50 new British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships awarded

A record 50 British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships have been awarded to begin in the autumn of 2013. 
 
The scheme, which offers a major career development opportunity for outstanding early career scholars in the humanities and social sciences, is one of the flagship awards offered annually by the Academy. It represents a major investment in research and career development for scholars of great potential at the start of their academic careers. Postdoctoral Fellows are based at UK universities across the country, with awards in this years’ round being taken up at universities from Exeter to Edinburgh and from Cardiff to Roehampton. 

The Postdoctoral Fellowship Award allows scholars three years to concentrate on a major piece of new research, going beyond the work already done for a doctoral thesis, in a university environment where they will also gain teaching experience, training, personal development and mentoring.

Research topics by the 2013 Postdoctoral Fellows cover a wide range from the humanities and social sciences including; young people’s use of their daily time and how this will influence their future employment prospects and family formation; the effects of increasing variability of weather on health and the healthcare sector in the UK, and the ways in which sleep helps human beings convert individual memories into general knowledge. Scholarship will also look at: the wider implications of efforts in India to make 1.3 billion people perfectly identifiable to the state through the Unique Identification or UID project (linking citizens’ biometric details to a unique numerical ID); ‘open access’ and the social boundaries of scientific knowledge; questions of educational aspirations and outcomes for Black Caribbean young men in England; questions of multiculturalism, and how new forms of heritage languages develop in multicultural metropolises such as London; as well as the influence of the latest technology of social media and tag clouds on artistic production and spectatorship, and how to develop a theoretical framework to help overcome management challenges faced by firms working in mobile device application markets.

Many of the research awards have an international dimension. The 50 new Postdoctoral Fellows join a community of over 950 current award-holders and alumni of the scheme, which has been running since the first awards were made in 1986.
 
To find out more and see a list of the award-holders please visit the Postdoctoral Fellowships webpage.