islamic World’s Great Gender Divergence
King's College London
£151,543.42
Gender norms vary across the Islamic world, with differing rates of female employment and leadership. What explains this heterogeneity? I propose the first-ever global analysis of why some Muslim societies are more gender equal than others. My interdisciplinary study combines comparative historical analysis, qualitative interviews, urban economics, and big data analytics. Fieldwork will focus on key sites of diversity and flux: Saudi Arabia's top-down secularisation, Indonesia's enduring pluralism, and the contrasting gender relations among Muslim communities in the US and UK. By examining inclusive nation-building, state-backed permissive media and neighbourhood effects, my research will improve our understanding of what fosters support for gender equality.
Dr Jonathan Fitzgibbons
MCFSS25\250048
A new edition of Bulstrode Whitelocke’s memoirs: remembering the British Civil Wars and understanding the dynamics of early modern memory
University of Lincoln
£112,939.90
The memoirs of the parliamentarian MP Bulstrode Whitelocke, written after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and published posthumously in 1681, are an essential source for the British Civil Wars and Cromwellian regimes of the 1650s. This fellowship will allow the completion of a scholarly edition of an earlier, previously unreadable, version of Whitelocke’s memoirs that will transform our understanding of the author and the events he describes. Written in the later 1650s, it includes passages on sensitive topics, such as the trial of Charles I and rise of Oliver Cromwell, that were deleted and rewritten after 1660 but have now been recovered in their entirety through reflected infrared photography. This project also offers a unique case study for unravelling the dynamics of early modern memory, including how private recollections shifted in response to national events and how the process of remembering intersected with religious and political beliefs.
Professor Leigh Gardner
MCFSS25\250012
Exporting the American Dream to Africa? US Expansion and Economic Development Under Colonial Rule, 1914-45
London School of Economics and Political Science
£123,298.40
Economic histories of Sub-Saharan Africa during the interwar period have focused almost exclusively on the interventions of colonisers like Britain and France. But this was a period in which the global order was shifting, and new powers like the United States were displacing the old on the global stage. Thus far, the impact of this shift on African economies has been neglected by economic historians of Africa and by historians of the United States in the world - though contemporary accounts suggest that both Africans and Europeans were keenly aware of the opportunities and risks these changes presented. They also show that the material and cultural extension of an interwar "American dream" increasingly influenced African economies as the period progressed. This programme examines the economic legacies of American trade, investment, philanthropic and missionary engagement in Africa in the period between the wars.
Dr Michele Gazzola
MCFSS25\250016
Evaluating Linguistic Justice in Europe (ELIN)
University of Ulster
£137,680.80
This project aims to evaluate and compare the degree of linguistic justice of language policy in European countries. At the practical level, language policy can influence the degree to which people can access and benefit from publicly provided language-related goods and services. At the symbolic level, it affects the degree of recognition of a language in society. The range of language policies and their objectives is broad, and so are their potential political effects on social stability and national cohesion. The High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) of OSCE showed that the more a language policy is perceived as fair, the less likely it is to create political tensions around language issues. Starting from the index presented in the article 'Towards an Index of Linguistic Justice' (2023), this project aims to test its applicability to the countries of the Council of Europe and produce a ranking of countries.
Professor Nick Gill
MCFSS25\250044
Understanding the Dynamics and Conflicts of Emotion Within the Emerging Movement to Improve Refugees' Access to Higher Education
University of Exeter
£140,056.80
The emerging international movement to improve refugees’ access to Higher Education (HE) faces serious challenges, being embedded within the neoliberal and neo-colonial setting of the contemporary international HE sector. Social movement studies’ recent emotional turn highlights the potential of understanding the emotional dynamics, challenges and tensions within social movements as a way to improve their resilience and capacity. This project will draw on cutting-edge social movement theory to both reveal the challenges facing activists in this field and uncover practical tactics addressing them. An academic monograph "Building a Movement for Sanctuary in Higher Education: Opportunities, Challenges and Tactics" will highlight the contingency of the movement’s success on activists’ abilities to navigate their hope, guilt, pride, compassion and empathy. And a new, co-researched, co-produced and widely disseminated “Universities of Sanctuary Handbook” will draw on the principles of recent social movement theory to outline practical, proven tactics available to the movement.
Dr Martyn Griffin
MCFSS25\250013
From Moral Injury to Moral Repair? Learning to Build Collective Resilience in Critical Care Nursing during the ‘Covid Decade’
University of Sheffield
£136,421.60
The proposed programme of research explores moral injury and moral repair within a workforce – critical care nursing – during what the British Academy (2024) have termed the “covid decade”. It seeks to develop public engagement between nurses and the public contributing towards organizational learning and, in turn, collective resilience of a profession. To do so the fellowship will build upon previous research conducted by the PI to: a) explore the long-term effects of moral injury within a workforce and its implications both for the individual and the broader organization; b) consider the attempts at moral repair within a workforce in an effort to heal the emotional wounds created by moral injury; c) share the findings with the public through an art installation codesigned with critical care nurses on moral injury/repair so to improve the public understanding of the profession whilst contributing to its resilience and collective preparedness for future crises.
Dr Michael Hannon
MCFSS25\250007
Lies of the Electorate: The Role of Insincere Discourse in Politics
University of Nottingham
£142,771.40
Lies, spin, and propaganda have long been tools of the politician’s trade. It is therefore unsurprising that work on political dishonesty focuses on cover-ups, collusion, false promises, conspiracies, and propaganda. But what about the honesty of citizens? When "the People" speak, do they tell the truth? What are the different forms that citizen dishonesty can take, and what are the social consequences of such dishonesty? This project investigates the nature, motivations, and significance of dishonest public discourse. The central hypothesis is that citizens often knowingly make false political claims for various purposes, such as signalling ideological allegiance and expressing their identity. Drawing on empirical data and theory, this project provides a novel framework to better understand the nature and consequences of citizen insincerity in politics, as well as national challenges such as polarization and misinformation. The main outputs are public engagement activities, a policy report, and a single-authored book.
Dr Katie Hemer
MCFSS25\250020
Living and Dying in Early Medieval Wales: A Bioarchaeological Perspective
University College London (UCL)
£151,987.03
Bioarchaeological data from the analysis of human remains can offer a significant insight into the lives of those early medieval communities who lived in Wales following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. However, there has yet to be a single synthesis of all published and unpublished bioarchaeological and funerary data for early medieval Wales. Drawing on a decade of excavation and research into the largest excavated rural cemetery in Pembrokeshire, this study will synthesise, analyse, and interpret a corpus of bioarchaeological data from St Patrick’s Chapel and other early medieval cemetery populations. I will investigate population demography, health status, migration, and how communities’ concepts of belief, status, gender, ethnicity, and kinship impacted the treatment of the dead within this Christian society. I will create an original narrative that explores the experiences of those individuals and communities who lived and died in Wales between the early-5th and late 11th-centuries AD.
Dr Noam Maggor
MCFSS25\250045
The Great American Leap Forward: Yankee Leviathan and the Making of Modern Capitalism in the United States, 1850-1914
Queen Mary University of London
£140,457.60
At the end of the nineteenth century, American capitalism went through a dramatic transformation as the former cotton-exporting slave republic emerged as the world’s topmost industrial nation. Whereas standard accounts have narrated this shift as a market-driven process, my project explores the proactive role of the American state in nurturing the rise of the U.S. as a large manufacturing economy. It examines how government institutions deployed promotional policies, particularly in fields such as corporate regulation, credit and banking, antitrust and monopoly, and science and technical education, that facilitated rapid economic development. Given the centrality of the U.S. in how capitalism has been theorized and understood, the rediscovery of an American developmental state bears profound implications across the social sciences and humanities. Culminating in a major book and several public facing engagements, the project advances a fresh historically-grounded reconception of capitalism as co-produced by private and public actors.
Professor Sarah Mills
MCFSS25\250022
Gambling on Political Futures: Geographies of Political Betting
Loughborough University
£152,000.00
Political betting is a growing market of the trillion-dollar global gambling industry. UK consumers are placing more and more bets on elections, making it an ideal case-study of a global phenomenon. This research examines the geographies of political betting, how the gambling industry imagines political futures, and the role of political betting advertising. There is an urgent need to better understand this topic: first, gambling is a critical public health issue; second, because of the worrying rise of ‘insider knowledge’ bets during the UK’s 2024 General Election; and finally, for the future of democracy we must understand how political betting potentially contributes to political outcomes. Prof. Mills will map gambling markets connected to political events and candidates, analyse secondary data including gambling adverts, and conduct interviews with vital stakeholders. The research will advance academic knowledge and public understanding on this underexamined topic, providing critical insights into gambling on political futures.
Dr Terri Ochiagha
MCFSS25\250008
Chinua Achebe: A Life at the Crossroads
University of Edinburgh
£130,487.55
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), the acclaimed ‘father of modern African literature,’ is one of the key literary figures of the twentieth century. While most of his oeuvre dwells on the political ineptitude of contemporary African leaders and the socio-political malaise of postcolonial Africa, Achebe is generally considered the anticolonial novelist par excellence. Beyond his literary accomplishments, Achebe had considerable influence in Nigeria’s political sphere, including advisory and diplomatic roles during the Nigerian Civil War and involvement in 1980s party politics. His life offers a prism through which to examine Nigerian history, the global rise of African literature, and the present-day reinvigoration of imperial reckoning. This project will yield his first full-length biography (Princeton University Press) and a comprehensive public engagement campaign in his native Nigeria— in collaboration with literary platform Borders Literature for all Nations— targeting schools, universities, and the general public through appearances in podcasts, television, and the national press.
Dr Ed Pulford
MCFSS25\250025
Marginal Nationhood: Transnational Minorities and the Age of Global China
University of Manchester
£137,725.60
During this Fellowship I will complete a major research project focused on ‘Transnational Chinese minorities’, that is communities of non-Han people who have a connection to China but live in states neighbouring the PRC. Building on field research in Hanoi (Vietnam), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Seoul (Korea) in 2023-25, the fellowship will allow me to conduct final follow-up visits to the three field locations, author a monograph, and organise public and policy-oriented events to disseminate findings. With China-connected minorities in each location as case studies, the book will explore how China’s growing importance is affecting minority experience, from economic opportunity to risk and stigma, as well as understandings of identity and ethnicity that are shifting amid global economic and social change. Dissemination activities will focus on how China’s international political and social importance is reshaping understandings of diversity and identity, and what ‘global China’ means in three strategically important Asian regions.
Dr Edward Roberts
MCFSS25\250035
Bishops, Law and Society at the End of the First Millennium
University of Kent
£144,935.04
The institutional power of the medieval church has traditionally been thought a product of the eleventh-century ‘Gregorian reform’, whereby newly invigorated popes liberated the church from secular interference and restored clerical integrity. But this was only possible because a bottom-up transformation was well underway across Latin Europe. This project traces changes in ecclesiastical governance across the tenth and early eleventh centuries by reassessing the activities and ethos of the church’s most important local leaders: the bishops. Through a study of contemporary episcopal manuscripts, this research shows how innovative approaches to religious law produced new conceptions of episcopal jurisdiction and group cohesion, which enabled bishops to operate as a transregional elite and paved the way for a wider transformation of European society. The resulting monograph will offer a new model for the medieval church’s institutional development, while an exhibition at Canterbury Cathedral will communicate the research to a wide public.
Dr Asha Rogers
MCFSS25\250061
“Eng. Lit” after empire: decolonizing the curriculum at decolonization, 1965-1985
University of Birmingham
£135,732.28
What would a “decolonized” literature curriculum look like, and has one ever existed? This programme locates the contemporary drive to “decolonize” curricula in the historical era of decolonization itself. Proposing an innovative conceptual framework for literary “decolonization” as changes to literature's form, its geographical relevance and the identity of the author, it focalizes each of these dimensions in pioneering historical campaigns to reform English Literature examinations for 14–18-year-olds in Kenya, Jamaica and Britain. Calls to “decolonize” the curriculum have long proved contentious because they involve writers, teachers and students challenging the political authority of governments as guardians of culture. This timely, agenda-setting research will allow me to complete a highly original monograph, Matter of State, on changing ideas of literature’s diversity in the twentieth century and to challenge the presentism contained in appeals to “decolonize the curriculum” through a suite of public engagement activities.
Professor Ben Russell
MCFSS25\250055
Roman Stone Carvers and their Craft: A Socio-Economic and Technical History
University of Edinburgh
£133,318.68
This project will write the first comprehensive analysis of Roman stone carvers and their craft from both a socio-economic and technical perspective. Roman sculptors were responsible for an unmatched florescence of their craft that would influence generations of carvers from the Renaissance to today. And yet because we know of no ‘big names’—no Phidias, Michelangelo, Canova—the socio-economic world in which Roman sculptors operated and their technical expertise has been overlooked: they were ignored by contemporary elite writers and are understudied in histories of sculpture. This project will build on the applicant’s last fifteen years work in this field and capitalise on a renewed interest in makers and making in antiquity. Drawing together three datasets for the first time—inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and the working traces left by sculptors on their works—it will shed new light on a world of ancient craftspeople, their lived experiences, and working practices.
Dr Eleanor Rycroft
MCFSS25\250010
Walking the Early Modern Stage
University of Bristol
£135,853.62
Pedestrian practices fundamentally and irrevocably changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. Early modern texts, such as courtesy literature, medical treatises, and dialogues, reveal that walking was emerging as a new, elite leisure activity during the period. However, few records remain to demonstrate what walking was actually like. One rich source of evidence remains untapped: early modern playtexts. Dramatic representations of walking expose how new pedestrian styles actually materialised in practice, with stage directions and character descriptions offering remarkably detailed information about everyday embodied movement through space in Renaissance England. ‘Walking the Early Modern Stage’ will innovatively investigate the social performance of Renaissance walking, showing that staged pedestrianism reflected and shaped walking practices beyond the theatre. This is crucial historical work: exclusions made at the time on the basis of gender, race and class continue to reverberate through pedestrian inequality today, and continue to delimit who can walk, when, and where.
Dr Christian Schemmel
MCFSS25\250031
Relational Equality and Social Class
University of Manchester
£114,883.59
In mainstream political philosophy of equality, class has taken a backseat. This is surprising, as relational egalitarian views have recently gained ground over economics-inspired theories focusing on the just distribution of resources and welfare. These argue that equality is a value focusing on the quality of social relations, and predominantly directed against hierarchies of respect, power, and status. Class should play a major role for them. So far it does not. This project connects theories of relational equality to sociological accounts of class, with a particular focus on Bourdieusian approaches to class inequality. According to these, we all tend to possess a class habitus: a deeply ingrained way of interacting and relating to others, based on our social position and origin. The project investigates how interacting based on our differential habitus, or failing to, impedes equal autonomy, and inquires whether and how we can develop an egalitarian habitus in response.
Mrs Sandra Sequeira
MCFSS25\250049
Understanding Displacement in Sub-Saharan Africa: Drivers, Impacts, and Policy Implications
London School of Economics and Political Science
£149,867.20
Globally, over 400 million people are currently on the move. While attention often centres on South-North migration, South-South movement is far more common, driven by a complex mix of poverty, conflict, and climate shocks. Sub-Saharan Africa faces rapid population growth and increasing displacement. Africa's population is projected to double by 2050, and the region already accounts for two-thirds of all new internal displacements and at least 44% of cross-border movements. How will displacement shape African development? Displacement can shift people from conflict-prone, climate-vulnerable regions to more favourable areas, potentially into more productive activities, but it can also impose significant economic strain on impoverished host communities. Whether displacement promotes or hinders economic development depends heavily on where migrants settle and how well they integrate into host economies. This project will use novel data from 33 countries in SSA to analyse displacement patterns and identify factors driving integration into poor host communities.
Dr Alex Silk
MCFSS25\250029
Conditional Predicates in Context
University of Birmingham
£135,223.35
This project provides the first systematic investigation into conditional ‘if...’ expressions in noun phrases (as in ‘the [parties if school is cancelled]’) and verb phrases (as in ‘Students will [party if school is cancelled]’)—what I call ‘conditional predicates’. I develop a rigorous theory of conditional predicates’ structure, meaning, and use. The project is the first of its kind in synthesising leading work on conditionals with broader cutting-edge research and methods from linguistic syntax and semantics, corpus linguistics, and the sciences. The main output will be a monograph. A vibrant series of public engagement activities will promote interest in the research, the value of its methodology, and its wider significance. Applications in cognitive science and artificial intelligence are especially timely. These project innovations and outputs constitute first steps toward shaping public understanding and cross-disciplinary research on conditionals and inquiry into linguistic meaning, predication, and the role of context in interpretation.
Dr Rebecca Thomas
MCFSS25\250028
Hostages in Medieval Wales
Cardiff University
£129,652.48
This project is the first study of hostages in texts from and relating to medieval Wales (c.500–1282). Hostages were a key part of making and maintaining peace in the medieval world. Wales is recognized as a particularly compelling case study of the practice, as the Welsh were frequently required to give hostages to the English. Despite this, no study of hostageship in medieval Wales has ever been undertaken and no attention has been paid to the giving of hostages among the Welsh themselves. This research programme will focus on three avenues of investigation: the status of hostages; the mechanics of hostageship; its literary representation. This will lead to an advanced understanding of the practice in medieval Wales, and across Europe more broadly. As hostageship was a key component of international relations, this project also constitutes a new way of exploring how medieval Welsh rulers interacted with the wider world.
Dr Huamao Wang
MCFSS25\250036
Empowering UK Small Businesses with AI-Enhanced Sustainability Solutions
University of Nottingham
£133,392.50
The project aims to revolutionize how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) report on their environmental impact and social responsibility using artificial intelligence (AI). I will develop an AI system, leveraging large language models and machine learning techniques trained on sustainability data, to help SMEs create accurate and standardized sustainability reports to attract funding and customers, enhance climate resilience, and contribute to net-zero targets. This innovation addresses SMEs' challenge in producing complex reports due to limited resources. I will test this system with a sample of UK SMEs, comparing its effectiveness to traditional methods. I will explore how this technology affects public understanding of business sustainability efforts and influences policy-making. Through workshops, media engagement, and open-access resources, I will ensure the findings reach a broad audience, from business owners to policymakers and the public. This project bridges cutting-edge technology with practical needs in social science, transforming society's views of business sustainability.
Dr Rachel Winchcombe
MCFSS25\250015
Edible Empire: Foodways and the Making and Breaking of Anglo-America, c. 1550-1783
University of Manchester
£123,762.98
'Edible Empire' is the first project to uncover the fractious history of entangled foodways in Anglo-America, arguing that the age of British empire building in the Americas (c. 1550-1783) represented a formative episode in the history of global food provisioning. The project not only tells the story of British foods and the ways that they transformed life in the Americas, from spurring on overseas expansion to precipitating damaging ecological change, it also reveals how Indigenous communities, and enslaved populations mobilised their knowledge and command of food resources to resist colonial oppression and the devastating institution of slavery. By foregrounding foodways, the project draws critical attention to the knowledge and expertise of marginalised peoples, including emphasising the significant power they had to impact the lives of colonisers, whilst also tracing how the large-scale commodification of colonial food products increasingly undermined traditional, place-based modes of food production and food sovereignty.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.