The British Academy announces Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2022

Research projects examining dementia, migration, the social history of football, music festivals and poetry are among 45 postdoctoral projects to receive British Academy funding.

The funding has been awarded under the Postdoctoral Fellowships Scheme, the Academy’s flagship programme for early career academics based at universities around the UK. The Fellowships run for three years and enable outstanding scholars to obtain a permanent academic post through working in a Higher Education or Independent Research Organisation Institution.

The main emphasis is on completing a significant piece of publishable research, giving award holders a foundation on which to build their academic career.

For this round of Postdoctoral Fellowships, the Academy has awarded over £13m in funding to researchers at universities across the UK. The scheme is funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Some of the projects include:

• Dr Taylor Aucoin (University of Edinburgh) – The Contested Ball Game: Football and the Social Value of Sport and Leisure in Britain
• Dr Zeinab Azarbadegan (London School of Economics and Political Science) – Citizenship Beyond Borders: Extraterritoriality in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Iraq
• Dr Sara Caputo (University of Cambridge) - Health and Medicine in European Navies, 1750 - 1830
• Dr Matilda Carter (University of Glasgow) - Maintaining the Extended Mind: Dementia Care and the Relationship Between Justice, Mind and Space
• Dr Naomi Muggleton (University of Oxford) – Why Does Income Inequality Foster Status Anxiety? Identifying Psychological Mechanisms of Status Competition from Mass-Transactional Data.

Dr Zeinab Azarbadegan, London School of Economics and Political Science, said:

"Having studied for my doctorate in the US, the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship gives me the opportunity to build my academic profile back at home in the UK. As a historian, the PDF allows me to use the rich resources and archives in the UK for my research, easily travel to various countries in the Middle East for archival work and connect to networks of scholars in my field in the UK, Europe, and the Middle East."

Professor Simon Swain FBA, Vice-President for Research at the British Academy, said: 

“We are delighted to award funding to this talented cohort of early career researchers. They will be exploring a range of fascinating topics and bringing to bear the skills and insights from the SHAPE disciplines (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts of People and the Economy) to unearth new insights. British Academy Postdoctoral Fellows have gone on to produce books and documentaries about their work and have forged stellar academic careers. We wish the researchers every success with their respective projects.”