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HRC Doctoral Fellows

Doctoral Fellowships at the HRC are awarded following an internal competition for outstanding third-year PhD students at the University of York. Initial nomination is by the student’s supervisor. The final of the Fellowship competition is judged by a panel of academics from across the arts and humanities with external representation. The criteria for nomination are intellectual achievement and potential, and the final presentations are judged on the candidates' capacity to communicate high-quality research clearly and engagingly to a non-specialist audience.

More about the HRC Doctoral Fellowships competition

2025 Doctoral Fellows

Gemma Shearwood (History of Art)

  • 'Sculpting the Tropics: Visualising the East and West Indies in the Westminster Abbey Sculptural Pantheon c.1760 – 1840'

Chenyu Gao (School of Arts and Creative Technologies (Music))

  • 'Symbolic music generation for diversification of video game music assets through automatic variation and arrangement'

Irene Zarza Rubio (School of Arts and Creative Technologies (TFTI))

  • "‘I Still Believe in Heroes’: Combining Storytelling and Media Industry Practices to Construct a Contemporary Mythology in the Marvel Cinematic Universe."

Madeleine Mikinski (English and Related Literature)

  • 'Credit and Credibility: The Economics of Gossip in Jane Austen’s Novels'

Buhan Guo (Language and Linguistic Science)

  • 'How the Melody of Speech Unlocks Hidden Meanings'

Sarah Wood (Philosophy)

  • 'What It Is Like to Have Dementia: a Phenomenological Study'

Mengjin Xue (History)

  • "Female Translators and Indirect Translation in Modern China: Western Translations through Japanese at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century"

Yannick Signer (Archaeology)

  • "Potting landscapes: a regional approach to the development of pottery production in 11th-13th century Yorkshire"

2024 Doctoral Fellows

Hannah Armstrong (English and Related Literature)

  • "'Sheaves from Sagaland': Ecomedievalism and the Norse North Atlantic in British Writing (1860-Present)’"

Georgia Gerson (History of Art)

  • "The Hall of Mirrors: NFTs and the Art Market"

Katie Vernon (Centre for Medieval Studies)

  • "Arms and Armour of Romance"

Eimear Hurley (School of Arts and Creative Technologies (Music))

  • "A contemporary analysis of the realisation of UK government"

Rachel Feldberg (History)

  • "‘Fountains of Knowledge’ 1760-1810, for non-specialists"

Ben Gibb-Reid (Language and Linguistic Science)

  • "Investigating the Phonetic Properties of Word Tokens in Interactional Contexts with Implications for Forensic Voice Comparison"

2023 Doctoral Fellows

Saad Maqbool (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • Nothing Besides Remains: Using digital technologies and speculative design to explore the hidden and contested histories of museum and heritage artefacts

Wiktoria Tunska (English and Related Literature)

  • Community of Emotions: Affect, Brexit, and Contemporary Literature

Thomas William Dowling (Philosophy)

  • A Hegelian Review and Reconstruction of Reification

Kate Morris (Archaeology)

  • Archaeologies of Bereavement: The creation of grief and mourning objects in the second half of the nineteenth century

Basil Arnould Price (Centre for Medieval Studies)

  • The Shadow Age: Genre and Place in the Post-Classical Íslendingasögur

Kirill Kartashov (History)

  • Pyrethrum in 1880s–1950s Japan: A History of Rise and Fall

Xinpei Zheng (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • Instrumental pedagogy across cultures: The perspectives of Chinese instrument teachers in China and the UK

Eliza Goodpasture (History of Art)

  • Invisible Figures: Collaborative Friendship Amongst British Women Artists, 1870-1920

2022 Doctoral Fellows

Katie Crowther (English and Related Literature)

  • Georgian Paper Traces: Women’s Stories, Ephemeral Texts and Hidden Objects

Daniel Kim (Philosophy)

  • Naive Realism and the Structure of Consciousness

Kate Harrison-Ledger (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • "Body as performing subject, body as compositional object: the pianist's embodied practice in the context of composer-performer collaborations."

Susie Beckham (History of Art)

  • Time in the label & the label in time: Interpreting the “Pre-Raphaelite” (1848-2022)

Margherita Belia (Language and Linguistic Science)

  • Does sleep help babies recognise new words in different voices? An online study.

Emma Marshall (History)

  • Social Dynamics and the Management of Sickness and Healthcare in English Gentry Households, c.1620-1750

Eleanor Green (Archaeology)

  • Curiouser and Curiouser: Tales from Extracting Ancient Biomolecules from Unusual Museum Collections

2021 Doctoral Fellows

Claudia Nader Jaime (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • ASMR: sound interventions for wellbeing in adolescents

Heather Turner (L&LS)

  • Language Attitudes in Azerbaijan

Francesca Curtis (History of Art)

  • Beyond Treading Water: Mediating Ocean Ecologies for a Posthuman Global Imagination

Eleanor Byrne (Philosophy)

  • Fatigue: A Philosophical Investigation

Holly Day (History)

  • Women’s Life Writing in Later Georgian Memorandum Books

Taryn Bell (Archaeology)

  • The comfort of things: an archaeology of object attachment

Sharon Choe (English)

  • Deformed, Dismembered, and Disembodied: Reinventing the Body Politic in William Blake

Alice Masterson (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • ‘Little Girl Blue’? The mediation and reception of the posthumous careers of female musicians

Emma Nuding (CMS)

  • Fenland Pilgrimage: Writing St Guthlac of Crowland, Medieval to Modern

2020 Doctoral Fellows

Bella Powell (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • The causation and perpetuation of the prohibition on women’s violin playing in nineteenth-century England

Rui Qi Choo (Language and Linguistic Science)

  • The building blocks of syllable shape and tone in learning Mandarin: A longitudinal and experimental analysis

Luke Townend (Philosophy)

  • Purely Evaluative Moral Realism: Ethics without Obligations

Marte Stinis (History of Art)

  • Music as Aesthetic Ideal and Victorian Aesthetic Painting

Brendan Whitmarsh (English and Related Literature)

  • Authority and Representation in Henry James and Queer Theory

Kirstin Barnard (History)

  • Negotiating Boundaries: Sociability and Neighbourliness in Late Medieval England

Aubrey Steingraber (Archaeology)

  • Making a Medieval Border: Power, Place and the Archaeology of the Medieval Anglo-Scottish Borderland, c. 1200-1500

Rosamund Portus (School of Arts and Creative Technologies)

  • Extinction Studies: Imagining a World Without Bees

The 2020 Doctoral Fellowships finals took place online due to Covid-19.  You can watch the finalists' presentations on the HRC YouTube channel. 

2019 Doctoral Fellows

Adam Timmins (Philosophy)

  • (no title)

Jennifer Buckley (English)

  • ‘Facts and Fictionality: Essay-Periodicals and Literary Novelty’

Owen Burton (School of Arts and Creative Technologies (Music))

  • 'Upholding a Modernist Mentality: Experimentalism and Neotonality in the Symphonies of Einojuhani Rautavaara'

Luke Giraudet (Centre for Medieval Studies)

  • 'Political Communication, Public Opinion and Communities in the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, 1405-1449'

Rebecca Mellor (History of Art)

  • 'Phallus(ies) Galore: Quantifying the Visuality of the Classical ‘Obscene’ through the Long Nineteenth Century into the Digital Age.'

Aidan Collins (History)

  • 'Bankruptcy in the Court of Chancery, 1674-1750'

Florence Oxley (Language and Linguistic Science)

  • (no title)

Caitlin Kitchener (Archaeology)

  • "Unite and Be Free”: The Historical Archaeology of Political Radicalism c.1815-c.1822

Benjamin McDonald (School of Arts and Creative Technologies (TFTV))

  • 'The Presentation of Mental Illness on the Stage: and those who feign it'

Past HRC doctoral fellows