The British Academy awards eight new Senior Research Fellowships

Exploring the literary and scientific innovations of the early British industrial revolution, understanding interpersonal self-consciousness, and shining a light on the experiences of displaced persons who don’t fit under the definition of ‘refugee’; the British Academy has awarded funding to eight research projects across the UK. 

Altogether the Academy, in association with the Leverhulme Trust and the Thank-Offering to Britain Fund, has awarded eight Senior Research Fellowships totalling £400,000.

The BA/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships are among the Academy’s many funded research schemes, specifically designed to allow established academics to complete a major research project – typically a career-defining work.

The awards relieve individuals from teaching and administration work in order to bring an existing research project to fruition. There is a particular focus on individuals who have worked on a project for a long time but have struggled to complete it due to time constraints.

Each year there are up to eight awards: seven made possible thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, and one occasional award – the Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship – provided by the Association of Jewish Refugees in gratitude for the UK’s support for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.

This year’s Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship goes to Professor Phillip Cole (University of the West of England), whose research project, Global Displacement in the 21st Century: Towards an Ethical Framework, will look at the experiences of displaced persons who do not fit into the definition of a ‘refugee’ and so are rarely discussed within global ethics or political theory. Professor Cole aims to arrive at an ethical framework for understanding these forms of displacement and what makes an ethical response to them. To this end, the project brings these displaced people within the scope of moral and political theory for the first time.

The Senior Research Fellowships scheme has been available for over 30 years and more than 200 scholars have benefitted from it since its inception.

The projects set to receive funding are:

• Southern imagining: a literary history of the far southern hemisphere – Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford)


• Traditional and Ancient Animal Husbandry in the Mediterranean – Professor Paul Halstead (University of Sheffield)


• Philosophy, philosophizing, and the philosopher in 18th-century Britain – Professor James Harris (University of St Andrews)


• Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Networks of Improvement, 1780-1840 – Professor Jon Mee (University of York)


• The Pains and Pleasures of Interpersonal Self-Consciousness – Professor Lucy O'Brien (University College London)


• Early Scottish Uses of European Humanism – Dr Nicola Royan (University of Nottingham)


• Wheatcroft's Written Worlds: Non-Elite Writing in Seventeenth-Century England – Professor Susan Wiseman (Birkbeck, University of London)


• Global Displacement in the 21st Century: Towards an Ethical Framework – Professor Phillip Cole (University of the West of England).