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
2020-21 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.
2021-22 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
2022-23 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
2023-24 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
Past HRC doctoral fellows