HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2014

Isabelle Hesse, English and Related Literature

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My doctoral research linked the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine to an important shift in cultural perceptions of Jewishness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, extending the concept of “Jewishness” beyond ideas of diaspora, marginality, and victimisation, to include emerging intersections with Israeliness, Zionism, settler-colonialism, and nation-building.

Being an HRC postdoctoral fellow has allowed me to work on adapting my doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph, which is currently under consideration for publication. I have also started identifying and analysing key sources for my next project, entitled ‘Global Jews, Global Palestinians: The Holocaust, Israel, and Palestine in 21^st Century German and British Culture.’ Furthermore, I am currently completing an article on Palestine and the Arab Spring and I am also teaching for the Department of English and Related Literature and for the Languages for all Centre at York.

Mark Hutchinson, Music

I’m a musician and musicologist with a special interest in the analysis of contemporary music from the Western classical tradition. I completed my PhD in Musicology at York in 2012 (entitled ‘Redefining Coherence: Interaction and Experience in New Music, 1985–1995’), under the supervision of Tim Howell. I particularly enjoy exploring the overlaps between music, literature (especially poetry) and philosophy, and looking at the ways in which we can use unusual metaphors to enrich our understanding of new music. I’m also active as a piano and oboe teacher and performer, particularly as a piano accompanist and duet partner.

My HRC fellowship has been really useful, and has supported me immensely in what has been a productive year. Over the course of my fellowship, I’ve developed research in several key areas. Firstly, I’ve continued my PhD research into the concept of ‘aesthetic coherence’ in the analysis of post-1980s contemporary music: in the spring of 2014, my proposal for a book on the topic (Coherence in new music: experience,aesthetics, analysis) was accepted for publication by Ashgate. Alongside this, I’ve followed up one particular strand of my PhD, the connection between Japanese garden aesthetics and the late music of Tōru Takemitsu,into an article (‘Dreams, gardens, mirrors: levels of narrative in Takemitsu’s Quotation of Dream’), which has just been published in the journal Contemporary Music Review.

I’ve also been able to explore a new research area, the role of memory in recent contemporary music: in February I organised a study day in the Department of Music at York, supported by the Royal Musical Association as well as by the HRC. As part of the day, I gave a paper on the concept of ‘mythic absence’ in the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, Theodor Adorno and the composer György Kurtág; I am due to present a revised version of this paper at a conference in Portugal in March 2015. Finally, I’ve co-authored an article on the role of empathy in piano duet partnershipswith Liz Haddon (forthcoming 2015, in Empirical Musicology Review), and a book chapter on creative approaches to teaching musical analysis with Tim Howel (forthcoming 2016).

Matt Jenkins, Archaeology

I am an archaeologist with a specialism in historical and buildings archaeology. My primary research area is the long eighteenth century and I am committed to demonstrating the role that archaeology can play in understanding cultural life during this period and contributing to interdisciplinary debates concerning the nature of urban improvement, consumption, sociability and domestic privacy. My PhD was completed in 2013 and was entitled ‘The View from the Street: Housing and Shopping in York During the Long Eighteenth Century’. It demonstrated how close-grained empirical research can be combined with cutting-edge theory, such as the idea of ‘buildings biographies’. Here, the house and the occupiers can be studied together, revealing the life histories of both and enabling the study of how architecture and people influenced each other.

During my Fellowship, I will continue to develop my PhD research into journal articles. I will also be researching a number of new projects:

1) Building Virtual Landscapes – London in Pieces (In collaboration with Dr Charlotte Newman, English Heritage): The project enables the vanished heritage of London’s historic streetscapes to be recreated virtually using a number of sources, in particular English Heritage’s Architectural Studies Collection. This neglected collection contains a huge number of the internal fixtures and fittings of houses that have now been demolished.

2) Building Biographies in New England: The project gives my research a transatlantic perspective, enabling the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural diaspora to be explored in detail. It focuses on Salem, Massachusetts and Boston.‌‌

Lena Liapi, History

The Humanities Research Centre Fellowship postdoctoral fellowship allowed me to undertake new research on the subject of news about criminals, titled 'Notorious:Crime, News, and the Public Sphere, 1640-1720’, working on the circulation of news about criminals through print, manuscript and oral dissemination. The preliminary findings of this research were presented at the Moveable Types: People, Ideas, and Objects. Cultural Exchanges in Early Modern Europe conference at the University of Kent and I am preparing an article based on this paper for submission to an edited volume arising from this conference.

In 2014 I have also been active in the academic life of the University of York. In collaboration with Matt Jenkins, a HRC postdoctoral fellow, I undertook research on behalf of the History Department of the University of York, the York Civic Trust, Fairfax House and the North Yorkshire Archive, on the records of the Fairfax family deposited in the North Yorkshire Archive. Furthermore, in November 2014 I co-organised a workshop ‘Cheap Print and Popular Print Culture’ in the context of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York, with scholars from the University of Sussex, St Andrews, and the Royal College of Art. During 2014 I advanced my publishing profile. My article titled ‘“Loyal Hind”, “the prince of thieves”: crime pamphlets and royalist propaganda in the 1650s’ appeared in the edited volume News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections (Brill, 2014). Following my examiners’ suggestion, I am currently preparing a monograph proposal, based on my thesis, for submission to the series ‘Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain’ of Manchester University Press. Expanding the research of my thesis, I am also preparing an article titled ‘Narrating Crime and Punishment in Early Modern London: The Life and Death of Griffin Flood Informer’, in collaboration with Mark Jenner, to be submitted to Renaissance Studies. I am very grateful for the fellowship and the support that HRC provided, which has been significant for the development of my academic career.

Marta Szreder, Language and Linguistic Science

I study child language development, with a focus on two levels of observation. On the more detailed level, I am interested in how children acquire speech sounds, how they learn to coordinate those sounds into syllables and words, and how their practice in production and exposure to language interact, leading to the development of a phonological system. On the more general level, I am interested in what language development can tell us about the principles that guide cognitive development, the learning mechanisms that are involved, and their link with the development of other self-organising systems in nature.

My doctoral thesis, “Child phonology as a dynamic system” (supervised by Prof. Marilyn Vihman and Dr Tamar Keren-Portnoy) examined the phonological development of three children acquiring English, and looked at the properties of the developing phonology that are continuous with processes observed in natural dynamic systems. However, two major elements of the puzzle are still missing:

A detailed examination of the relationship between production and perception, and between articulation and phonology, that would allow for a strict definition of the components of the system.
A rigorous examination of the applicability of nonlinear dynamics to language development through computer modeling.

As a HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, I am working on developing a research program dedicated to exploring these two questions, and on disseminating the results of my doctoral research.