Three academics from School of English and Drama awarded prestigious fellowships

Professors Michèle Barrett, Joad Raymond, and Bill Schwarz will be pursuing their research projects during the academic year 2016-17, following earlier success in the same scheme for medievalist Dr Tamara Atkin.

The fellowships offer up to £50,000 over three to twenty-four months for experienced researchers to conduct a programme of research in any discipline.

For her research, Professor Barrett is writing a monograph entitled Virginia Woolf as Researcher, which will draw on the papers of Woolf and her husband Leonard.  Professor Raymond’s fellowship will be devoted to producing a scholarly edition of John Milton’s Latin Defences – ‘The Book that Made John Milton Famous’ – for Oxford University Press (OUP). Meanwhile, Professor Schwarz is completing the third and final volume of his trilogy Memories of Empire, also for OUP.  

Professor Barrett said: "Virginia Woolf’s writing, even at its most lyrical, drew heavily on her own social and historical research.  During this Leverhulme-funded project, ‘The Author as Note-taker’, I will be working in the Woolf archives in order to demonstrate the extent of her research, and to establish its relation to her published work."

Professor Raymond added: “The award is for leave to complete an edition of Milton's three Latin Defences for Oxford University Press' ongoing Complete Works of John Milton. This is the first new complete works since the early 20th Century, and it will be the standard edition for decades to come. The first Defence was the book that made Milton famous across Europe in the 1650s, a work of reasoned republican argument and rhetorical verve, which justified the execution of the king and the introduction of a commonwealth. The two subsequent defences are embroiled in political and personal disputes with other polemicists. The edition is based on research into copies located across Europe and beyond.”

The Leverhulme Trust awards funding across academic disciplines, supporting individuals in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences to realise their personal vision in research and professional training.