Dr Emma West from the Department of English Literature has been awarded a prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
The Fellowship, which is worth £246,000 has been awarded to Dr West for her postdoctoral project ‘Revolutionary RedTape: How State Bureaucracy Shaped British Modernism.’ She started work on the project in October 2017 and it will run until September 2020.
It examines how public servants and official committees helped to commission, disseminate and popularise British modernist art, design, architecture and literature.
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships enable early-career academics in the humanities and social sciences to conduct a significant piece of research leading to publication over a period of three years.
Emma’s Postdoctoral Fellowship is one of a record 85 awarded this year to outstanding early-career scholars, an unprecedented two-thirds (64%) of whom are women. More awards have been made thanks to a £10m boost in funding from the government’s Global Talent Fund for an extra 40 fellowships, enabling the British Academy to make the most awards in the scheme’s 30-year history.
The Head of the College of Arts and Law, Professor Michael Whitby, says, “This is excellent news for both Dr West and the College. It is recognition of her considerable achievements so far and her potential to continue delivering engaging, comprehensive and relevant research.”
Chief Executive of the British Academy, Alun Evans, adds, “We are delighted to welcome the largest ever cohort of Postdoctoral Fellows. It is particularly exciting to recognise the achievements of so many women at early-career level. This is a promising trend - both for our disciplines and academia as a whole – as Postdoctoral Fellows often go on to stellar academic careers.”