British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships Awards 2025-26

The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships 2025-26 awardees are:

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust

Professor Dan Anderberg

SRF26\260181

‘Maternal Assaults and Children’s Outcomes: Leveraging Data from ECHILD to Identify Causal Pathways’

Royal Holloway, University of London

£75,644.00

This project examines the intergenerational effects of violence by linking maternal experiences of physical assault—captured in hospital emergency records—to children’s educational, health and social care outcomes. Using the ECHILD dataset, which integrates health, education, and care data for England, the project applies state-of-the-art longitudinal and quasi-experimental statistical methods – including event-study designs, sibling fixed-effects, and regression discontinuity designs – to establish causal impacts of maternal assault on child outcomes. It further investigates how the local capacity of domestic-abuse response systems, such as Independent Domestic Violence Advisers (IDVAs) and Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences (MARACs), moderates these effects. The project will generate the first population-wide causal evidence on how maternal victimisation shapes children’s outcomes from birth through primary school and how institutional responses can mitigate these harms. By advancing methods for causal inference in linked administrative data, the research provides both scientific innovation and policy-relevant insights into the transmission of violence and disadvantage across generations.

Professor Felicia Chan

SRF26\260002

‘Cinema Before Nation: Screen Representations of Singapore Before Independence’

University of Manchester

£59,073.22

Using the example of Singapore, this project proposes a historiographical rethinking of national cinema through the lens of 'cinema before nation,' a framework that foregrounds cinema’s role in shaping cultural formations prior to and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. While scholarship has challenged essentialist definitions of national cinema, dominant models remain tethered to linear, area-based, or thematic approaches that overlook the ebbs and flows of cinematic cultures that bleed beyond territorial lines. Singapore's 'national cinema' is often conceptualised from its postcolonial independence in 1965, with earlier – prolific – film histories consigned to a pre-national past. This project brings both halves of Singapore’s film history into dialogue, and examines how pre-independence cinematic portrayals continue to shape the postcolonial city-state’s self-representation. By investigating how cinematic practices negotiate historical ruptures and continuities, this project speaks directly to the broader stakes for film studies in an increasingly nationalistic global context.

Professor David Colclough

SRF26\260210

‘The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, vol. 14: Sermons Preached at St Paul's Cathedral, 1628-1630’

Queen Mary University of London

£73,560.73

I propose to use the Fellowship to complete The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne vol. 14.

This volume, contracted to Oxford University Press, presents the last 13 sermons preached by Donne (1572-1631) in St Paul’s Cathedral, over two years at the end of his life. The sermons will be, for the first time, edited to the highest standards of modern textual criticism; the edition will also be the first to supply extensive commentaries, which trace Donne’s sources, gloss unfamiliar language, and set the sermons in the contexts – ecclesiastical, social, political, and theological – of their composition and delivery. Special emphasis is put on the location of their preaching, with the edition as a whole organising all of Donne’s sermons by the places in which they were delivered.

Dr Gwilym Dodd

SRF26\260036

‘The Late Medieval English Parliament, 1272-1461’

University of Nottingham

£63,204.47

A distinctive feature of the political system of late medieval England was the existence of an all-powerful and authoritative parliament, through which the king was obliged to levy taxation, promulgate new statutory law and conduct much of the business of governing the nation. Parliament assumed this mantle between 1272 and 1461. The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Fellowship will allow me to complete a major new interpretation-based reappraisal of this key period of parliamentary history – the first in well over a century. By investigating how parliament developed across two hundred years, and by adopting an inclusive investigation into all of its many functions, this project will set new paradigms in the study of late medieval English politics and governance. The increased accessibility of medieval parliamentary records, the convergence of different methodologies, and controversies over the efficacy of modern representative institutions, make the project not only feasible, but also pertinent and extraordinarily timely.

Dr Anthony Gerbino

SRF26\260088

‘Charles Perrault’s Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns Regarding the Arts and Sciences, Volume I (1688), a new English translation and annotated edition.’

University of Manchester

£58,673.00

Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (4 vols) launched a great struggle of ideas. A manifesto for the present, the treatise attacked the authority of the ancients in encyclopaedic fashion: in the fine arts (1688), in eloquence (1690), in poetry (1692), and in the sciences (1696). More than just the classical canon, Perrault set his sights on learned elites, their allegedly expert judgement and unquestioning bias in favour of philology and learned commentary over all forms of useful knowledge. Recent achievements in art and architecture, the subject of volume one, lay at the heart of Perrault’s argument. The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship of 12 months will enable me to make this key text – with full scholarly apparatus and a substantial introductory essay – available in English for the first time. The translation will open new routes into Louis XIV’s art patronage, early modern art theory, and Enlightenment thought.

Professor Anindita Ghosh

SRF26\260326

‘By Bomb & Song: Revolutionaries, Affective Communities & The State In India, 1905-38’

University of Manchester

£59,308.00

The contrast between the extraordinary prominence of anticolonial Indian revolutionary heroes in popular culture and their neglect in historical scholarship has been described as ‘one of the puzzles of twentieth-century Indian history’. Post-colonial India has preferred a Gandhian self-image of its anticolonial past. And yet Indian revolutionaries commanded widespread admiration across the country, were internationally networked, and posed a serious challenge to colonial administration. My research offers the first in-depth analysis of the appeal of revolutionaries in India in the first half of the twentieth century, studying both regimes of violence and the affective communities and cultures associated with them. Examining hitherto unexplored vernacular songs, performance and images, it adds to a growing literature that asks questions about the il/legitimacy of revolutionary and colonial violence, the moral authority of the state, and rule of law – which in turn can shed new light on modern day extremism in the world.

Professor Jon Henderson

SRF26\260365

‘The Human Sea: Marine Cultural Heritage and the Sustainable Ocean’

University of Edinburgh

£63,610.68

While global initiatives under the UN Ocean Decade – “the science we need for the ocean we want” – prioritise science and technology, they overlook knowledge from past human action in the marine environment. 'The Human Sea: Marine Cultural Heritage and the Sustainable Ocean' addresses this gap, offering the first integrated account of Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) as a form of biocultural heritage that unites nature and culture in pursuit of a truly sustainable ocean. Building on over a decade of research through the Rising from the Depths GCRF network (2017–22) and the UN Ocean Decade–endorsed Cultural Heritage Framework Programme (2022–26), the project will produce a major scholarly monograph, a UNESCO White Paper and two online workshops. Together, these outputs will demonstrate that when cultural heritage is embedded in ocean science, sustainability becomes not only environmental but also cultural and human – fostering more inclusive and resilient futures for the sea.

Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach

SRF26\260050

‘Understanding lost exemplars: Medieval song transmission before the large French songbooks’

University of Oxford

£66,553.59

In the second half of the thirteenth century, over two dozen large vernacular songbooks were produced in various locations in Western Europe. Makers of these monumental manuscripts must have relied on other, no-longer-extant sources, which had preserved the repertoire for over a century, from the time of its creation to its copying into the surviving large written compilations. But although a tiny number of earlier individual pieces have come down to us in writing, no substantial body of source material exists. This project deduces the nature of the now-lost exemplars for large songbooks through close examination of scribal processes in two philologically related but materially different examples of surviving manuscripts. The resulting monograph will not only change the way we understand the practices of music scribes but will importantly also give insight into the circulation and preservation of individual songs in the living musical culture of the thirteenth century.

Professor James Moran

SRF26\260081

‘A new history of the Irish stage: Global-Majority communities and representation’

University of Nottingham

£67,070.10

Contemporary Irish political discussion is dominated by issues of race and immigration. A common misapprehension is that Ireland only began engaging with Global-Majority communities of colour from the 1990s, when inward migration led to significant demographic change. However, this research project uncovers and explores three centuries of representation of Global-Majority groups and individuals on the Irish stage. Drama plays a key role in public ideas about race and racial-representation, and so I ask: how, in the realm of theatre/drama, have these communities been represented by themselves and others? This project provides a full reappraisal of Irish theatre history, addressing a critical gap in knowledge about racial visibility and intercultural exchange. Crucially, this work traces the sustained work of theatre-makers of colour in Ireland since the 1700s. In this way, I reframe contemporary thinking about Global-Majority presence and visibility, with implications for debates about race and inclusion in Ireland and beyond.

Professor Wayne Veck

SRF26\260291

‘Inclusive Refugee Education: Decolonisation, Ethics, and the Pedagogy of Attentiveness’

University of Winchester

£38,006.18

This project develops Inclusive Refugee Education, a framework that brings philosophy, decolonial critique, and refugee testimony into dialogue to reimagine education as an ethical response to displacement. It advances a pedagogy of attentiveness that treats education as a moral practice - deepening thought while opening possibilities for practices, policies, and curricula that respond more fully to refugee experience. Based on in depth interviews with six refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Uganda, Ukraine, and Tibet, the study shows how uprooted learners and their teachers reshape educational spaces through creativity and ethical imagination. Informed by Levinas, Weil, Arendt, Fanon, Orwell, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, it challenges colonial and exclusionary traditions while emphasising responsibility. Through a polyphonic method, refugee participants actively shape the project’s concepts and direction. The Fellowship will support a monograph (Inclusive Refugee Education: Decolonisation, Ethics, and the Pedagogy of Attentiveness, for Oxford University Press), an article, and a policy brief.

Funded by the Thank Offering to Britain Fellowship

Dr David Rundle

SRF26\260366

‘Italian Renaissance Humanism and Quattrocento England’

University of Kent

£58,443.93

A fellowship will ensure the completion of my next monograph, 'Virtue Vision: England and the Identity of Italian Renaissance Humanism, c.1400–c.1465' (; under contract with Oxford-Warburg Studies, published by Oxford University Press). It makes two related interventions in scholarship, which together challenges widespread perceptions of the ‘spread’ of ideas; First, it tempers the still-prevalent claim that the Renaissance arrived late in England: in terms of the intellectual interests we call humanism, there were English and Scottish characters who were integral to making its early success international. Second, it questions the assumption that English engagement with humanism was slow in the sense of being superficial. Participants in what I have called the English Quattrocento detected in the humanists’ works a tendency to endow not just actions but also objects with moral worth, making virtues material — what we can call virtue vision. This book delineates for the first time that process.

Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.