Senior Research Fellowships announced for 10 established scholars

The British Academy has awarded funding to 10 established academics across the UK, allowing them to complete a major research project.

Altogether the Academy – in partnership with the Leverhulme Trust, and using generous legacy gifts from the late Professor Donald Winch FBA, and Professor Michael Dockrill – has awarded 10 Senior Research Fellowships worth a total of £547,000.

By relieving individuals from teaching and administrative work, the BA/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships help bring existing research projects – typically a career-defining work – to fruition. The awards focus particularly on individuals who have worked on a project for a long time with little or no prospect of completing it without the relief from normal academic duties offered by these awards.

The Senior Research Fellowships scheme has been a kite-mark of excellence for over 30 years and more than 200 scholars have benefitted from it since its inception.

The projects set to receive funding are:

Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships

• Whose morality? – Dr Fiona Bloomer (University of Ulster, Senior Lecturer, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences)
• Literary Resurgence: Centre, Periphery, and Gender in the Poetry of Early Qajar Iran – Professor Dominic Brookshaw (University of Oxford, Associate Professor of Persian Literature, Faculty of Oriental Studies)
• Modernism in Ruins: Tristan Murail’s Winter Fragments – Professor Jonathan Cross (University of Oxford, Professor of Musicology, Music)
• Reconceptualising international trade law: In search of a bounded, socially embedded and re-connected regime – Professor James Harrison (University of Warwick, Professor of Law, School of Law)
• Structures of power in the Frankish world: palaces, castles and towers c700-1000 – Professor Simon MacLean (University of St Andrews, Professor of History, History)
• Sex Trafficking: A Contemporary History – Dr Jeanne Morefield (University of Birmingham, Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, Department of Political Science and International Studies)
• Fugitive Ground. Moses Roper's Emancipatory Radicalism, the Black Family and the British Literary Archive – Dr Fionnghuala Sweeney (Newcastle University, Reader in American and Black Atlantic Literature, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics)

Saki Ruth Dockrill Senior Research Fellowship in Contemporary History and International Security Studies 

• British professional services, Eurasian kleptocrats and the transformation of international security in the post-Cold War era – Professor John Heathershaw (University of Exeter, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics)

Michael Dockrill Senior Research Fellowship in British Foreign Policy

• The UK's European diplomacy: from accession to Brexit – Professor Richard Whitman (University of Kent, Professor of Politics and International Relations, School of Politics and International Relations).

Donald Winch Fund Senior Research Fellowship in Intellectual History

• Sarah Bowdich (Lee) 1791-1856: Pioneering Natural Science From Below – Professor Mary Orr (University of St Andrews, Buchanan Chair of French, School of Modern Languages (French))

Professor Simon Swain FBA, Vice President for Research and Higher Education at the British Academy, said:

“We are delighted to announce 10 new highly prestigious Senior Research Fellowships to work on a series of transformative research projects. Even at the best of times, the demands of teaching and administration can seriously limit senior academics’ opportunities to pursue original work – a situation compounded in the last year by the COVID-19 pandemic. These awards will be a great help in addressing this issue by providing our new fellows with precious time to see their projects through to completion and contribute to the UK’s world-beating research in humanities and social sciences.”