HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2013

Samantha Howard, History of Art

Holding an HRC Post-Fellowship has been a very worthwhile experience for me. I feel overall that I now have a greater awareness of the different sorts of opportunities that are available to me as a post-doc graduate. I have been able to take advantage of the facilities at the HRC, which have been a positive boon such as having a quiet desk space on campus to retreat to when needed! Being part of the HRC has also provided numerous career-related conference/workshop opportunities that perhaps I would not have otherwise attended: The Arts Engaged/White Rose Consortium post-grad workshop, ‘Engaging with Non-Academic Audiences’ was particularly illuminating and provided much food for thought about the potential and scope of interdisciplinary opportunities for us early-career academics.

All of the staff at the HRC have all been brilliant and helpful throughout. The sessions run by Sarah Burton and Philip Morris on the crucial practicalities of obtaining further grants and funding from other institutions have been very useful and informative.

Erika Kvistad, English and Related Literature

I was awarded an HRC fellowship over Christmas 2012, following the completion of my Ph.D thesis on sexual power dynamics in Charlotte Brontë’s work, and took up the position after my viva in February 2013. I spent two of the three terms of the fellowship working as a part-time tutor at York, teaching Victorian Literature in the spring, and Critical Questions and Translations in the autumn.

Alongside this, I took my doctoral research into new contexts. Taking advantage of a teaching-free summer term, I wrote a proposal for a monograph based on my thesis, which is currently under review at Routledge. I began to develop a postdoctoral project on sex and bad writing. ‘Critical Bodies: Reading Through Desire in Brontë’, a paper linking ideas from my doctoral and postdoctoral research, was presented at the Somatechnics International Conference in Linköping in June. In July, I presented the paper ‘Intimate Readings’ as an invited speaker at the symposium ‘Making a Scene: Networks of Intimacy’. Later that year, I published a revised version of this paper as ‘Scenes of Unveiling: Reading Sex Writing in Charlotte Brontë’ in the journal Writing from Below. I joined the review board for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and reviewed a collection on Victorian things for the Review of English Studies. I also explored my interest in public engagement, becoming a regular contributor to a Norwegian journal of secondary school teaching, and training as a tutor for the Brilliant Club.

In November 2013 I accepted a three-year position as senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Oslo, where I am currently working.

Ed Crooks, Music

Oliver Jones, Theatre, Film and Television

Ellie McCullough, Medieval Studies

Hilary Paterson, Archaeology