Queen Mary University of London academics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences have been awarded British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships for their research. The British Academy is an independent fellowship of world-leading scholars and researchers.
Dr Claudia Soares from the School of Geography was awarded funding for her work exploring children’s social and emotional experiences of institutional care in Britain, Australia and Canada.
“I am thrilled to have been awarded the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will enable me to undertake research that explores children's social and emotional experiences of institutional care and 'aftercare' in several children's homes in Britain, Australia, and Canada, between 1850 and 1914.
My project will interrogate the history of childhood and institutional care in a transnational context by using a new and emerging history of emotions framework, to contribute to the development of conceptual thinking in this field. I feel privileged to receive this grant which will enable me to produce a new kind of study of childhood out of the home setting, reveal new understandings of the social, emotional, and cultural lives of children in care in the past, and to understand care as part of the history of emotions.
This funding will contribute significantly to my ability to strengthen and enhance my research and teaching experience at a crucial time in my academic career.”
Dr Chris Moffat from the School of History was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for his research on Pakistan. Dr Moffat’s work will provide the first comprehensive study of history’s contested public life in Pakistan, asking what the past has come to mean in a country born through violent rupture in 1947 and partitioned again in 1971.
“It is a tremendous privilege to be awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to complete new research in Pakistan and look forward to learning much through my collaborations with architects, artists and public historians in Lahore and elsewhere.
At Queen Mary, I will be helping to establish a new multi-disciplinary South Asia Forum as well as benefiting from the spirited intellectual environment provided by the School of History.”
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.
This year the British Academy has awarded a record 85 Postdoctoral Fellowships to outstanding early-career scholars, an unprecedented two-thirds (64 per cent) of whom are women.
For media information, contact: