Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards 2025-26
Dr Asma Alfar
PFSS26\260086
‘Enduring Survival: Palestinian Women’s Lived Experiences under Israeli Siege and War in Gaza’
Goldsmiths, University of London
£310,832.28
This research project investigates the everyday lives, survival strategies, and emotional resilience of Palestinian women in Gaza during the ongoing Israeli siege and war. Drawing on interviews, digital ethnography, and collaborative storytelling, it explores how women navigate life under conditions of displacement, infrastructural collapse, and profound loss. The study also highlights the forms of care, resistance, and future-making that emerge in response to these hardships. As one of the earliest academic studies focused specifically on women’s lived experiences during the current war in Gaza, it offers a unique insider perspective: I am a Palestinian woman originally from Gaza with lived experience of refuge and displacement. The project challenges the way Western media and humanitarian discourses often erase or misrepresent Palestinian women, and instead centres their voices and agency. It aims to contribute to wider public understanding, influence policy, and lay the foundation for future research and advocacy.
Dr Olympia Campbell
PFSS26\260087
‘Evolutionary causes and consequences of cousin marriage’
University of Cambridge
£423,127.78
In 1870 Charles Darwin urged Parliament to collect data on cousin marriage, noting that objections to it rested on “no direct evidence”. Over 150 years later, despite work on its health risks, we still know little about why cousin marriage arises, persists, or how it shapes society. Yet around 10% of the world’s population is consanguineously married, with rates reaching 40–50% in some regions. This project combines genetics, ethnography, and survey data to provide the first comprehensive evolutionary account of this important yet poorly understood practice. Project 1 combines modern and ancient DNA with cross-cultural data to test hypotheses about the ecological drivers of cousin marriage. Project 2 examines whether cousin marriage is associated with kin-based support in contemporary Britain. Project 3 explores its consequences for marital autonomy. The results will advance understanding of a practice argued to underpin cross-cultural variation in psychology, morality, and even economic development.
Dr Nicolò Campodonico
PFSS26\260018
‘Virgil Unfinished. Completing a Classic from Antiquity to the Renaissance.’
University College London (UCL)
£393,564.29
Virgil’s "Aeneid" is a rare case of a literary work that became canonical despite remaining unfinished. This project examines how ancient and modern readers responded to its incompleteness and attempted to supplement it. I will first analyse additions completing the unfinished verses in the poem, attested by ancient authors and found in medieval manuscripts, as forms of collaborative engagement with Virgil’s text. I will then consider ancient debates concerning the posthumous edition of the "Aeneid", arguing that their emphasis on Virgil’s concern with the unfinished poem justified interventions to complete it. Finally, I will discuss the ‘thirteenth books’ of the "Aeneid" written by the humanists Vegio and Decembrio as sequels that develop plotlines left unresolved. Integrating philology, literary criticism, labour and reception studies, the project interprets these interventions as reading strategies blurring the boundaries between author and audience, and offers new perspectives on textual authority in the classical tradition.
Dr Jose Ignacio Carrasco
PFSS26\260017
‘Modelling Irregular Migration: AI-Augmented Agent-Based and Microsimulation Approaches’
University of Oxford
£455,850.44
Irregular migration poses major social challenges, yet its underlying dynamics remain poorly understood due to limited data and methods. This project develops new computational approaches to study how migrants lose legal status after entering lawfully, and the population-level implications of such ‘deflections into irregularity’. Two complementary strands of modelling are proposed. The first builds agent-based simulations, enhanced with machine-learning decision rules, to capture how migrants and institutions interact, adapt, and learn from peers. The second applies microsimulation to longitudinal data, estimating transition probabilities into irregularity and generating scenarios under different policy, labour market, and demographic conditions. Linking individual decision-making with aggregate outcomes, and applying models to Europe, the UK, and the United States, the project will advance knowledge of migration processes, contribute to computational social science, and provide evidence to inform policy debates on regularisation and governance.
Dr Amna Chaudhry
PFSS26\260088
‘Resilient Organisations in Climate-Vulnerable Contexts’
Royal Holloway, University of London
£349,354.00
This project investigates how organisations in climate-vulnerable contexts mobilise, adapt, and sustain action in times of crisis. As extreme weather events intensify, state capacity is often overwhelmed, placing philanthropic and civil society organisations at the forefront of disaster response. Drawing on recent cases such as the 2022 and 2025 floods in Pakistan, the study examines how organisational resilience is built, disrupted, and maintained under conditions of uncertainty and scarcity. By combining ethnographic fieldwork with comparative organisational analysis, the research seeks to advance theory on resilience, crisis management, and organising beyond the state. It will contribute to organisational scholarship by uncovering how adaptive capacity, collaboration, and innovation emerge in high-pressure environments, while also generating practical insights for philanthropic actors and policymakers engaged in climate disaster response. Ultimately, the project positions climate-vulnerable settings as critical sites for rethinking core questions in organisational theory.
Dr Pedro del Valle-Inclán
PFSS26\260077
‘Rules, Models, and Categoricity’
University of St Andrews
£328,748.86
According to moderate inferentialism, the meaning of logical expressions is determined by the rules governing their use. The position, though compelling, faces a powerful objection: on many natural ways of understanding what 'use' and 'determined by' amount to, our inferential use of logical terms does not determine their standard meanings. This is known as Carnap’s Problem.
This projects aims to get a clearer view of Carnap's Problem, its solutions, and their consequences. The first goal is to present a philosophically motivated account of the formulation of Carnap’s Problem. The second goal is to propose a new solution to Carnap’s Problem for first- and second-order logical expressions. The third goal is to use the resulting account of logical terms to address a long-standing challenge in philosophy of mathematics, concerning whether mathematical expressions have determinate referents.
Dr Rachel Dishington
PFSS26\260055
‘Constructing engineers: historical geographies of engineering training for nineteenth-century India’
University of Nottingham
£358,628.18
Civil engineering is fundamentally geographical: it connects knowledge, power, and the material environment. Emerging alongside imperial expansion and serving to materially demonstrate authority through territorial control, engineering epistemologies and practices were profoundly shaped by physical and cultural geographies. Educational sites were key locations where otherwise implicit expectations of what it means to be an engineer were articulated, and the boundaries of professional identity were established. Using archival methods, this research analyses engineering knowledges, explicit and hidden curricula, and the development of professional identities among engineers training for the Indian Public Works Department. It compares three engineering colleges established in the nineteenth century, one in England and two in India. The research deepens understanding of links between engineering and empire, demonstrates how training sites shaped technical practice and professional identity, and extends conceptual and theoretical understanding of relationships between people, infrastructure and environments.
Dr Tosin Durodola
PFSS26\260045
‘Born in Exile: Youth, Statelessness, and the Afterlives of Displacement’
School of Advanced Study, University of London
£306,252.00
Across Africa, children of refugees are coming of age in exile, often without having crossed a border. When host states withdraw refugee status from their parents, these youth inherit legal erasure without protection, documentation, or a path to citizenship. While recent studies have begun to explore how first-generation refugees confront the loss of refugee status and the pressure to return, surprisingly little is known about the second-generation living with the afterlife of these decisions. To examine this neglected phenomenon, the project shifts analytical focus from refugee status to post-refugeehood and statelessness. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory research with Liberian youth in Nigeria, it examines how they navigate exclusion through informal documentation, creative self-representation, and alternative claims to belonging in the absence of state or humanitarian recognition. Ultimately, the study will develop an intergenerational understanding of displacement that moves beyond status-based approaches, positioning post-refugeehood as a critical lens in refugee studies.
Dr Jean David Eynard
PFSS26\260120
‘The Atomic Word: A Cultural History of Monosyllables’
Queen Mary University of London
£353,896
This project explores the surprising cultural history of the smallest words in English—monosyllables—from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. These short words have long been celebrated as the pure essence of the English language, being linked to clarity, moral truth, and national identity. Yet they have also been recurrently dismissed as crude, foreign, childish, or unintelligent. Drawing on a broad range of literary and non-literary sources, this study traces how writers and thinkers have discussed or deliberately used monosyllables to express or challenge ideas about nation, class, gender, and taste. By assembling the first historical taxonomy of monosyllables in English and recovering the critical attention that they have received, this project thus foregrounds the monosyllable as the elemental building block of language—hovering on the threshold between noise and meaning—and as a potent site where markers of social distinction have been repeatedly inscribed and contested.
Dr Frederick Feilden
PFSS26\260096
‘From Commons to Enclosure: Using Japanese Graphic Narratives to Chart an Age of Adaptation, 1868–1886’
University of Cambridge
£363,500.80
While Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century is typically characterised as a translation culture shaped by Western influence, this project revisits the home-grown strategies of adaptation that remained a driving force behind the evolution of Japanese literature. Focusing on woodblock-printed graphic narratives, which combined text and image to engage mass readerships, my research interrogates creativity at the cusp of modernity, charting alternative approaches that blurred the lines between startling innovation and outright plagiarism. Forgoing the traditional emphasis on elite, “modern” literature, I reposition adaptation as the best lens for understanding the large-scale cultural shifts of the 1870’s and 1880’s—specifically the move from a free-flowing “cultural commons” to a publishing landscape increasingly enclosed by intellectual property. Through close analysis of three underexplored case studies, I will highlight how these works reimagined diverse sources, prompting a re-evaluation of originality, authorship, and value in Japan’s literary and media history.
Dr Arianna Gentilini
PFSS26\260022
‘Unlocking missed pharmaceutical innovation through strategic repurposing in women’s health
Imperial College London’
£580,176.00
Most experimental medicines never reach patients: fewer than one in ten compounds that enter human trials is eventually approved for clinical use. Many projects are abandoned not because the science fails but because company priorities shift, trial designs are inadequate, markets look uncertain, or budgets tighten. Yet we lack metrics for the socially valuable innovation left behind when projects are discontinued or never explored in alternative indications. Using women's health as use case, the project builds a longitudinal evidence base to quantify missed innovation and identify where
compounds are abandoned for strategic rather than scientific reasons. It then applies natural-language processing to identify repurposing candidates and models how concrete policy instruments, exclusivity extensions, fast tracks, patent pools, and public–private partnerships, shift repurposing probabilities. This fellowship aims to develop a new field at the intersection of innovation economics and health policy, namely the study of “missed innovation” in drug development.
Dr Eleanor Godwin
PFSS26\260036
‘Environmental Regulatory Collapse and Corporate Environmental Crime in the UK: A Case Study Analysis of Water and Chemical Pollution’
Queen Mary University of London
£353,914.37
Environmental regulation in the UK has collapsed at a critical juncture, just as the need to safeguard ecosystems has become more urgent than ever. Regulatory enforcement actions have declined dramatically in the past decade, reflecting chronic underfunding, austerity, and a deregulatory agenda that has hollowed out the Environment Agency. As a result, polluting industries operate with near impunity, as the risk of enforcement becomes symbolic. This research investigates the collapse of the UK’s environmental regulatory state through in-depth case studies of water and chemical pollution scandals. Focusing on wastewater treatment plant failures and chemical pharmaceutical pollution in Tideswell Brook, PCB contamination in Cheshire and North Wales, and industrial toxins linked to marine loss in Teesside, the project examines the political, economic, and institutional drivers of regulatory failure. Using legislative analysis, stakeholder interviews, and environmental data, it aims to inform debates on the rebuilding regulatory capacity and 'ecological modernisation'.
Dr Fiona Gogescu
PFSS26\260008
‘Educational Stratification and the Construction of Aspirations in Vocational Education’
University College London (UCL)
£410,113.29
This project explores the relationship between processes of educational stratification and the aspirations of students pursuing vocational upper-secondary education in England, Germany, and Romania. Students in initial vocational education and training (iVET), often perceived as less academically capable than those in general education, might internalise or resist deficit narratives related to their allocation in lower-ranked educational pathways. This research will use mixed methods to investigate how pupils understand their allocation to vocational trajectories, as well as the educational and occupational opportunities available to them. The research design combines surveys of iVET students with semi-structured interviews with both students and their teachers. By integrating the perspectives of students and teachers from three countries with different systems of educational stratification, the project offers novel insights into the interplay between institutional arrangements, deficit narratives, and educational inequality.
Dr Laura Havers
PFSS26\260064
‘Rethinking the measurement and modelling of psychotic symptomatology in the context of social-structural inequalities’
King's College London
£476,515.08
Psychotic symptomatology (e.g., hearing voices, paranoia) occurs along a continuum from everyday experiences to severe mental illness. Despite evidence that marginalised groups are disproportionately affected, we know little about how specific symptoms are shaped by and interpreted within diverse social contexts, particularly where social-structural disadvantages intersect. Dominant approaches often assume uniform manifestation across populations, embedding this in measurement and modelling and obscuring lived intersectional experience. Using existing data, this fellowship will (i) map intersectional symptom-level patterns and advance continuum hypotheses in a social-structural context; (ii) critically review evidence on symptom development, its social-structural determinants, and the methodological and epistemic assumptions underpinning it; and (iii) advance equity-informed statistical approaches grounded in lived experience, intersectionality, and social theory. Rather than treating measurement tools and quantitative methods as neutral, this project will address how existing practices reproduce biases and reify inequities, laying a critical foundation for advancing theory and fairer, more accountable research.
Dr Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur
PFSS26\260049
‘The Personal is Algorithmic: Data, Care Work & the Platform Gaze’
Institute of Development Studies
£360,124.84
This research examines how digital platforms transform care work by converting intimate, relational practices into transitory services. Drawing upon feminist theory and critical digital studies, the study investigates tensions between care as an affective practice rooted in human connection; and care labour commodified through platform capitalism. The research contends that the 'gigification' of care work/domestic work erodes relational dimensions of caring, with implications for both workers and recipients.
This research employs mixed methods from the qualitative tradition of research. Tools would include: photovoice, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews to capture experiences of platform-mediated care and domestic workers.
A critical component focuses on visibilising data brokerage practices—examining what data platforms collect, how it is brokered, why, and subsequent implications for workers, employers, and platforms themselves. This investigation reveals how personal care interactions become data commodities, further distancing care from its fundamentally relational nature whilst creating new forms of surveillance and control.
Dr Rony Hirschhorn
PFSS26\260028
‘Exploring the Richness of Conscious Perception’
University of Sussex
£342,198.74
Looking at the world around us, what do we see? This fundamental question has long divided researchers: some argue that visual consciousness is rich, while others claim it is sparse and that apparent richness is illusory. This project suggests that both sides are asking the wrong question. Combining theory, large-scale data from the Perception Census (33,000+ participants), and novel experiments, I will develop a refined framework for understanding visual experience as neither uniformly “rich” nor “sparse”, but as comprising multiple independent dimensions that evolve differently over time. I will: (1) identify distinct dimensions of perceptual richness; (2) test whether these dimensions function independently and how they combine to generate global judgments of richness; and (3) investigate how richness evolves in time and with volitional control. The project will therefore transform a binary dispute into a tractable multidimensional account, advancing theories of consciousness and our understanding of individual differences in experience.
Dr Katie Joice
PFSS26\260051
‘Disability and the Developing Child in Postwar Britain: an Emotional History’
Queen Mary University of London
£360,527.56
How did the rise of psychological expertise, with its emphasis on emotional health, transform the lives of disabled children in postwar Britain? Employing methodologies from the history of emotions, the history of the senses and the new history of experience, this project investigates the troubled emotional landscape that emerged from the encounter between disabled children and the doctors, psychologists and social scientists who treated and observed them, in the aftermath of three major medical crises. Using newly found archives and unstudied expert literature, the project will focus on three pivotal, closely linked case-studies: the blindness epidemic of the late 1950s, the thalidomide scandal of the early 1960s, and the campaign to liberate disabled children from lifelong hospital care during the 1970s. My inquiry reveals the hidden role played by the emotions of children, parents, researchers, politicians and the public in rewriting psychological theory, overturning social policy and reshaping care practice.
Dr Kamil Karczewski
PFSS26\260044
‘Claiming Sexual Minority: A Transatlantic History of a Political Concept, 1921–1981.’
University of Oxford
£412,858.17
Claiming Sexual Minority is a transnational intellectual history of a category central to modern culture and politics. The project challenges the view that the notion of ‘sexual minority’ originated in the post-1945 Anglosphere by tracing its earlier emergence in interwar East-Central Europe, where queer activists drew on nationalism and minority rights to frame same-sex desire as a collective identity. Using sources in Czech, German, Polish, Slovak, and English, the study reconstructs how sexual minoritisation was shaped by international law and gendered power, how the concept crossed borders, and how it provoked nationalist backlash. It then examines how the idea resurfaced in the postwar Anglosphere through migration, textual transmission, or analogous conditions. Combining archival research, discourse analysis, and digital methods, the project shows how ‘sexual minority’ enabled mobilisation while imposing limits, and what it has meant to claim and be claimed as a sexual minority.
Dr Hope Kent
‘No child left behind? The over-representation of children with acquired brain injury in youth justice systems.’
Aston University
£347,506.02
Children with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) are significantly over-represented in the youth justice system – between 50 and 87% of children in youth justice settings have an ABI. This project aims to tackle this social justice issue by examining the intersectional pathways that contribute to this over-representation. There is emerging evidence that these children are excluded from school at disproportionate rates, creating a ‘school to prison pipeline’. This systemic educational disadvantage - shaped by disability, poverty, ethnicity, and care status - accumulates into criminal justice involvement.
This project will deliver the first population-level evidence in England on how our education system contributes to the criminalisation of children with ABI - and will inform solutions to reverse this trend and design more equitable, inclusive systems. It will achieve this by using linked administrative data from NHS England, the Department for Education, and the Ministry of Justice for the first time.
Dr Edward Marshall
PFSS26\260033
‘Building choral sound from the ground up: phonetic convergence in choral singing’
University of Cambridge
£364,216.00
Successful choral sound is assumed to result from singers adapting to each other musically. Another aspect of choral singing is that singers must produce a text simultaneously. We know that there are regional choral accents and that the accents of classical choral singing in the UK have changed over the twentieth century, reflecting changes in prestigious forms of speech. However, little is known about how choral accents are created through singer-to-singer phonetic convergence. Building on my interdisciplinary doctoral research on change in regional choral accents, I am developing a holistic model which uniquely integrates the intersecting musicological, sociolinguistic and phonetic factors which together account for choral sound: Conductor, Own accent, Referee design, Accommodation, Attention-to-speech and Technique (CORAAT). This project will work together with choral singers and directors to design and implement a series of novel experiments addressing the key question: do singers converge in their phonetic realisation when singing together?
Dr Sam Mason
PFSS26\260117
‘A Defence of Moral Sentimentalism’
University of Oxford
£420,123.00
Moral sentimentalists argue that emotions, such as guilt, resentment, indignation, admiration, pride, and shame, play centrally important roles in morality. The aim of my research project is to provide a comprehensive defence of sentimentalism concerning moral concepts, properties, and knowledge. This defence will cover both evaluative moral concepts and properties (such as moral goodness, badness, virtue, and vice) and deontic moral concepts and properties (such as moral wrongness, permissibility, and requirement). Discussions of moral sentimentalism often have a narrow focus—for example, on whether emotions can help us to acquire moral knowledge, or on whether moral facts are essentially related to emotions. My research will aim to show that sentimentalist accounts of moral concepts, properties, and knowledge are not only individually plausible, but also mutually supportive.
Dr Jonathan McAllister
PFSS26\260043
‘Performing Politics: The Avant-Garde Theatre of the Cartel des Quatre, 1919–1939’
University of Nottingham
£337,438.13
Between 1919 and 1939, four actor-directors known collectively as the Cartel des Quatre transformed avant-garde theatre in Paris by training ‘new actors’ in innovative European performance practices. Simultaneously, governments across Europe responded to modernity through enacting social policies underpinned by fascist, communist, and liberalist ideologies to produce ‘new humans’. These theatre directors and policy makers across the continent shared the underlying conviction that by disciplining bodies they could reform culture and society. Despite recent scholarly interest in twentieth-century actor training, this intersection between theatrical and political body cultures remains understudied. To address this, I will take the Cartel’s training regimes as a case study to investigate how interwar experiments into performance techniques related to political attempts to regulate bodies. This will advance our understanding of the body cultures of interwar Europe, including the process of bodily politicisation and the shifting affinities or resistances of embodied cultural practices to radical ideologies.
Dr Georgia Meyer
PFSS26\260121
‘On Digital Heterotopias: Tracing Ideologies in Decentralising Infrastructures’
London School of Economics and Political Science
£384,524.00
The rate of technological innovation continues to outstrip the pace of societal sensemaking. This risks misidentification of both risks and opportunities at a time of grave socioeconomic, environmental and geopolitical insecurity. An arc towards decentralisation in data infrastructures and concurrent developments in personalised Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents possibilities for citizen-stewarded innovation, of a nature not previously imaginable. Yet understanding the conflicting ideologies materialised in discrete, and overlapping, layers of software / hardware architectures, remains understudied. This research examines the structure of the ideologies (goals, corresponding principles, materialisation in architectures) underpinning the development of decentralised, personalised AI and corresponding data infrastructures. It uses a novel discourse analysis approach, structurational discourse analysis, which advances understanding of how values are embedded in distinct technical artefacts, by tracing the rationale used by designers and developers - expressed as rhetorical enthymemes. This research builds on techniques and theories developed during my PhD research.
Dr Ekaterina Mizrokhi
PFSS26\260010
‘From Ruin to Resource: Grassroots Revaluations of Soviet Modernist Architecture since 2022’
University of Bristol
£370,010.13
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, debates over the future of Soviet-era architecture have intensified across the region. This project examines the widely maligned, yet ubiquitous buildings of mundane Soviet modernism. They are often demolished by local authorities, framed as decolonisation in some contexts, urban renewal in others. However, this drive for demolition increasingly conflicts with the overlapping crises of war, displacement, and climate emergency. Amidst these tensions, a growing number of grassroots cultural initiatives are seeking alternatives to demolition through repair and reinvention. Through oral histories with leaders of such initiatives across Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Russia, the project examines how a common urban inheritance is reimagined in settings shaped by divergent sociopolitical pressures. Situating these efforts within global debates on sustainability and contested heritage, the resulting monograph—Maligned Modern: Architecture and Aftermath—will examine how Soviet architecture is being reframed from ruin to resource under the compounding pressures of polycrisis.
Dr Hongwei Mo
PFSS26\260042
‘AI in Financial Decision Making: Micro Evidence from Daily Professional Usage’
University of Oxford
£457,795.12
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how financial professionals process information and make decisions, yet direct evidence on whether it complements, substitutes for, or biases professional judgement is limited due to data constraints. I exploit a proprietary dataset from a leading AI service provider that records the daily interactions of mutual fund managers and financial analysts with AI tools, including queries, functionalities used, and search history. This granularity enables me to open the “black box” of AI use in the financial industry. I examine how AI influences investment performance among fund managers and research quality among analysts, and whether it induces herding or overreliance on algorithmic outputs. I establish causality using a randomised rollout of access to a more advanced AI agent. The project will provide novel individual-level evidence on how AI reshapes decision-making in financial markets, with implications for market efficiency, systemic risk, and AI governance.
Dr Robert O'Sullivan
PFSS26\260029
‘Empire, Citizenship and Race: Mathew Carey and the Making of Irish America’
University of Oxford
£412,628.17
This project provides a major reconsideration of the emergence and consolidation of Irish America before the mass-immigration of the Famine generation, through a study of the career and legacy of Mathew Carey (1760-1838), the Catholic Irish-born publisher, philanthropist and humanitarian. The project is structured around the key causes that Carey championed, and uses his career to contextualise the significance of several reform movements in the United States and the Atlantic world. The project uses Carey as a vantage point for exploring the Irish immigrant experience of the early-national and Jacksonian United States and his legacy and influence on subsequent generations of Irish immigrants to the United States. I situate Carey’s life and career as a foundational moment in the political, diplomatic and cultural relationship between Ireland and the United States since the American founding,and in the emergence of a trans-national, Anglophobic Irish-American subculture.
Dr Leone Pecorini Goodall
PFSS26\260110
‘Maternal kinship ties in Early Medieval Islam c. 600-1000’
University of Edinburgh
£369,231.25
This project analyses the importance of matrilineality (kinship with one’s mother or mother's family) in the early Medieval Islamic world (600-1000), arguing that the patriarchal norms attributed to the formative centuries of Islam - commonly associated with the religion by modern commentators - were a product of scholars writing after three centuries of dynastic rule that cemented the importance of paternal kinship. Using a combination of prosopography (the study of individuals as a group) and close reading of three sets of underutilised sources I will demonstrate that maternal kinship was fundamental in tribal identity as visible in political decision-making, poetry and scholarly production. By establishing that maternal kinship ties were more important than the field recognises, my project invites the revision of the social history of the period, introduces new source bases, and centres the history of women and mothers in the formative centuries of Islam.
Dr David Rischel
PFSS26\260111
‘Territory, resources, and land use: A resource egalitarian approach’
Newcastle University
£324,125.53
This project in applied normative political philosophy develops and defends a novel model of territorial justice, offering a framework for the fair use and control of land. The project first establishes the model, exploring what principles ought to guide the distribution of land. It then investigates how these principles bear on global issues of resource extraction, arguing that the globally advantaged have duties to compensate those burdened by natural resource extraction. The project moves on to apply these principles to domestic issues surrounding residential land use, interrogating whether existing residents have rights to control the development of their local area, focusing on housing construction in urban areas. Here, it argues that the control rights of residents are significantly constrained by the interests of non-residents in housebuilding. Finally, the project considers what policies would best uphold these principles, proposing that this is best done by implementing a land-value-tax on land.
Dr Deborah Russo
PFSS26\260034
‘Falling through the cracks: the long-term imprisonment of women in Scotland’
University of Glasgow
£319,275.00
Prison numbers in the Scottish female estate are rising, with a significant increase in long-term imprisonment: 107 women are currently serving sentences of four years or more, including 48 life sentences. This study will provide the first comprehensive socio-legal account of women’s long-term imprisonment in Scotland, combining legal analysis with qualitative research into women’s lived experiences. It will examine whether existing sentencing provisions, parole processes and opportunities for progression adequately respond to women’s gendered and life-course circumstances.
By revealing both systemic drivers and their human consequences, the research will generate an urgently needed evidence base to inform more equitable sentencing, parole practice and penal policy. My professional and academic experience working with both women and indeterminate-sentence prisoners uniquely motivates and positions me to undertake this work, reflecting my longstanding commitment to improving outcomes for those most affected by long-term incarceration.
Dr Michael Sharkey
PFSS26\260118
‘Rewriting Mao: System, Ideology and Attention in English Translations of Mao Zedong’
Queen's University Belfast
£337,825.00
This project explores, from a systemic perspective, the genesis and impact of competing representations of Mao Zedong in English translation. It argues that translations serve the goals – and reflect the world-views – of social systems. Competing representations of Mao encode systemic biases and preoccupations in a form that appears – erroneously – to be a direct report of ‘what Mao said.’ I explore this idea with reference to four different social systems: the Chinese state propaganda system, the US military and intelligence systems, the North American academic system, and contemporary online communities centred around Marxism/Maoism. I show how translations produced within these four systems attend to Mao differently, and as a result create radically different portrayals of the Chinese leader and his ideas. These representations are imbued with differing forms of authority, influencing how Mao is perceived in the English-speaking world.
Dr Nikki Sheth
PFSS26\260100
‘Nocturnal Soundscapes in UK UNESCO Biosphere Reserves: Immersive Technologies in Sound’
University of Greenwich
£317,469.24
Sound allows us to reconnect to nature. Through field recording, soundscape composition and immersive technologies, this site-specific research project explores interdisciplinary research on nocturnal sounds across three of the most remote UNESCO Man and Biosphere reserves in the UK. These sites are celebrated for their natural environment and unique biodiversity and a great number of these species are nocturnal. There is limited scientific understanding and public awareness of these vital nocturnal ecosystems that are at risk due to climate change. The research project will explore the transposition of techniques and approaches from electroacoustic music and leading immersive audio to contribute to enriching the sonic representations of nocturnal soundscapes, to benefit analytical understandings of ecology and these endangered biospheres and to address problems of ecological disaster. It will create awareness and greater understanding of biodiversity and changing ecosystems, contribute to ecoacoustic monitoring efforts and enhance public engagement with biosphere reserve sites.
Dr Bruno Shirley
PFSS26\260059
‘The Emotions and Ethics of Buddhist Narrative across Second Millennium Sri Lanka’
University of Edinburgh
£368,607.81
This project examines Sinhala-language renditions of the Vessantara-jātaka: a narrative of the Buddha in a prior life, in which he demonstrates his selfless generosity by giving his own children away into slavery. Despite—or perhaps because of—the tale’s ethical complexity, it became a defining feature of Buddhist cultures throughout Southern Asia, and has been the subject of much academic inquiry. Yet still unstudied are the novel retellings of Vessantara’s story throughout second millennium Sri Lanka: from an early scholastic commentary on the authoritative Pali-language rendition; through prose and poetic retellings informed by Sanskrit literary theory; to modern anti-colonial theatre of the twentieth century. By attending to how these literary works depicted the character of Vessantara and his moral choices, the project will trace how idealised visions of masculinity, kingliness, and religious virtue shifted over time—and how narrative itself served as a vehicle for the reinvention of religious practice.
Dr Owen Stampton
PFSS26\260105
‘The New-Intellectual Theatre: Writing and Staging Drama in Early Twentieth Century Korea’
University of Sheffield
£307,549.00
This project explores the rise of drama (희곡 戱曲) as a new literary genre and the birth of the theatre (극장 劇場) as new cultural space in the early decades of 20th-century Korea. Drama was to be read as literature, watched as a play and performed by actors. The Korean new-intellectual class came to see and experiment with drama as a persuasive tool to spread ideas on modern living to the masses. Drawing on emerging scholarship on theatre, heterotopic space and the actor-audience relationship, this project investigates how theatre, and writing for it, inspired new perspectives on societal progress and facilitated public debate on a range of pressing contemporary issues that Korean intellectuals saw as stumbling blocks on the nation’s path towards modernity.
Dr Holly Elizabeth Anne Sutherland
PFSS26\260091
‘Autistic conceptualisations of lying: A mixed methods study of the (dis)honesty of non-literal language and social talk’
University of Cambridge
£377,493.00
Emerging research suggests autistic people may view a wider range of talk as dishonest than nonautistic people, including small talk, white lies, sarcasm, irony, and figurative language. Such differences in how (dis)honesty is understood may contribute to interactional difficulties between autistic and nonautistic people. But, despite honesty judgements being fundamental to communication, this has not been studied outside neurotypical populations. My project will address this gap using a mixed-methods approach. Study 1 will compare autistic and nonautistic judgements of the (dis)honesty of forms of social talk such as small talk, white lies, and loophole use. Study 2 will extend this to figurative and ambiguous language. Study 3 will use interviews with autistic adults to explore their perspectives on honesty, contextualising findings from the first two studies. By centring autistic perspectives, this research will clarify how (dis)honesty is conceptualised across neurotypes, with broad implications for interventions, support, and understanding.
Dr Jasmine Vieri
PFSS26\260070
‘Past Pathways to Production Centralisation’
University of Cambridge
£432,484.80
While past economies offer unique deep-time perspectives on production and exchange dynamics across human societies, archaeology currently lacks systematic methods to measure trends like economic centralisation. This project presents three new quantitative measures of production standardisation – specialisation, concentration, and scale. Together, they can provide novel insights on how production centralisation emerged in past societies. Focusing on the chemical signatures of pre-Aztec and Aztec ceramics (AD 700-1520), I will use these indices to test competing hypotheses on pathways to production centralisation: was it a) primarily driven by states and taxation, b) pulled by markets and competitive dynamics, or shaped by other processes that have not yet been considered? The results of this project will shed new light on the Aztec economy, inform broader debates about socio-economic transitions in past societies, and offer new quantitative approaches to the study of production organisation.
Dr Sophie Whitehead
PFSS26\260073
‘Interrogating the ‘education imperative’ as a response to online misogyny in schools’
London School of Economics and Political Science
£383,398.00
Digital technologies are transforming the landscape of sexual and gender-based harm amongst young people. Social media algorithms increasingly expose them to misogynistic content, while platforms enable new forms of harm, such as image-based sexual abuse and so-called deepfake pornography. In response, there is a common call to “educate”, with school-based interventions promoted as a key solution. My project critically interrogates that imperative through a year-long ethnographic study in a London secondary school. It examines how online misogyny enters school life, how it intersects with other structural injustices like racism and homophobia, and how educators respond amid relational, institutional, and policy constraints. By exploring this process, the study will shed light on the complexities and challenges of addressing digital gender-based harms in schools. In doing so, it offers an in-depth account of how schools navigate the mounting pressures resulting from online misogyny and surveys the possibilities and limits of pedagogical intervention.
Dr Joseph Williams
PFSS26\260069
‘Malcolm Bradbury and the “serious” novel: creative writing, literary criticism and the archive, 1965-2000’
University of East Anglia
£320,942.54
‘Malcolm Bradbury and the “serious” novel’ is an ambitious research project which seeks to map and understand Malcolm Bradbury’s legacy and the ways in which his creative, critical, and educational work have shaped both Creative Writing pedagogy and the novel as a form in the second half of the twentieth century. The project is centred on Bradbury’s idea of the ‘serious’ novel as a ‘major mode of enquiry’ and the influence of this idea on Bradbury’s students, colleagues, and collaborators, as well as British literary culture more widely. The project will produce a critical biography, a series of oral history interviews, and an archival map of relevant material from the catalogued and uncatalogued archives of Bradbury's vast network of students, colleagues, and friends. By considering the influence of Bradbury’s ‘serious’ novel, the project explores and tests the generic boundaries between the novel and the essay, the creative and the critical.
Dr Emma-Catherine Wilson
PFSS26\260023
‘Self-Deception in Late Medieval English Literature, c. 1350 to 1450’
University of Bristol
£369,028.06
My project investigates how vernacular writers in late medieval England conceptualized and articulated the typically human trait of self-deception. Informed by contemporary philosophical approaches to biased thinking, it explores how these writers probed the limits of human introspection by drawing on both religious discourses on self-knowledge and new literary forms and techniques aimed at encoding subjectivity in narrative. Focusing on eight key texts from different genres, I uncover the language, literary traditions, and theological frameworks that writers adapted to conceptualize self-deception and the moral dilemmas that it posed. The project unites literary and philosophical approaches in the conviction that imaginative literature represents a form of epistemological enquiry – and one particularly apt to reveal the subjective and oftentimes self-deceiving nature of human perspective. This study of self-deception intersects with a growing scholarly interest in uncertainty, subjectivity, intentions, moral ethics, and emotional history in the medieval period.
Dr Mengxue Yao
PFSS26\260047
‘Mapping Air Pollution Health Inequalities: An Integrated Assessment Framework for Urban England’
University of Sheffield
£333,095.00
Air pollution is a pervasive environmental health threat, reducing global life expectancy by 2–3 years on average, rising to 8–10 years in severely affected regions, and contributing to nearly one-third of deaths from stroke, heart disease, and lung cancer. These impacts are disproportionately distributed across populations and communities. To systematically assess air pollution-related health inequalities at a regional scale, this project will develop a novel multi-dimensional and intersectional data analytics framework. Focusing on the Yorkshire & Humber, the research integrates high-resolution air quality mapping (PM₂.₅, PM₁₀, O₃, and NO₂), UK Census socioeconomic data, urban form and vegetation data, and linked health datasets. Inequalities will be evaluated across air quality, vulnerability, and governance dimensions using new indicators and indices. An interactive web-based tool will synthesise these insights into maps showing who is most affected, where, and why, enabling targeted, equitable interventions with potential for wider national application.
Dr Xi Zhang
PFSS26\260113
‘Scientific Approaches to Music Style Distinctions: A Case Study Based on Four Chinese Regional Traditions’
Queen Mary University of London
£413,348.36
This project explores musical style distinctions through a case study of four Chinese regional traditions. Using Music Information Retrieval (MIR), I investigate what makes one regional music distinct from another, how its distinctive characteristics can be measured, and the extent to which these characteristics are maintained or vary.
The research examines six elements—melody, pitch, ornamentation, rhythm, metre, and tuning—whose nuances and interactions shape this music yet remain largely unexplored. Employing fieldwork and archival recordings of solo and small-group instrumental performances, I analyse and compare how these elements manifest across four regional traditions and assess how individual performances preserve or transform them.
The project addresses a long-recognised challenge in ethnomusicology and MIR: analysing and comparing regionally grounded musical styles. By developing a scalable analytical framework and curated datasets, it models tacit, performance-based musical knowledge across traditions, contributes to more culturally inclusive MIR, and offers a transferable approach for other musical traditions.
Dr Sergei Zotov
PFSS26\260085
‘Albums of Secrets in the Age of Reason’
University of Cambridge
£376,330.19
My project uncovers a hidden genre of early modern knowledge-making: manuscript albums combining alchemy, medicine, astrology, and magic in visually structured formats. Produced by non-elite practitioners between 1600 and 1800, these handmade books fused allegory with practical instruction, offering tools for healing, speculation, and experiment. Unlike printed treatises or recipe books, they use serial imagery — often with minimal text — to organise knowledge and provoke reflection. This project is the first sustained study of these albums as a distinct epistemic form. Drawing on around 50 examples from England and German-speaking Europe, it investigates how images were used to reason, teach, and remember outside of institutional settings. By tracing their production, use, and circulation, the project offers a new model of vernacular science that challenges top-down narratives of Enlightenment rationality — showing how visual traditions of experimental thought facilitated the combination of imagination and empiricism, belief and technique.
Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.