University Research Fellowships 2022-23

We are pleased to announce the four researchers who have been awarded a University Research Fellowship for 2022-23.

The Fellowships are for a year’s duration and aim to support research projects which will permit a demonstrable step-change in terms of significance and ambition, appropriate to the applicant's career stage.

Each year the University supports up to five Fellowships for researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences from across the four University research themes. The Fellowships provide £10,000 to successful applicants to cover teaching replacement costs and research expenses. Successful applicants are also supported to develop research leadership through mentoring and training, where appropriate.

The awards this year are made to:

Bolanle Adebola (Law): Justice-Based Corporate Rescue: Principles and Challenges 

The research seeks to create a justice-based analytical and normative framework through which to evaluate and recommend improvements to the structure of global corporate rescue systems when businesses fail. The project will combine procedural and social interpretations of justice to advocate for an equitable rescue framework which provides fairer outcomes between those creditors who hold proprietary rights in the company (secured creditors) and their unsecured counterparts, such as suppliers and tradespeople.

Rachel Mairs (Classics): Dragomans, Archaeology and Tourism in Cairo, 1882-1918

This work explores the figure of the dragoman in the period of the British ‘Veiled Protectorate’ over Egypt. Dragomans were interpreters and guides employed by tourists, and often had highly specialised knowledge of Egypt’s monuments and archaeology. They were, however, seldom credited as professional archaeologists/historians by contemporary scholars. The proposed research contributes to this by demonstrating that dragomans were accomplished professionals, who cultivated their own networks with archaeologists, antiquity dealers, hoteliers and others in the tourist industry.

Anthony Zhang (Education): Improving Foreign Language Proficiency in the UK: Transforming Classroom Language Teaching through Multimedia

The numbers of 16-year-olds studying a modern foreign language in the UK are low, as is foreign language proficiency when compared with the rest of Europe. We also know that UK learners make less use of foreign language multimedia such as video clips and computer games outside of school than in Europe, where multimedia seems to benefit foreign language development. The study involves both teachers and learners, to develop nine sets of multimedia learning materials which will help to assess how the visual elements in multimedia materials affect learning and whether that differs for different kinds of learners.

Nicola Wilson (English Literature): Book Society Ltd

This is the story of Britain’s first celebrity book club and the five judges who revolutionised how we read and buy books. The Book Society (1929-69) defied the critics, proving that busy people would subscribe to buy books if they trusted the judges’ decisions. Archival research will bring the club back to life through letters, diaries and its monthly book choices and reviews. It will uncover how the club saw readers through the crises and key events of the mid-twentieth century and shared the best of world literature with members in over 30 countries. The pandemic lockdown in 2020-21 saw a dramatic increase in readers signing up to digital and physical subscription models and this is a new and emerging field of research in publishing studies.