Mid-Career Fellowships awards 2026
The 2026 Mid-Career Fellowships awardees are:
Dr Tamsin Alexander
MCF26\260277
'Incandescent: Music and the Politics of Illumination'
Goldsmiths, University of London
£89,654.00
'Incandescent: Music and the Politics of Illumination' will form the first book-length study of music’s lighting history. Challenging the assumption that the ideal musical experience concerns sound alone – listening in darkness, eyes closed – this project reveals that the very century often credited with propagating this ideal was, in fact, one in which audiences were encountering new levels of multisensory spectacle.
'Incandescent' examines the methods for and debates surrounding music’s illumination, from the introduction of gaslight in the 1810s to experiments in electric into the early twentieth century, drawing on archival research across the histories of science, architecture and theatre.
Alongside the monograph, the project will develop an interactive digital model, enabling scholars and the public to visualise Victorian lighting effects. By unveiling the multiplicity of audiovisual practices in the nineteenth century, these outputs seek to stimulate creative and inclusive directions in the curation of art music today.
Dr Ioanna Bakopoulou
MCF26\260336
'Addressing Language Inequalities: Designing Fair Systems and Tools to Track Language Development in the Primary-School Years'
University of Bristol
£142,427.76
In the UK, an estimated 2 million children are experiencing language difficulties – the highest number ever recorded. This shocking increase has reached a level that is now considered a public health problem.
Language difficulties have profound and lasting consequences, are unevenly distributed across society, and preventative services remain inconsistent and inequitable in their reach. Early and consistent identification of language difficulties can be transformative. Yet, there is a lack of robust evidence about current monitoring practices, particularly for primary-aged children.
While the UK Government has pledged significant investment in children’s language development, key stakeholders and policymakers warn that, without a clear and coordinated roadmap, these resources risk being ineffectively allocated.
This project aims to address this research gap by examining how language development is monitored in primary schools, and exploring factors that support effective and equitable identification of language difficulties, providing policymakers with the evidence they urgently need.
Dr Anna Bull
MCF26\260432
'Power-based sexual harassment in higher education: interrupting the cycle'
University of York
£109,290.03
Power-based sexual harassment – from academic staff towards students or early career researchers – continues to occur in higher education.
This project will synthesise and re-analyse data from three previous studies to outline the cultural, social, institutional and regulatory processes that enable the perpetuation of staff/faculty sexual harassment; explain why institutions often fail to respond adequately when the issue is reported to them; and reveal how to interrupt the cycle whereby the impacts of sexual harassment exacerbate gender and other inequalities.
The findings will be published as a monograph that will enable practitioners and policymakers to better prevent and address power-based sexual harassment and its impacts.
The project’s dissemination strategy will draw on my extensive networks as a campaigner in this area to run webinars for stakeholders within higher education that will enable them to better address sexual harassment and convene a public event to raise awareness of this issue.
Dr Stephanie Coen
MCF26\260097
'Uncovering gendered environments and their influence on women’s health and injury in Paralympic sport'
University of Nottingham
£152,000.00
Sport remains a gender-inequitable playing field. The UK Government’s 2023 Sexism and Inequalities in Sport parliamentary inquiry highlighted how inequities play out, literally, on the bodies of women and girls who experience some sports injuries at alarmingly higher rates than men and boys (e.g., anterior cruciate ligament rupture).
Traditional explanations for gender disparities in sports injury focus on sex-based biological factors (e.g., anatomy), without considering how modifiable social and cultural factors (e.g., gendered social norms) contribute to injury risk. Para (disabled) female athletes are up to two times more likely to sustain a major health problem than their male counterparts, yet most sports injury research focuses on non-disabled female athletes.
Collaborating with a national sport partner, this research uncovers social and cultural influences shaping Paralympic female athlete health to identify new solutions for addressing gendered health inequities. Innovative arts-based resources for public and sport audiences move research insights into impact.
Dr Benedetta Crisafulli
MCF26\260405
'Modulating persuasion in the influencer economy: Towards a co-produced user-centred approach to online safety'
Birkbeck, University of London
£137,381.47
Social media influencers play a crucial role in contemporary debates on online safety. Policymakers strive to regulate the influencer industry by placing duties on social media platforms to remove manipulative content.
Yet, such platforms continue to incentivise influencers’ persuasive practices to generate traffic. Scholarly work is fragmented and directs inadequate attention to influencers’ manipulative persuasion. Although central to debates, there is hitherto no comprehensive account of influencers’ persuasion practices and the measures that inoculate users from detrimental consequences of manipulative content.
This project provides the first ever shortform book combining scholarly evidence on persuasion in the era of social media influencers with practice-based insights from interviewing teachers and charities working on online safety.
A parallel programme of public engagement and dissemination activities fosters dialogue between academia, teachers and charities to advance a co-produced, user-centred approach to online safety. Such novel approach guides users in recognising and resisting influencers' manipulative content.
Dr Sami Everett
MCF26\260626
'Zouj: Dialogical Encounters in North African Judeo-Arabic Popular Culture'
University of Southampton
£144,464.73
Zouj explores the deep historical roots and contemporary significance of Jewish–Muslim relations through the lens of artistic duos, each pairing one Jewish and one Muslim cultural producer, whose collaborations span music, cinema, theatre, animation, photography, and comedy.
These tandems illuminate the creative entanglements that have defined much of Jewish life in Muslim North African contexts, challenging the rigid binaries that have hardened through colonialism, nationalism, and geopolitical conflict.
Drawing on archival research, ethnography, and critical cultural analysis, the programme traces these partnerships across the Maghrebi Mediterranean, historically and today, showing how shared languages, repertoires, and aesthetic traditions are forged through everyday cooperation and mutual influence. In today's climate of resurgent ethno-religious polarisation, recovering these creative partnerships contributes to debunking perpetual Judeo-Muslim belligerence.
The programme’s two main outputs, a scholarly monograph and a multimedia digital platform, will together offer an enduring resource for contemporary debates on coexistence, pluralism, and shared belonging.
Dr Giulia Felappi
MCF26\260013
'The reappearance of Margaret Macdonald’s ink'
University of Southampton
£128,348.31
Margaret Macdonald was a leading figure in the British philosophical community from the 1930s to the 1950s, a period in which British philosophers played a central role in shaping the discipline as we still carry it out today across the globe.
Yet, Macdonald’s contributions were quickly forgotten, up until very recently, when scholars started to rediscuss some of her work. This project sits within the current rediscovery of Macdonald’s philosophy, by producing the first monograph aimed at systematically reconstructing, analysing and assessing her philosophy.
The objective is three-fold: to highlight Macdonald’s original contributions in a variety of debates still alive today, and her distinctive methodology; to rectify the important omission of Macdonald from the usual narrative about the history of 20th Century philosophy; to inspire, via targeted public engagement events, members of groups underrepresented in academia, by celebrating the work of a woman from a less advantaged background.
Dr Benjamin Gray
MCF26\260535
'Rejecting and Reinventing Citizenship: The Polis and its Critics between the Hellenistic and Modern Worlds'
University of Cambridge
£151,981.46
The Greek polis (city-state) has often preoccupied modern political thinkers who have shaped modern society. While some reject it, others reclaim it as a perfectible political model.
My project contributes to scholarly and public discussion by innovatively comparing this modern dialogue with a neglected ancient precursor: Hellenistic debates (c. 323–31 BC) between critics and defenders of the small-scale polis of engaged citizens. Attacks from intellectuals and outsiders helped to provoke many citizens of Hellenistic poleis, across the social spectrum, to reinvent their institutions and ideals.
The critical half of this Hellenistic dialogue has resonated in modern debate, especially through the influence of Stoicism and Epicureanism. Yet the other half has mainly been obscured by focus on Classical Athens (c. 480–323 BC).
Through my research and public workshops, I will explore how integration of the latest Hellenistic research with contemporary theory can transform our understanding of the polis, citizenship, and democracy.
Professor Tom Hamilton
MCF26\260034
'The Social Roots of Religious Violence in Sixteenth-Century Paris'
Durham University
£149,101.64
How can historians understand the social dynamics of religious violence yet avoid reducing them to class conflict? This project develops a new approach to trace the social roots of religious violence to some of its most notorious perpetrators, the Paris civic militia in the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598).
The Paris militiamen have long been blamed for leading the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), when Catholics killed thousands of Protestants in Paris and across France. Public debates about the Massacre following its 450th anniversary in 2022 have reinforced this view.
Yet only a minority of militiamen took part in the killing and almost all stayed (just) within the bounds of legality to maintain order. They took complex decisions that balanced corporate and family interests with longstanding cultures of devotion.
The project explains its significance for scholarly and public audiences via a book and a digital museum.
Dr Laure Humbert
MCF26\260017
'Aiding the French Resistance. An intimate history of Medical Internationalism during the Second World War'
University of Manchester
£146,367.41
This project offers the first intimate history of international humanitarian and medical encounters in the French Resistance during the Second World War. It draws critical attention on the contributions of global relief actors in South America, Oceania and Asia, thereby tracing the development of a transnational mobilisation beyond the confines of Great Britain and the borders of the French Empire.
In so doing, it provides a new perspective on the history of Franco-Allied and colonial relationships, moving from top-down bilateral negotiations to everyday exchanges in hospital tents. It presents a comprehensive picture, from below, of how the Resistance crucially depended on foreign medical resources and the blood of people of colour.
Ultimately, it reveals the extent to which the formation of the French Resistance was a transnational process, in which medical carers and humanitarian actors played a vital, albeit largely forgotten, role.
Dr Thomas Jones
MCF26\260410
'The Evolution of Asylum in British History'
University of Buckingham
£58,819.30
Asylum has been a remarkably durable phenomenon in British history. This fact is often lost in contentious twenty-first-century debates about asylum-seekers, which reference only the most recent past and increasingly regard Britain’s obligations to refugees as being externally imposed.
Yet the idea of asylum emerged organically within British political thought and for five centuries has been successfully adapted to the country’s ever-evolving political, social, and cultural contexts.
My project traces the history of the idea asylum from the first self-conscious refugee policies of the Tudor monarchy to the dawn of the international refugee ‘system’ after the First World War.
It will result in a monograph published by Harvard University Press and an accompanying public engagement campaign of podcasts and articles aimed at general and policymaker audiences. It will also serve as a bridge to a future textbook on refugees that will bring this research to a new generation of undergraduates.
Dr Joseph Lawson
MCF26\260119
'Party-state Consolidation, Gender, and Memory in Teaching in China, 1950s-1990s'
Newcastle University
£138,035.00
This project uses the teaching profession as a case-study to examine how China’s party-state operated and evolved at a local level between the 1950s and the 1990s. In many party-states, including China’s, schoolteachers were supposed to act as a key link between party, local communities, and state institutions.
This project examines what happened to these links when the teaching workforce changed radically, as it did with the dramatic rise of women in teaching in Maoist China, and with the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.
The project also considers how these changes in the teaching workforce and status of teachers have been represented in China’s highly politicized public memory.
The project is based on an innovative combination of quantitative analysis with large datasets and qualitative analysis of public memory in the form of literature, published oral history, and online personal narratives.
Dr Jonathan Leader Maynard
MCF26\260439
'Analysing Ideology and World Politics in the New Cold War Era'
King's College London
£147,033.37
According to numerous practitioners and scholars, a ‘New Cold War’ involving renewed 'ideological' competition is underway. The EU observes a “competition of governance systems accompanied by a real battle of narratives”; the last US National Security Strategy declared: “The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy… [and export] an illiberal model of international order.”
Yet international politics scholarship has a weak track record of analysing ideology. Expert and public discussions are often confused: over what ideologies are, how they might matter, and how we would know if they do.
This project will initiate a step-change in scholarship on ideology's role in international politics, completing my current research agenda. I will complete major new book ('Analysing Ideology in World Politics') and three journal articles, and host multiple knowledge-exchange events, including in the UK Parliament.
Professor Brian Lobel
MCF26\260164
'Re-figuring Illness: From Liminality to Transition in Performance, Ritual, and Health'
Rose Bruford College
£82,960.00
Grounded in performance studies and shaped by dramaturgical analysis, this research examines how public ceremony and participatory performance can support people navigating cancer.
It investigates how illness transitions can be acknowledged, supported, and accompanied by rituals that reflect a patient’s reality, particularly when patients do not return to 'normal' or reach conventional endpoints.
The study combines ethnographic fieldwork, creative co-design with patient groups, and performance analysis to develop new rituals that reflect lived experiences of survivorship, recurrence, and chronic care. It critiques the dominance of 'liminality' in illness discourse, which frames patients as suspended between health and illness, and proposes instead a transitions-based framework that recognises illness as an active process of negotiation between patients, their communities, and healthcare systems.
Responding to the growing number of people living with and beyond cancer, the project will produce conceptual models, academic publications, and an open-access toolkit for clinical, artistic, and community use.
Dr Kitty Lymperopoulou
MCF26\260589
'Ethnicity and sentencing: The influence of pre-sentence reports'
University of Plymouth
£125,540.00
Ethnic disparities in sentencing persist in the UK, yet the role of pre-sentence reports (PSRs) in shaping these outcomes remains under-researched.
This study addresses a key evidence gap by examining how PSRs—and their recommendations—influence sentencing outcomes across ethnic groups. Using large-scale administrative data from courts and probation services, the project employs mixed methods to analyse patterns in PSR requests, report types (oral, fast, standard), and the alignment between recommendations and final sentencing decisions, complemented by qualitative interviews with probation officers and judges to contextualise decision-making behind PSRs.
It investigates whether PSRs contribute to ethnic disparities in custodial and non-custodial outcomes, controlling for legally relevant factors such as offence severity and criminal history. By advancing understanding of PSR influence within sentencing, the study will inform evidence-based reforms aimed at promoting consistency, fairness, and greater equity in criminal justice outcomes.
Dr Anna Macdonald
MCF26\260386
'Everyday lawfare: what can we learn about authoritarian legalism from below?'
University of East Anglia
£139,936.00
A defining feature of the global authoritarian turn is the strategic use of law and legal institutions to consolidate power. Existing research focuses on the use and abuse of law by political elites.
This project breaks new ground by uncovering how legal frameworks and institutions are instrumentalised and repurposed by ordinary citizens in ways that reproduce and reinforce authoritarian tactics from below. Building on ten years of ethnographic research in magistrates’ courts in northern Uganda, I will develop a novel, micro-foundational theory of lawfare.
This will reveal the processes through which practices of illiberal legality become normal, necessary, and even desirable in everyday life and relationships. Integral to the project is a participatory communications strategy in Uganda that combines research and dissemination.
Through theatre and radio, I will involve communities in interpreting findings and shaping policy recommendations for national and international policymakers in the fields of rule-of-law and justice.
Dr Mahreen Mahmud
MCF26\260037
'“We’re All in This Together”: Addressing Poverty in Village Economies'
University of Exeter
£106,261.04
Extreme poverty remains one of the greatest global challenges, affecting over 700 million lives and is a core sustainable development goal.
My proposed study will deliver rigorous evidence from a randomised trial of a novel, universal poverty alleviation program spanning 335 villages in rural Uganda. Unlike traditional interventions, this program is uniquely inclusive, given to everyone in a village, and designed to address multiple constraints simultaneously.
The BA Fellowship will enable me to prepare a high-impact manuscript for a leading economics journal and to disseminate findings through key channels: stakeholder meetings in Uganda, accessible policy briefs, and academic engagement at conferences and workshops.
This work builds on my successful 400-village trial in rural Kenya and a track record of translating research into actionable insight. The fellowship will ensure this work achieves its full impact in a timely manner in both academic and policy domains.
Dr Giovanni Mantilla
MCF26\260505
'Compromise, not Consensus: International Institutional Change in a Postcolonial World (1955-1981)'
University of Cambridge
£133,966.55
Decolonisation revolutionised international politics. From 1946 through the 1980s, dozens of new states from the so-called Third World emerged and gained membership in the United Nations (UN) system and other multilateral institutions reshaping governance structures and practices in international security, human rights, humanitarian law, and trade and development.
Third World pressure for change resulted in diverse outcomes: clear successes, apparent successes that later proved desultory, and failed efforts. Based on multinational archival research in 6 countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, France, India, Mexico, Brazil), this project proposes to carefully trace and theorise the multilateral practices through which Third World states exerted pressure for change, and how their opponents managed such pressure, sometimes accepting it, other times evading and defeating it.
It focuses on core components of international security governance (UN Security Council; conventional and nuclear disarmament; international humanitarian law) from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Dr Emma Martin
MCF26\260187
'Provenance and Empire: The Toshakhana and the Redaction of Diplomatic Gifts in Colonial India'
University of Manchester
£142,630.00
This Fellowship offers the first comprehensive study of the Toshakhana, a key but overlooked institution that administered the circulation and sale of diplomatic gifts in colonial India.
The project reconstructs how objects of political and cultural significance were decontextualised, anonymised, and commodified, ultimately entering museum collections in Europe as unprovenanced “curios” or “art”.
In doing so, the project reconfigures understandings of colonial power, bureaucracy, and material culture, recasting the gift as a tool of imperial dispossession. The monograph will advance debates in imperial history, gift economies, and the afterlives of colonial collections. Methodologically, the project mobilises the framework of coloniality to interrogate institutional erasure and epistemic violence.
Public engagement activities with museum professionals and affected communities will examine the implications of these findings for provenance, restitution, and cultural memory.
The project, therefore, recovers a forgotten institutional history while offering a model for critical historical work on colonial-era material culture today.
Dr Jennie Middleton
MCF26\260003
'Masked mobilities: urban walking in the neurodivergent city'
University of Oxford
£143,094.89
Many neurodivergent people engage in 'masking' — continually suppressing traits to navigate everyday social norms—often at a significant cost to their physical and mental wellbeing. While walking is widely promoted as an inclusive and sustainable mode of transport, its planning rarely considers neurodivergent experiences.
This project extends over 15 years of foundational research on everyday urban mobilities and care through investigating the everyday urban walking experiences of neurodivergent adults—including those with autism, ADHD, and related conditions.
This research introduces the concept of ‘masked mobilities’ to examine the hidden labour involved in navigating the neurodivergent city on foot. Focusing on Oxford and Swindon, the study will adopt sensory elicitation methods to co-produce new insights with neurodivergent participants.
In doing so, it addresses critical gaps at the intersection of urban mobility, care, and disability. Outcomes will inform inclusive transport policy and public understanding, including through the co-curation of an interactive mobile exhibition.
Professor Claire Nance
MCF26\260166
'Finding voice: The role of vocal tract posture in accent and individuality'
Lancaster University
£139,403.10
What makes a voice unique? While accents differ in many ways, two speakers with similar accents can still sound distinct. This project tests the hypothesis that speaker individuality arises not just from regional or demographic cues, but from articulatory settings: the habitual positions of the tongue, mouth, and jaw that shape vocal timbre.
Measuring articulatory settings is extremely challenging due to the difficulty of separating individual traits from shared community patterns. This research proposes a novel method to tackle this challenge by triangulating listener perceptions, acoustic features, and articulatory movements.
I will develop a new methodological framework that will integrate these features and use diverse dialect data to estimate the characteristics that are shared between speakers and those that are idiosyncratic.
The research activities will feed into public engagement activities that use ultrasound tongue imaging and a poetry toolkit to help children discover their own unique voices.
Dr Rashna Nicholson
MCF26\260581
'How a Discipline is Born: Performance Studies, the Asian Performing Arts and the Cold War (1955-1995)'
University of Warwick
£135,442.69
Performance Studies is today one of the most influential paradigms for the study of all cultural activities yet it possesses remarkably few disciplinary histories. While most trace the field's beginnings in the 1970s to key intellectual centres in the US, no one has pinned down the material support that made this discipline possible.
This project will conduct the first extensive reassessment of the emergence of Performance Studies. It will delineate how the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation-affiliated Asia Society, Japan Society, and JDR 3rd Fund smoothed the way for many moves beyond Western concepts of literature, drama, and the arts, comprising Performance Studies’ ‘broad-spectrum approach’.
Through exemplary case studies of institutional grants and fellowship programs, it will uncover the multi-layered history of how policy makers, experts, academics, and artists benchmarked a transregional consensus on theatre’s role in civil society, thereby assisting the US’ rise to global leadership in the arts.
Dr Leire Olabarria
MCF26\260306
'Connecting with the Past: Egyptology, Ethnography, and the Concept of Survivals'
University of Birmingham
£130,287.83
The ways in which ancient Egypt is studied and interpreted are still influenced by Victorian evolutionary frameworks, Orientalist concerns, and imperialistic biases, which created an image that endures to this day both in scholarship and in public imagination.
My research builds on current critical trends by examining the extent to which ethnography in general, and the so-called ‘doctrine of survivals’ in particular, have shaped understandings of ancient Egypt. Egyptologists have long used ethnographic analogies to approach sociocultural practices, but the theoretical implications of such comparative endeavours have hardly been addressed.
My project proposes a new approach to survivals and analogies from the perspective of memory studies. The main outputs of this fellowship will be a single-authored monograph, a two-day conference, and a programme of engagement activities, including public lectures in the UK and Egypt, as well as a contribution to a major upcoming exhibition.
Dr James Read
MCF26\260413
'The inevitability of general relativity: derivations, principles, and consilience'
University of Oxford
£152,000.00
Einstein's general theory of relativity, completed in 1915, remains our best theory of space, time, and gravitation. Central to general relativity are Einstein's field equations, which describe how, in the immortal words of John Wheeler, "spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve".
In his development of general relativity, Einstein arrived at the field equations through a combination of the need to recover the known equations of Newtonian gravity in the right contexts, and various principles such as 'general covariance' and 'Mach's principle'. In the intervening century, however, dozens of new derivations of Einstein's field equations from diverse areas of physics have been proposed.
But what is the structure of these derivations? How do they compare to each other? And to what extent does this apparently great consilience speak to the inevitability of Einstein's edifice? This project will interrogate and seek to answer these questions.
Dr Paula Sheppard
MCF26\260422
'The barriers to reproduction in the UK: Five years later'
University of Oxford
£135,759.43
You cannot open a newspaper without reading about declining fertility rates, the cost of parenting, or ageing populations. Although UK fertility is low, people do want more children, but many do not realise this ambition because of social, economic, and health barriers.
This Fellowship will build upon pilot work identifying barriers to family building in the UK to produce a second wave of data, after five years and a new government. This mixed-methods study will gather rich qualitative data on people’s desires and constraints when planning for children. That data is used to design a discrete-choice experiment, administered to a nationally-representative sample to quantify the relative value of the barriers identified.
Findings will be relayed to the public through media with which I have experience; print, radio, television, and podcasting, and will be showcased through collaborative public-engagement events to provide aspirant parents with opportunities to reduce the barriers they face.
Dr Daniel Smith
MCF26\260265
'John Donne in Venice: A Study of the Burley Manuscript'
King’s College London
£144,461.22
This project reveals that John Donne (1572–1631), one of early modern England’s most influential poets, travelled to Venice in 1605–06, during a turbulent moment in Anglo-Catholic relations.
Based on an analysis of the Burley Manuscript, a seventeenth-century miscellany compiled at England’s Venetian embassy, this study establishes 35 letters as sent by or to Donne. This corpus of texts – the largest addition to Donne’s canon since his death – provides a wealth of evidence about Donne’s career, his entanglement in English diplomacy, and his literary influence.
The research reveals Donne’s Italian travels as a crucial chapter in his life, uncovers their influence on his literary and polemical style, and situates the manuscript within broader networks of Anglo-Venetian political, religious, and textual exchange.
The work will culminate in a monograph for a leading publisher, an open-access digital output, and public engagement opportunities, reshaping understanding of Donne, religion, politics, and textual circulation.
Dr Milena Tripkovic
MCF26\260183
'The Criminal Citizen: Migration, Belonging, and Punishment'
University of Edinburgh
£152,000.00
The research explores recent changes in the use of penal power towards citizens, as full members of political communities. To do so, the research examines contemporary penal instruments used specifically against citizens and shows how such instruments have both expanded in recent decades, but have also become unusually severe, hostile, and exclusionary.
As a result, the distinction between citizens and non-citizens in respect of the state’s use of penal power against them, which had previously protected the former category from rejection and expulsion, is becoming increasingly blurry.
By focusing on citizenship deprivation on penal and security grounds in Western Europe, the book explores the types, dynamics, causes and – based on the preceding analysis – the normative foundations of such practices.
The book’s original argument traces these recent changes in the use of penal power towards citizens back to the migration-induced changing ethnic composition of post-Second World War European states.
Professor Martin Weidner
MCF26\260211
'Randomness and Identification in Economics: Bridging Technical Methods and Conceptual Understanding'
University College London
£113,251.55
Modern economics relies heavily on diverse data sources and advanced statistical tools, yet often underexamines what those tools actually mean. What does a confidence interval represent, and when is it appropriate to report one?
When we say a parameter is "identified," what exactly are we claiming? This project addresses two foundational issues:
(1) how to interpret randomness---distinguishing "external" sources (e.g. sampling, measurement error) from "internal" ones (e.g. unobserved heterogeneity, uncertainty about deterministic processes); and
(2) the multiple meanings of identification---from mathematical uniqueness to causal interpretation. These distinctions shape whether confidence intervals have frequentist validity or reflect epistemic uncertainty, and whether "identification" implies a causal claim or a descriptive pattern.
The project will develop a unified framework connecting randomness and identification, clarify the assumptions behind common inferential practices, and produce accessible resources to support teaching, applied research, and methodological clarity across the discipline.
Dr James Whitehead
MCF26\260080
'Representing Schizophrenia: Psychiatry, Literature, and Culture since 1911'
Liverpool John Moores University
£129,341.05
This project examines literary representations of schizophrenia across a long century from the term’s primary emergence in 1911 to the present.
It covers in particular:
1) appropriations of schizophrenia (or what was historically thought to be schizophrenia) by writers and artists of the avant-garde, in English and in English translation, through modernism and postmodernism to contemporary writing, appropriations which swiftly diverged from the clinical use and understanding of the concept, and indeed the lived experience of the condition;
2) varied representations in broader popular literary culture which identified a wide range of divided selves and minds as schizophrenic, for very varied reasons, again swiftly diverging from primary clinical and psychiatric uses; and
3) the debates around the concept of schizophrenia (as often political and philosophical as psychiatric) which influenced these patterns of representation.
Dr Daniel Yon
MCF26\260127
'Original Thinking'
Birkbeck, University of London
£140,796.25
Imagination is at the heart of our distinctively human lives. But psychology and neuroscience suggest that we may need to rethink how we think imagination works.
In this project, I will combine my expertise as a scientist and an author, interweaving the latest scientific perspectives on imagination to produce a non-fiction book for a broad general readership.
This book will reveal the implications that new theories and new results have for human memory, morality, creativity, decision making; and how we imagine our personal futures and the future of humanity as a whole.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.