University Research Fellowships 2024/25 announced

Five researchers have been awarded a University Research Fellowship for 2024–25.

Each year the University supports up to five Fellowships for researchers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences from across the four research themes.

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.

This year’s Fellowship programme has two routes. Route A Fellowships (Innovation) support the development of Mid-Career research leaders. Route B Fellowships support researchers at all career stages to complete monographs intended for submission to REF 2029.

Professor Parveen Yaqoob, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), said: “We're delighted to support these researchers to make significant contributions to their fields through the award of fellowships.

“It was important to introduce the two funding routes in order to provide targeted support for mid-career researchers and to progress the development of outstanding and influential monographs.

“The Fellows will have their teaching costs and research expenses covered to support the completion of ambitious, high quality outputs of extended scale and scope that are likely to be considered suitable for submission as double-weighted outputs in REF 2029.”

Route A Fellowships

Dr Nat Hansen (Politics and Philosophy) for the study titled ‘Socratic Questionnaires: Experiments in Argument and Conversation’

Conversation is the lively core of language. One type of conversation, argument, is essential to philosophy, politics, and the exchange of ideas.

This project will put conversation and argument back at the heart of empirically informed philosophical discussions of language. In collaboration with psychologists and digital humanists.

Dr Hansen will develop experiments that evaluate the way arguments change people’s minds about topics of philosophical significance, and the way people do not take experimental materials at face value but misconstrue and reconstrue what experimenters are asking them to do.

Dr Erhan Aslan (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for the project titled ‘Micro-celebrity Language Teachers: Digital Fame and Multimodal Pedagogy in the Age of Social Media’

The landscape of technology is rapidly changing and creating new and innovative ways to learn and teach foreign languages. Social media platforms have acquired creative uses and digital affordances that were not originally designed for educational purposes.

Many micro-celebrity language teachers are creating bite-sized language teaching content. Doing so brings them millions of followers who consume the engaging, accessible, and relatable nature of the multimodal content which can promote microlearning.

Combining digital ethnography and multimodal digital discourse analysis, this project explores the principles, ideologies, and innovative practices that shape micro-celebrity teachers’ content curation and pedagogy.

Dr Lisa Woynarski (Film, Theatre & Television) for the project titled ‘More-Than-Human Dramaturgies: Climate Justice in/through Performance’

Arts and culture have a powerful role to play in igniting climate imagination, for the public, policy-makers and academics, and rehearsing potential futures.

Dr Woynarski’s research is underpinned by the idea that theatre and performance can offer new frames of thinking, feeling and viewing, or reframe perspectives about climate crisis.

This project will develop Dr Woynarski’s leading work on ecodramaturgies  by undertaking a research project with more ambitious scope which develops new and innovative practice research approaches through interdisciplinary collaborations and creative industry partnerships.

Route B Fellowship awards

Professor Gabor Thomas (Archaeology) for the monograph titled ‘From Tribal Centre to Royal Monastery: Excavations at Lyminge, Kent, 2007-15’

From 2007–15, Professor Thomas led archaeological excavations that took place at Lyminge, Kent. This research represents the most extensive exploration of an early medieval monastery in England.

The monograph will provide a comprehensive account, analysis and synthetic interpretation of the archaeological excavations at Lyminge to pioneer new perspectives on the role played by monasteries in the Christianisation of early medieval peoples and landscapes. 

Dr John McKeane (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for the monograph titled ‘Sarah Kofman and Ancient Thought: Learning to Live at Last’

This project reappraises the key group in French critical theory which called itself ‘la philosophie en effet’ (philosophy in-deed). ‘La philosophie en effet’ brought together generation leading figures Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

The book will be the first full-length monograph on the fourth member, Sarah Kofman. It will address her work on classical thought, ranging from tragedy to philosophy and intervening on questions from Stoicism to education.