The British Academy awards over £15.9 million in Postdoctoral Fellowships to 45 outstanding SHAPE early career researchers

The British Academy has awarded 45 Postdoctoral Fellowships to outstanding early career researchers in the SHAPE (social sciences, humanities, arts for people and economy) disciplines worth over £15.9 million.

Successful research projects in this year’s cohort range from those looking at afforestation in Pakistan, disability in the world of orchestral music, and a “mental health toolkit” to promote positive self-evaluation and well-being in adolescents.

Funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Academy’s flagship Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme offers early career researchers the opportunity to strengthen their experience of research and teaching in an academic environment, to help develop the researchers’ CVs and boost their prospects of obtaining a permanent academic post.

The Postdoctoral Fellowships will see the funding spread over a three-year period, with the goal of completing a significant piece of publishable research. The scheme gives award holders a foundation on which to build their academic career, allowing them to integrate into the community of established scholars within their field.

The 2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellowships awardees are:

Please note: Awards are arranged alphabetically by surname of the grant recipient. The institution is that given at the time of application.

Dr Victoria Adams

PFSS24\240064

Mapping New Geographies of Cultural Production in Brazil through Pontos de Cultura

University of Leeds

£357,986.40

In the early 2000s, Brazil pioneered efforts to democratise access to culture and encourage cultural production in geographically diverse and marginalised communities. The recognition of pre-existing cultural institutions and community centres throughout the country as Pontos de Cultura [Cultural Points] that were eligible to receive funding for activities and multimedia equipment was central to this endeavour. This project will collaborate with Pontos de Cultura across Brazil to consider the programme’s impact 20 years after its introduction, as well as how it has evolved and endured under distinct political administrations. The first major academic study to offer qualitative analysis of the programme over such an extensive time span, this project will ask what the experiences of the Pontos de Cultura contribute to our understanding of the sustainability, possibilities and perils posed by government-led initiatives and digital media as communities seek support and visibility for their work.

Dr David Addison

PFSS24\240012

The Making of Atlantic Christianity: Asceticism and Organisation in Far-Western Europe, AD 300-900

University of Liverpool

£299,065.71

My project intervenes in fundamental debates about the structures of Christian government and their origins across the Latin west. It pursues this through a comparative study of ascetic, monastic, and clerical structures along the Atlantic seaboard of western Europe, from Portugal and Galicia, through Brittany and Cornwall, to Ireland and Iona. While these regions are often seen as peripheral to Mediterranean-focussed ‘late antiquity’, it is now increasingly clear that they were in fact embedded in long-distance networks of communication that reached across the Mediterranean to the Byzantine east. My project will not only illuminate these underappreciated connections, but also challenge pervasive narratives around the institutional history of Christianity in the wider Latin west. Indeed, the Atlantic regions evince distinctive forms of religious organisation, rooted in monastic entities, that disrupt some of our conventional narratives around the development of the diocese, the parish, and the cloistered medieval monastery.

Dr Yasmeen Arif

PFSS24\240109

"Plant trees, save Lahore": afforestation as hope and political project in Pakistan

University of Oxford

£370,589.18

In Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, nearly two million trees have been planted since 2018. This is the result of unlikely alliances between the state, civil society, activists and businesses, who come together around a seemingly innocent desire: mitigating climate change through planting trees. Research shows that the apparently uncontroversial project of afforestation has malign political, environmental and social effects, including deforestation and the privatisation of common land. Why, then, does tree-planting remain so popular? Using participant observation and interview methods, I explore what meanings afforestation takes on in Lahore in the midst of the 21st century climate crisis. What does the act of planting a tree symbolise in Pakistan's postcolonial landscape? Who is included, and who excluded, by the project of 'greening' Lahore? What can afforestation tell us about the experience of living in climate crisis, and the futures that become (un)imaginable as a result?

Dr Shruti Balaji

PFSS24\240013

At the Cold War’s Margins: New Theory of Indian Women's Pacifist Thought

University of Cambridge

£348,706.49

The Cold War reordered modern international politics. But whose ideas shaped Cold War politics? In a newly decolonised world, Asian and African leaders advocated for peace, resisted imperial war, and rallied against nuclear weapons at the international level. Previous Cold War scholarship on US-USSR relations and “Great Men” anticolonial thinkers have overlooked Asian and African women’s political ideas on non-violence and anti-war solidarity. This interdisciplinary project critically examines the pacifist political ideas developed by three prominent postcolonial Indian women leaders: Rameshwari Nehru, Lakshmi Menon, and Aruna Asaf Ali, embedded in two Afro-Asian organisations: Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization and the All-India Peace Council. This research brings together multi-sited, multi-lingual archival material from India and the UK combining unexplored private papers and official sources from postcolonial India. This project will develop a new theory of Indian women's pacifist thought to make a timely and critical contribution to decolonising Cold War politics.

Dr Lydia Barnes

PFSS24\240101

Understanding generalisation: Prediction, attention, and neural mechanisms

University of Cambridge

£396,567.00

We often respond to a new environment or task without instruction or practice. This is possible through generalisation: we extract rules from what we have learned before, and predict how our new environment will work. Yet generalisation can fail, whether in brain injury, cognitive decline, or fatigue. Understanding generalisation is fundamental to uncovering what goes wrong when we struggle to do something new. Here, I will test what happens in brain and mind when we generalise. The brain’s “multiple-demand network” may enable generalisation by directing attention to segments of the new task – but this is untested. I will use cutting-edge brain imaging to test whether periods of focus are formed in the network, and whether these predict generalisation performance in healthy and brain injured groups. This will produce novel insights into human ability, and catalyse discovery of how we can best educate, rehabilitate, and design to meet individuals’ needs.

Dr Lucy Benjamin

PFSS24\240035

Four Typologies of Architectural Repair in an age of Planetary Disrepair

University of Edinburgh

£333,099.20

This project interrogates ‘repair,’ a concept that has come to be central to discussions of designing for planetary and social justice. It is heard in appeals to ‘retrofit’ the built environment and made explicit in programs of decolonial reparations. And yet, while we need to repair what is broken, we cannot entrench those systems that actively produce the planetary ‘disrepair’ of the climate crisis. As questions of what it means to repair emerge, for whom we repair and when we do it, another concern appears: what is the product of repair? I suggest we answer this question with the claim that we repair in order to repair to the world as a comfortable site of collective retreat. Reconciling the imperative to repair with the right to repair to, this project explores what it means both to repair and repair to a world beleaguered by legacies and futures of disrepair.

Dr Clara Boulanger

PFSS24\240002

Following the fish? Using ichthyoarchaeology to study the tempo and geography of human dispersals through Island Southeast Asia

University College London

£426,052.40

By 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens’ dispersal to Australia marked the earliest period of human maritime adaptation. Two models of migration routes through Island Southeast Asia and the Wallacean Archipelago are proposed – a northern one and a southern one. However, the timing and location of these migrations remain disputed. Recent studies demonstrated the presence of populations with strong maritime culture in southern Wallacea from around 40,000 years ago, while coastal adaptation in the north remains largely unstudied. This project aims to understand human reliance on marine environments utilising samples from recently excavated archaeological sites located on the northern route. Using comparative anatomy, biomolecular techniques such as ZooMS, and stable isotope analysis, it will seek insights into subsistence strategies and seafaring technologies, establishing a novel framework for understanding our species' adaptation and dispersal for early seafarers across challenging regions of the planet.

Dr Sophie Eleanor Brown

PFSS24\240026

Bodies of Work: Pain, Perfection, and Disability in the World of Orchestral Music

University of Glasgow

£305,108.80

Access to culture, including music, is considered a human right, but disabled people face barriers to pursuing cultural professions. Orchestral music in particular is governed by restrictive and elite structures that often exclude skilled musicians with physical disabilities while also negatively affecting non-disabled musicians. This research will deliver a creative, phenomenological exploration of orchestral music’s pursuit of normative physical standards and their impact on disabled people’s access to the profession. The research will explore disabling barriers that impact on all musicians, considering pain, injury, and access alongside impairments. This innovative project will undertake interviews and workshops with musicians identifying as physically disabled and interviews with non-disabled musicians and music gatekeepers (eg promoters and directors). The research will contribute to a reimagining of disability theories originally used in visual arts to better understand the relationship between normative attitudes and practices and disabled access in orchestral music.

Dr Hillary Burlock

PFSS24\240077

Assembled, Disassembled, Reassembled: Britain’s Assembly Rooms, 1660-1880

University of Liverpool

£304,995.84

My monograph and digital history project traces the inception, zenith, and collapse of British assembly rooms between 1660 and 1880, recovering the history of an institution was formative to creating a British cultural model, and political identity, of civic humanism. Civic humanism centred participatory citizenship in eighteenth-century urban, political, and economic development. As spaces for dance, dalliance, and display, assembly rooms are the architectural eye candy to cinematic depictions of Georgian sociability today. Historically, they dominated social life yet, despite 935 surviving presently, we know surprisingly little about their origins, development, and proliferation. This project combines detailed and diverse primary source research with innovative digital humanities methodologies to quantitatively map Britain’s assembly rooms and trace the trajectories, spread, architectural forms, and cultural functions. It also qualitatively analyses assembly rooms as multidimensional, multipurpose spaces that were significant to the broader democratisation of British leisure culture.

Dr Samuel Cardwell

PFSS24\240017

The Beginnings of Biblical Interpretation in Northumbria, c.650-800

University of Nottingham

£330,719.77

Between the establishment of Christianity in the early seventh century and the death of Alcuin in 804 there was a remarkable period of cultural production in the kingdom of Northumbria, particularly in the field of biblical exegesis – the interpretation of the Bible through commentary, glossing, paraphrase and translation. While the biblical commentaries of the Northumbrian monk Bede have received much scholarly attention, no one has yet produced a comprehensive study of the broader development of biblical interpretation in this kingdom. My project will address this gap by offering a complete reassessment of the totality of exegetical material produced in or strongly influenced by Northumbria before the Viking Age, including recently discovered and previously unstudied material. The research will set Bede’s writings in their proper context and shed light on larger problems in early English history, including the process of Christianisation and the shifting nature of ecclesiastical and intellectual authority.

Dr Dave Kenneth Cayado

PFSS24\240027

How do Tagalog readers learn to find the meaningful parts of words?

Royal Holloway, University of London

£383,668.80

Skilled, adult readers understand printed words via smaller meaningful units called morphemes. For instance, reading the word ‘teacher’ entails recognizing the subparts {teach}+{-er}. Access to these meaningful pieces allows readers to interpret this word as ‘someone who teaches’. However, our knowledge of how children learn to read this way is based almost entirely on English and related Indo-European languages, even though most children globally learn to read in other languages. This project uses corpus analyses and behavioural experiments to investigate how developing readers of Tagalog learn and identify meaningful units within printed words. Tagalog extends our knowledge of reading acquisition as it builds words in a different way than in English and related languages. Moreover, by expanding theories of reading acquisition beyond a handful of languages, this project will foster a greater impact of reading research around the world.

Dr Mercedes Crisostomo

PFSS24\240073

The Pioneering Women of the Right: Gender and Right-Wing Politics in Twentieth-Century Peru

University College London

£373,740.31

This research will provide the first comprehensive examination of women’s participation in right-wing politics in twentieth-century Peru, a theme central to the history of right-wing movements and women’s history but hitherto largely overlooked. The project has three goals: (i) to examine the origins and development of Peruvian right-wing parties and movements during the twentieth century; (ii) to investigate the various manners in which women participated in right-wing politics, including their contribution to the production, dissemination, and representation of right-wing ideas, and their transnational links aimed at expanding their influence and political commitment; (iii) to identify women’s motivations and interests when participating in right-wing movements. By combining archival analysis, studies of printed material and oral history techniques, I will write the first monograph on women’s participation in right-wing politics in twentieth-century Peru. My research will advance the fields of right-wing politics, women’s participation in radical politics, and women’s history.

Dr Mila Daskalova

PFSS24\240093

Reading Madness: The Literary Origins of Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

University of Glasgow

£328,489.80

This project presents a detailed transatlantic exploration of nineteenth-century psychiatry’s reciprocal conversation with literature. Early psychiatric writings demonstrate physicians’ reliance on literary language, poetic quotations, and references to literary characters to illustrate their points and establish their professional expertise in insanity. As the century progressed, however, psychiatry leaned towards scientific positivism, thus seemingly renouncing its kinship with literature. Covering the period 1820s-90s, this project will present an in-depth study of the ways in which psychiatric theory and practice responded to various phenomena in literary production (such as the professionalisation of literary criticism, the proliferation of verse and life writing, and the rise of the sensation novel, realism, and science fiction/utopian writing). It will draw on a wide range of archival and published material, to suggest that, instead of a clear-cut rift, literature and psychiatry experienced parallel processes of professionalisation that obscured but did not stop the exchanges between the fields.

Dr Chloe Deambrogio

PFSS24\240096

Procedural Unfairness and (Un)equal Protection in Capital Cases: Does Rights Discourse Help Advance Social Justice?

University of Warwick

£304,158.48

Racial and other forms of discrimination are a long-standing feature of the American capital punishment process, particularly in the Southern States. The US Supreme Court has notoriously failed to tackle this structural unfairness through effective constitutional regulations. Less publicised is the essential role played by local criminal justice officials in maintaining discriminatory practices, despite the Court’s occasional, if ineffective, efforts to reform. This project will shed new light on this understudied phenomenon, by identifying how legal actors in the American South have hindered reformative efforts aimed at protecting the rights of marginalised capital defendants. Through a genealogical analysis of due process and equal protection violations from the 1960s to the present, the project will reveal how dominant notions of equality and fairness may help perpetuate historical patterns of political oppression, adding nuance and complexity to existing theories about the origins of persistent forms of discrimination in the criminal justice process.

Dr Beatrix Gassmann de Sousa

PFSS24\240086

Dreaming the African Renaissance: A Pan-African Friendship at the Black Artists Congress in Rome 1959

University College London

£398,965.16

The art and poetry of three befriended activist African artists, the South African exile Gerard Sekoto, the Nigerian Ben Enwonwu and the future Senegalese president Léopold Senghor records manifestations of traditional dance as resistance and as a unified and collective “African” identity. Drawing on oral and performance traditions the artists translate dance into new African-centred pictorial and literary modes of Afro-Modernity, pitted against the dominance of colonial European ethnography and cultural appropriation. In 1959 this core group surrounding the convening journal “Présence Africaine“ were delegates at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome. They reunited in Dakar for FESTAC 1966. The focus on dance reveals hitherto unknown historical African perspectives of pre-Independence African-centred creativity. The project prioritises the artists’ archived correspondence and African scholarship and recognises the importance of continental African contributions to global modernity, epitomised in the collective dream of an African Renaissance.

Dr Tianwei Gong

PFSS24\240099

Understanding the formation of false causal beliefs from a bounded rational perspective

University College London

£408,488.20

The human capacity to develop subjective causal frameworks serves as a fundamental mechanism for interpreting events in the world and navigating daily experiences. However, these subjective constructs are not always accurate reflections of reality, leading to the emergence of various phenomena, including superstitious behaviours, erroneous causal explanations, and conspiracy theories. Despite our ability to identify these phenomena, the underlying cognitive mechanisms responsible for such beliefs remains unknown. I propose that the process of belief formation is influenced by the finite cognitive resources available to humans, particularly the constraints on computing speed, memory storage, and time for information search. Through a combination of behavioural experiments and computational modelling, this project aims to uncover the cognitive factors that influence the belief formation process, enhance our understanding of flawed belief systems, and develop interventions capable of regulating the belief formation process.

Dr Benjamin Goodair

PFSS24\240047

How does for-profit outsourcing impact healthcare quality? Unpacking the relationship between NHS privatisation and health outcomes in England.

London School of Economics and Political Science

£371,073.60

What happens when public services are provided by private sector providers? For decades, England’s NHS has been increasingly privatised through the for-profit delivery of health services. While existing evidence indicates a correlation between increased privatisation and higher mortality rates, the specific mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are poorly understood - a huge gap in our understanding of the for-profit provision of welfare state services. This study seeks to address this gap in knowledge by considering three mechanisms: 1) the introduction of health inequalities 2) selective provision of services by for-profit providers, and 3) the depletion of system-wide resources. This project will ultimately answer how is privatisation impacting quality of care and who is benefitting/suffering as a result. England’s NHS, like many public health services around the world, is being slowly privatised – understanding how this is impacting health outcomes is integral if we are to protect the quality of care provided

Dr Till Greite

PFSS24\240088

The Legacy of Exile: 20th-Century Literature in the ‘age of dispersion’ (Case Study: Michael Hamburger)

School of Advanced Study, University of London

£288,872.60

The project seeks to revise substantively our understanding of German literature in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust by focusing on the under-appreciated issue of exile after 1945 – what we might call ‘Post-Exile’. It is an archive-based case study about the Berlin-born poet, translator and critic Michael Hamburger, who came to Britain as a refugee in 1933 and crucially mediated the dissemination of German literature in the anglophone context. Hamburger referred to this era, with its unresolved issues, paradigmatically as the ‘age of dispersion’ that, in its traumatic results, unspoken pain and lost identities, still affects Europe today. The project will result in a monograph published first in German and subsequently, with the addition of a wider cultural contextualisation, in English. In addition, the project will initiate seminars and conferences to familiarize a broader audience in the UK with the legacy of the German-Jewish exiles.

Dr Emily Hards

PFSS24\240008

‘The way you think about yourself affects your life’: A mental health promotion toolkit designed to promote positive self-evaluation and well-being in adolescents

University of Bath

£421,493.60

A negative view of oneself is common during adolescence and 13-18 year-olds tend to be more self-critical than any other age group (Robins & Trzesniewski, 2005). Having a negative view of oneself increases the risk of developing mental health problems, which are also very common during adolescence. Importantly, adolescents from under-served communities (e.g., racial/ethnic minority, rural, poor, gender, and sexual minority) are more likely to have a negative view of themselves and have a heightened vulnerability to experiencing mental ill-health (Doi et al., 2019). Therefore, developing a resource to promote positive self- evaluation and well-being in this population is essential. This proposal aims to examine the experience of both positive/negative self-evaluation in adolescents and co-produce a toolkit designed to promote positive self-evaluation and well-being. This resource will be co-developed with stakeholders; eg adolescents from under-served communities, parents, teachers, academics, and clinicians and piloted in two schools to assess feasibility/acceptability.

Dr Louis Henderson

PFSS24\240106

Compulsory school-entry age, maternal labour supply, and early childhood human capital: evidence from Canada, 1870-1920

London School of Economics and Political Science

£292,608.79

My proposed research will investigate how compulsory schooling laws redistributed education over the course of childhood. While the literature in this area has generally considered how compulsory schooling laws affected the total amount of schooling children received, these laws usually also defined a compulsory school-entry age affecting when school careers began. Because young children have different needs and capabilities than do older children, the asymmetric effects of school-entry age policies should be given due consideration. Using historical evidence from Canada, I consider how the introduction of compulsory school-entry ages (1) interacted with prior cultural norms surrounding school-entry age, (2) affected mothers’ labour supply by substituting for their care, and (3) impacted children’s human capital accumulation.

Dr Thomas Herzmark

PFSS24\240082

Mediating indigenous citizenship: the incorporation and co-option of adivasi identities in contemporary India.

Brunel University London

£370,630.20

“Mediating indigenous citizenship” will investigate the relationship between heightening nationalism and the politicisation of historically excluded indigenous (adivasi) minorities in India. Amidst ethno-religious tension shaping contemporary politics, ethnographic research will document, compare, and analyse the experiences of two representative adivasi communities, as they are drawn into nationalist ideologies. Most adivasi groups are officially classified as “Scheduled Tribes”, a category that is consolidated through everyday bureaucracy, increasingly digitalised welfare implementation, and interplay between local and national politics. I hypothesise that the re-inscription of this label, across regions and across generations, moulds adivasis into electoral constituencies to be co-opted or excluded from nationalist discourses. This research will explore how India’s indigenous communities are responding to new overtly Hindu representations of their identity. It will generate original understandings of indigenous politics in transition, and intervene in debates on nationalism to recognise how political polarisation can transform and threaten autonomy for indigenous communities.

Dr Nathaniel Hess

PFSS24\240119

The poet's new path: Neo-Latin poetry and the Catholic Reformation

School of Advanced Study, University of London

£288,409.60

Reformation – moral, spiritual, and ecclesiastical – was a by-word of the 16th century, even in Italy and other centres of Catholicism. This often-found literary expression in classical-style Latin poetry, where devout poets, many of them important churchmen, appropriated the forms and energies of pagan literature and symbolically “reformed” them to serve Christian ends, developing in the process a sophisticated sense for comparative religion. The use of Latin not only adorned, but also elevated, intensified, or purified; it could clarify and explain ideas, but it could also obfuscate and conceal them, something often necessary for those engaged in the complex and risky business of seeking to reinvigorate or reform Catholicism from within. Accordingly, classical poetics became an important medium through which big questions about church and faith were framed. This project will explore these overlooked texts, showing how they can give valuable insights into the history of Catholic reform.

Dr Nikolai Johnsen

PFSS24\240016

Transnational Advocacy Networks: Challenging Colonial Interpretations in South Korea and Japan

School of Oriental and African Studies

£415,757.30

This study examines the vital roles of NGOs, activists, and researchers in South Korea and Japan forming transnational advocacy networks to highlight colonial experiences marginalised in official interpretations. It assesses their achievements, potential drawbacks, and the extent of cooperation across borders, ethnicities, and ideologies. Amid strained South Korea-Japan relations, marked by conflicting interpretations of colonial history, particularly regarding Korean forced labour and “comfort women,” this research offers a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted nature of these networks. Drawing on theories of memory and identity politics, postcolonial studies, and social movement impact theory, this interdisciplinary study aims to uncover the complexities of grassroots movements in both countries. The research employs a two-stage data collection process, including extensive fieldwork in South Korea and Japan, to thoroughly examine the forms of cooperation and contributions of these networks towards decolonising official history, fostering a sense of justice, and advancing true reconciliation beyond formal agreements.

Dr Annabella Massey

PFSS24\240023

Augmented Ruralism: the Techno-Pastoral Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Art

Courtauld Institute of Art

£298,162.18

After the past four decades of rampant urbanisation and rural economic stagnation, the Chinese government is now attempting to rejuvenate the countryside by harnessing digital technology. This project will be the first scholarly account to explore the impact of this strategy on the visual imagination, and in turn, how art speaks back to these state projections of a high-tech Chinese countryside. It identifies a cohort of artists and filmmakers charting a strange new future for China’s natural environment: a countryside both pastoral as well as augmented by technology. The project defines the genre it calls ‘augmented ruralism’ across five thematic case studies, namely: ‘cottagecore’ aesthetics, ecological transhumanism, rural science fiction, biohacking, and the digitally networked village. Through a systematic analysis of major artworks and films which constitute this genre, ‘Augmented Ruralism’ reveals how an alternate account of our digital and environmental futures is being formed in the Chinese cultural arena.

Dr Pratik Mishra

PFSS24\240098

Climate-Debt nexus on the move: The production of vulnerability for debt-bonded migrant workers between brick kilns and native villages in India

University of Sussex

£302,792.00

The proposed research develops an analysis of the two-way relationship between the specific dynamics of capitalist exploitation (debt bondage) at worksites (brick kilns) and the production of socio-ecological vulnerability and climate-induced migration from rural-agrarian systems. In doing so, the research highlights processes through which brick kiln workers out migrate from their native villages due to local climate and environmental pressures. Alongside, it explores climate impacts, whether from heat waves or extreme rainfall, experienced by workers who are residents within the brick kiln worksite. These impacts, exacerbated by conditions of debt bondage, translate to negligible take-home incomes and depleted bodily capital for migrant workers and affects their ability to manage climate pressures and economic needs in their native villages. The fellowship will offer a book-length account of the everyday politics of brick kiln work, as well as new research into climate-induced migration and vulnerability for migrant brick kiln workers in India

Dr Salvatore Morra

PFSS24\240075

Italian-Arab Musical Encounters (1860-1960): Sound, Colonisation and Power

University of Cambridge

£346,643.4

This project concerns the histories of mobility and movement between Southern Europe (Italy) and North Africa through music. The project aims to address musical exchanges between Italians and Arabs that followed Italian unification (1860s) and developed during Italian colonisation (1920s). Focusing on the hybrid repertoire that was performed in Arab theatres (such as ʻughniyya), military bands (such as anthems), and extant local culture (such as domestic songs, poetry and so on), this proposal examines the construction of a collective musical heritage between Egypt/Libya and Italy. The project will juxtapose oral history with archival sources from the past to provide a unique historical ethnography of Mediterranean interchanges between Italians and Arabs where music presents a locus for understanding the on-going migrations between Africa and Europe.

Dr George Morris

PFSS24\240107

An Intimate Science: Psychical Research,1882 - 1938

Queen Mary University of London

£336,557.10

In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded to scientifically investigate ‘supernormal phenomena’. Over time, the SPR developed a conceptual framework with lasting consequences for ideas about subliminal consciousness, the unconscious mind and alternative mental states. Methodologically, psychical research was an intimate science – it produced and depended on forms of intimacy. It was driven by the desire to communicate with dead friends and lovers; higher questions were entangled in personal affairs. This dynamic led to increasing introspection as dead members of the SPR apparently communicated with surviving members. By mid-century, a section of the SPR saw itself as an intimate network of the living and the dead, committed to world transformation. This project charts this shift from high-minded Victorian science to interwar introspection by examining psychical research as an intimate practice.

Dr Annalisa Nicholson

PFSS24\240040

Huguenot Women's Lively Writing and Translation (1500-1700)

King's College London

£390,889.03

Despite the vast literary output of Huguenot, or French Protestant, women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no substantial study has sought to compare a range of these authors. This project brings together Huguenot women writers for the first time to investigate the forms and styles of their works, which were produced within a landscape of persecution. It will explore a mixed-genre corpus of writings authored between 1500 and 1700 by six women in Huguenot literary circles from a range of social backgrounds. The resulting monograph will draw out common but also divergent features of their works. Registering the transnational reach and lively rhetoric of these writings, the project analyses the extent to which the writers’ doubly minoritized statuses – as women and as religious minorities – counterintuitively afforded them the circumstances to forge livelier and bolder works for their impressively large continental audiences.

Dr Miguel Ohnesorge

PFSS24\240061

Measuring Planets: Quantification in Geophysics

University of Cambridge

£348,624.05

How can scientists quantify phenomena? Under which conditions are they entitled to represent them as continuous mathematical functions? Few philosophical questions have higher stakes for scientific practice and public life. While philosophers frequently make general claims about quantification, they usually base them on a small set of cases from experimental physics. Few scientific phenomena, however, can be studied under the conditions afforded by the physical laboratory. To make progress, we need a more representative picture of how quantification can succeed. My project reconstructs cases of successful quantification in geophysics. Many geophysical phenomena were notoriously (i) inaccessible to experimentation, (ii) causally complex, and (iii) morally significant. Their histories illustrate how quantification can succeed under such non-ideal conditions, which I exemplify for the cases of (i) earthquake magnitude, (ii) earthquake intensity, and (iii) the Earth’s tidal deformations. This promises to offer new lessons on the prospects and limits of quantitative science.

Dr Dominic Pollard

PFSS24\240024

Between the Local and the Global: A Multi-scalar Comparative Analysis of Urbanisation in Iron Age Greece, Etruria and Sicily

University of Cambridge

£380,021.07

Recent archaeological research in the Mediterranean recognises the profound impacts of the region's highly variable, fragmented ecologies on its past and present societies. But this fragmentation raises fundamental questions about the comparability or distinctiveness of historical trajectories in different regions. Urbanisation in the tenth to fifth centuries BCE is a case in point; this historically significant societal transformation is widespread, but its interregional variability, and the interaction between local and Mediterranean-wide causes and consequences remains contested. The proposed project tackles these unresolved questions through a multi-scalar, comparative investigation of urbanisation in three regions: the Aegean, Etruria, and Sicily. Integrating analyses of, at the macro-scale, demographic and environmental dynamics, at the meso-scale, regional settlement systems, and at the micro-scale, individual site histories, this project will break new ground in contextualising local developments against wider trends, and offering insights on the nature, variability, causes and implications of urbanisation in the Iron Age Mediterranean.

Dr Annalivia Polselli

PFSS24\240003

Double Machine Learning for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Panel Data

University of Essex

£320,955.14

Policy interventions have the potential to impact population groups differently. Quantifying treatment heterogeneity to identify those groups with the greatest potential to be affected by these interventions is an important objective for policy-oriented social scientists. In this fellowship, I will bring the power of machine learning algorithms from Artificial Intelligence into causal analysis for policy evaluation to implement improved estimators for the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) in the context of static and dynamic panel data. I will build on Chernozhukov et al. (2018)’s interactive regression model and Nie and Wager (2021)’s quasi-oracle algorithms. The power of these estimators to produce accurate and precise estimates will be assessed theoretically and in comparison with conventional estimation methods. Finally, I will illustrate the applicability of my methodology by carrying out empirical analyses to quantify, eg the effect of smoking behaviour during pregnancy on birthweight and identify those groups most affected.

Dr Tomaz Potocnik

PFSS24\240104

How to Hedge in Latin: A Pragmatic Approach

University of Cambridge

£364,596.80

The aim of my project is to study linguistic hedges in Latin. Hedges are linguistic expressions which introduce fuzziness and indirectness into speaker's statements – because, for instance, the speaker is not sure about the truth of their statement, cannot remember the right word, or may not want to come across as too forward. Hedging correctly is part of every language user’s pragmatic competence – ie competence to use language in a way that is appropriate for a particular social situation – which means that it is not random and depends on the relationship between interactants, social situation, mode of communication and other factors. The guiding questions of my project are: (1) what kind of hedges were used in Latin, and (2) which sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors governed their use in different types of discourse. The findings will fill a gap in a hitherto neglected area, which is nevertheless an essential part of all natural communication.

Dr Victor Rosi

PFSS24\240043

Investigating the perception and expression of gender-diverse voices

University College London

£384,629.07

The human voice has a crucial role in expressing gender identity. As our understanding of gender diversity evolves, there is a growing need to thoroughly understand and represent gender diverse voices beyond cisgender identities. While there have been first attempts to investigate acoustic cues for gender-diverse voices, comprehensive data is lacking, and the absence of gender diversity considerations in mainstream speech synthesis models hinders the development of inclusive AI-driven speech technologies. In this fellowship, I will create the first-ever gender-diverse speech dataset GenDiVox, and conduct research to investigate the perception of various gender identities. With this project, I aim to inform speech technology, and contribute to future research using voice to foster a more inclusive society.

Dr Ayan Salaad

PFSS24\240100

Somali Women’s Poetry: Expressing Southern Somali Material Cultures and Heritage

University of Southampton

£346,989.53

Scholarship on Somali poetry has predominantly focused on the poetry of men from a nomadic pastoralist background. This has meant that poetry from southern Somalia, which is distinct and different to poetry from the nomadic tradition, and women’s poetry has been largely overlooked resulting in an incomplete understanding of Somali literature and culture. This project will make a major contribution to Somali literature and women’s poetry by producing the first monograph to focus on southern Somalia’s women’s poetry. It will document and explore the different genres of poetry that southern Somali women use to articulate their culture. This project will bring together anthropology, material culture, and oral and written literature to understand the critical significance of southern Somali women’s poetry. It will make an unprecedented contribution to the understanding of women’s poetry, gender studies, as well as to the fields of World literature, African poetry and Somali literary studies.

Dr David Scott

PFSS24\240021

The Turn to Time in Contemporary International Legal Thought

Queen Mary University of London

£340,030.83

Over the past two decades, international lawyers have talked increasingly in terms of time: be it in the discipline’s turn to history, its work to periodise our present ‘era’ or ‘age’, or its attempts to predict the ‘future’ of international law. Utilising an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from German historian Reinhart Koselleck, my research investigates international law’s ‘turn to time’ along two lines: first, as sets of temporal relations that international legal scholars draw between the past, present, and future, in order to produce different interventions in contemporary international legal debates; and second, as an expression of particular beliefs about the present – what makes this moment one that requires temporal thinking. My research explores how and why international lawyers have used time to make arguments about contemporary international law, in order to critically illuminate time as a space of contestation within international legal thought that is ripe for further study.

Dr Holly Smith

PFSS24\240053

Rethinking professional identity commitments: caring, creativity, and collective action

University of Manchester

£328,992.92

This research will examine the relationship between professional identity commitments and propensity to industrial action for workers in the caring and creative industries. Those who view their work as a ‘calling’ are typically committed to the goods of those roles, such as patient care or artistic excellence, which are generally presumed to be incompatible with immoderate behaviours such as striking. Extant research in this area is ambivalent about whether these intrinsic motivations deter action, or if they can be instrumentalised for collective action for social change. Through qualitative empirical fieldwork to include focus groups and interviews with participants drawn from across the caring and creative sectors, this research will explore how professional identities are constructed, maintained, and contested, and the extent to which they are conducive or inimical to collective action.

Dr Oliver Spinney

PFSS24\240046

Margaret Macdonald: Beyond the Shadow of Wittgenstein

University College London

£402,157.12

In this project I will challenge narratives of early and mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy which emphasise the role of male thinkers to the exclusion of women through my producing the first comprehensive study of Margaret Macdonald (1903-1956). Macdonald’s name is most often connected with her transcriptions of lectures given by the better-known Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930s. The numerous original contributions which she made to aesthetics, epistemology, political theory, and the philosophy of language have consequently been seriously overlooked. I aim to correct this oversight through an assessment of the extent to which Macdonald’s conception of philosophy developed in an independent way beyond the thought of Wittgenstein, and through an examination of the way in which her conception of philosophy was employed in her treatment of specific philosophical problems. The result will be a major corrective to orthodox historical accounts of the period.

Dr Seth Stadel

PFSS24\240036

Interpreting the Psalms in Medieval Iraq: An Edition and Study of the Earliest Version of the Denḥa-Grigor Commentary

University of Oxford

£361,850.42

This project will produce the first complete edition and a critical analysis of the Denḥa-Grigor Commentary, the earliest extant full commentary on the Psalms that was written by East Syriac Christians in medieval Iraq. The Psalter was the key scriptural text for eastern Christians, and so this Commentary functions as the quintessential interpretation of the Psalms for the Church of the East under Islamic rule. This Commentary also provides important evidence regarding language contact between Syriac and Arabic-speaking communities in the medieval period. Furthermore, this project will help to preserve the religious and intellectual traditions of East Syriac Christians and, simultaneously, make this Commentary available in two volumes for the first time to modern East Syriac/Assyrian Christians, as well as to scholars interested in the history of interpretation of the Psalms and the transmission of late antique intellectual culture to the Islamicate world.

Dr Joanne Tomkinson

PFSS24\240083

From oil to autism: the global political economy of infrastructure’s new investment frontiers

School of Oriental and African Studies

£400,715.31

Why are global infrastructure funds with expertise in delivering oil and gas pipelines moving into British children’s homes and providing care for young people with profound and complex needs? How are society’s most vulnerable members becoming incorporated into new infrastructural investment frontiers, and what is driving and enabling these shifts? This project offers ground-breaking analysis of these perplexing questions, focusing on the recent diversification of global infrastructure funds from traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure such as energy, transport and communications into the UK’s health and social care sectors. Such research is both urgent and necessary given the serious abuse and neglect already reported in such settings. By offering an original global political economy account of such shifts, the project looks at the confluence of global and local factors shaping such investments and the implications of evolving international investment horizons for public service provision in the UK and beyond.

Dr Jasmine Virhia

PFSS24\240029

Understanding Neurodiversity in Professional Work

London School of Economics and Political Science

£419,651.60

My research seeks to understand the experiences of neurodiverse professional workers in the UK and whether stereotypes of skills associated with Autism, ADHD and Dyslexia impact hiring decisions. Previous literature has shown evidence of gender, race, and age discrimination in hiring decisions, and the stereotypes associated with each characteristic, however the present work builds on traditional CV judgement tasks to identify if biases in hiring for neurodiverse candidates is based on stereotypical profiles of professional skills. This work will not only expand the limited knowledge of professional skills specific to neurodiverse conditions, but will also impact employment outcomes for neurodiverse individuals. Moreover, findings seek to generate tangible changes to recruitment practices across large organisations, in turn creating more diverse and socially responsible professional environments.

Dr Hannah Waite

PFSS24\240022

A zero-sum game? Exploring a both-and approach to biological disorder and religious experience in relation to Christians who experience psychosis and/or mania

University of Leeds

£364,652.80

In society and within faith communities, our perception of illness predominantly relies on third-person perspectives grounded in medical research and evidence. While this viewpoint serves a vital purpose, it inadvertently perpetuates an injustice by side-lining first-person narratives of illness. This is particularly evident in faith communities' handling of first-person experiences of mania and psychosis as an individual’s ability to judge reality for themselves is questioned. For instance, when a Christian recounts their encounters with mania or psychosis, these encounters are often pigeonholed as either symptomatic of illness or indicative of a genuine religious experience, seldom both. This categorisation imposes an external, mutually exclusive framework on these personal experiences, leading to the neglect or suppression of individuals' first-person perspectives. This research challenges this mutual exclusivity, striving to amplify marginalised first-person accounts and foster a more inclusive 'both/and' approach that challenge the perceived dichotomy of first person/third person and medical/religious interpretations.

Dr Duncan Wallace

PFSS24\240037

British Lawyers and the Struggle for Immigration Justice, 1833–2023

University of Edinburgh

£332,185.75

What roles have lawyers played in the British immigration system? How have these roles both helped and hindered causes for immigration justice? And what do they teach us about the compatibility of immigration control with the values of the British legal system? In posing these central questions, this project will study the social and political history of lawyers' involvement in British immigration control, from the 1830s to the present day. By conducting archival research and oral interviews with former and current lawyers, I will explore mainly what lawyers do outside the courtroom: the giving of advice and care to immigrants; the devising of legal justifications for the government's policies; the leadership of campaigns for immigration reform. Lawyers, I will show, have been complicit in as well as resistant to much unfairness in immigration control, and are a complicated ally in the wider struggle for immigration justice.

Dr Rosalie Warnock

PFSS24\240015

Children as Co-Navigators: Feminist Political Economies of Care, Family Life and Welfare in the City

King's College London

£407,283.30

In families where adults have English language or literacy difficulties, children may step in to act as ‘language brokers’ (Sham, 1997) or ‘co-navigators’ (Devenney, 2020) of official systems and processes. They may attend meetings to interpret, translate letters, complete forms, write emails, or make phone calls. This activity raises four important questions. First, how, when, and why must children act as co-navigators? Secondly, how do children experience co-navigation? Thirdly, how might co-navigation widen definitions of care roles within families? And finally, what might co-navigation tell us about how welfare bureaucracies could better support marginalised families in super-diverse urban areas?  Working with local government, marginalised community groups and community research assistants, the research and monograph output entitled 'Navigating Welfare Bureaucracies in Precarious Times' will advance geographical understandings of bureaucratic navigation, urban childhoods, and feminist political economies of care. The Fellowship will also provide important participant-led policy recommendations for change.

Dr Elise Watson

PFSS24\240020

A Scandalous Sisterhood? Female Collaboration in the First Age of Print

University of Edinburgh

£338,785.71

This project provides an innovative synthesis of gender studies, labour history, and digital humanities to explore business relationships between women in the first age of print. It locates early modern women in unconventional roles: working in printshops, binderies, and type foundries, and in the streets, selling books and collecting rags to make paper. While instances of female collaboration in the print industry are rare, these partnerships produced hundreds of books across Europe between 1450 and 1800. Unfortunately, outdated data practices mean scholars still obscure and misattribute women’s work to their male relatives. This project uses three international case studies to analyse the legal and social marginalisation of these women, explore their friendships and business partnerships, and demonstrate how their commercial success depended on obscuring their gender and using masculine-coded family names. Using a collaborative digital humanities framework, it uncovers and highlights women's essential labour in the business of making books.

Dr David Young

PFSS24\240079

Caring about time and money: understanding the temporal experiences of in-work social security claimants in the paid care sector

University of Salford

£297,707.91

A basic aim of the UK's social security system is to provide income security for those in and out of work with low or variable incomes. However, policy, academic and public understandings of claimants’ finances and lives can be static, focusing on one point in time and unable to fully understand temporal aspects of working claimants’ lives. This has led to policy design choices that do not reflect the realities of work for many. This is especially problematic for adult social care sector workers, who face particular temporal challenges. To address this knowledge gap, this fellowship will combine analysis of secondary data with new data from innovative financial diary methods to: (1) provide a new and wide-ranging temporal understanding of the experiences of working social security claimants in the paid care sector; and (2) support the advancement of methodological strategies to capture the temporal nature of working claimants' experiences.

The awards listed are those for the 2023-24 Postdoctoral Fellowships. Previous award announcements can be found on the Postdoctoral Fellowships past awards page.