The British Academy awards £1.4 million in small grants to 160 UK research projects

The British Academy is awarding £1.4 million to support 160 research projects throughout the UK in its latest round of Small Research Grants.

The awards will support academics at 64 universities and research institutions, as well as five independent scholars, studying topics ranging from the impact of language barriers on access to public health information to the regulation of cryptocurrencies in the FinTech industry.

Funding for the Small Research Grants 2020-21 is provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust, Society for Advancement of Management Studies and Sino-British Fellowship Trust.

The British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grants funding scheme awards up to £10,000 to academics in the humanities and social sciences – including disciplines such as History, Philosophy, Linguistics, Sociology and Business and Management Studies – helping to cover the cost of expenses arising from a specific research project.

Tenable for a maximum of 24 months, the awards meet a clear need among researchers in the humanities and social sciences as they provide seed funding for pilot and development stages of larger projects and frequently offer the first grant opportunity for early career researchers.

The British Academy administers most of its Special Funds through its Small Research Grant scheme.

In this round, 81% of grants were awarded to researchers based at institutions outside of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London.

The full list of 2021 Small Research Grants is published online and examples include:

• Public Health in East Birmingham's Minoritised Communities: Removing Language Barriers to Accessing Public Health Information – Professor Frank Austermuehl, Professor of Translation Studies, Aston University. (With funding from the Wellcome Trust.)
• The Bureaucracy of Memory: Oral History and Human Rights in Brazil – Dr. Jacob Blanc, Lecturer in Latin American history, University of Edinburgh. (With funding from the Leverhulme Trust.)
• Regulating Cryptocurrencies and their Derivatives in the age of FinTech – Dr. Chris Muellerleile, Senior Lecturer in Geography at Swansea University.
• Findings pathways towards transformation of traditional farming in marginal areas – Dr. Hannah Pitt, Research Fellow at the Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University. (With funding from the Leverhulme Trust.)
• The persistence of political polarization: Evidence from news consumption using eye-tracking data – Professor Tommaso Valletti, Professor of Economics, Imperial College London.
• The Weak Child: Twentieth-Century Illness and the Politics of Developmentalism – Dr. Maria del Pilar Blanco Associate Professor in Spanish American Literature, University of Oxford.
• Progressive Christianities: Don Cupitt, the Sea of Faith Network and the Future of Radical Theology 1963-2024 – Professor Elaine Graham, Grosvenor Research Professor of Practical Theology, University of Chester.

The next round of BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants is currently open for applications until 17.00 on 2 June 2021. Applications for the following 2021-22 round will open on Wednesday 8 September 2021 and close again in November.