Humanities Research Centre
HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2016-17
I am a saxophonist and composer. I am researching Andean music as a source to create new sonorities for performance and compositional projects. I am particularly interested in analyzing the hybrid musical forms of the pagan-religious celebrations in the South Andes zone, specifically in the village of La Tirana, northern Chile. Through this research, I search to identify the multicultural elements that have influenced these particular music forms including themes that are part of the current debate such as globalization, colonialism, post-colonialism and modernity.
The postdoctoral project will extend the fieldwork developed in the Feast of La Tirana for my doctoral portfolio in July 2012. This second stage will focus on the celebration Pascua de Negros that is going to happen in January 2017. The fieldwork will include interviews, audio-video recordings and collaborative projects with local musicians. The aim is to analyze this new data through music transcriptions of the field recordings and interviews. An academic paper will be written as an outcome of this project and new compositions based on the musical analysis will be premiered in York in Summer 2017. I am also planning to present the research in conferences related to Ethnomusicology and similar topics during next academic year.
My experience at the HRC as a postdoctoral fellow was a great support for my research life after finishing my PhD. I received the benefits of working in a vibrant art and humanities research community where I could attend seminars and early career support sessions and use a personal workspace that helped me to prepare my presentations in three international conferences during the academic year. Also I received a research grant that helped me to fund some of my travel expenses to La Tirana, Chile where I conducted fieldwork and collect the data for my postdoctoral work. I always received help and collaboration from the HRC academic team when I asked some help or advice . I’m very grateful for this academic year as postdoctoral fellow at the HRC and I’m sure that it will be a valuable experience for my future career.
Hannah Boast, English and Related Literature
My research focuses on water and environmental politics in Israeli and Palestinian literature. I completed my PhD in the Department of English and Related Literature in 2016. This project was co-supervised in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield as part of the White Rose Hydropolitics Network.
The HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship will allow me to develop my thesis into a monograph, titled Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature. In this work I argue for the necessity of recognising water’s critical importance to any theorisation of modern and contemporary literatures and cultures from Israel/Palestine, and foreground water as a crucial new area of scholarship on resource fictions. This research draws on a wide range of disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies, political ecology and environmental history.
During the Fellowship I will also undertake preliminary research on two new projects, stemming from my thesis. The first will examine environment and climate in Israeli and Palestinian literature. The second will extend my work on the concept of 'hydrofictions' more widely, examining literary and cultural responses to water scarcity in a comparative, global context. I will present work-in-progress from these projects at conferences and aim to have a new article accepted for publication by the end of the year.
I have always found the HRC a friendly and supportive place to work since joining York as an MA student in 2009. One of the strengths of the HRC community is the number of scholars pursuing interdisciplinary research, who I’ve been able to talk to about the pleasures and, sometimes, struggles of working across different fields. I hope to promote these conversations during the Fellowship and, in particular, intend to continue building York’s reputation as a centre for the study of the environmental humanities.
I am an art historian specialized in early modern Italian and Spanish art. I have studied Art and Literature at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, before completing a PhD in History of Art at the University of York. My doctoral thesis explored the relationship between technique and subject matter in Jusepe de Ribera’s depictions of flaying. I argued that Ribera’s paintings of flaying offer viewers a visual paradox by never aligning, or making coherent the relationship between the force of their subject and their technique. In my approach, I am particularly fascinated by the way the materiality of artworks – especially the depiction of wounds and extreme emotions - disturbs conventional conceptions of time, narrative, violence, spirituality and the depiction of death in order to produce new affects and interpretations.
As a HRC Postdoctoral Fellow my primary focus will be to develop my doctoral thesis in a book manuscript for publication. I also plan to explore the depiction and conceptualization of skin in Spanish Baroque art in relation to materiality and spirituality. During my fellowship, I plan to organize a one-day workshop on the relationship between skin and violence in Italian and Spanish baroque art.
Mark France, Theatre, Film and Television
I have recently completed my PhD, which was a case study of the current artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Gregory Doran. My research interest is in contemporary approaches to Shakespearean production in English theatre, with a particular focus on mainstream practitioners working within institutional settings. I am interested in mapping rehearsal methodology onto specific performance outcomes and exploring the impact of organisational and cultural contexts on the director’s process, as well as how notions of Shakespearean tradition and authenticity inflect theatrical process and performance.
Over the next year I will be focussing on developing my thesis towards publication as a monograph as well as working on a journal article on the RSC’s current staging of Shakespeare’s History plays. As part of a wider, long term project, I also wish to broaden the scope of my research to examine rehearsal practice and traditions in greater detail in other comparable theatre-making institutions.
I am also a theatre director with extensive credits, both in Yorkshire and further afield, and am interested in finding ways to reframe my practice so that it can be used to generate productive research outcomes. I am looking forward to engaging proactively with the research community at the HRC over my postdoctoral year and I hope to organise a workshop and/or one day symposium relating to my research during 2017.
My research concentrates on the social and cultural history of memory, nationalism, ethnic identity, and intercommunal relationships, with a particular focus on migrant, refugee, and diaspora communities in the twentieth century Mediterranean world. My doctoral thesis at the University of York explored the experiences of the Greek communities of Istanbul and Imbros (Gökçeada) who left their places of birth in Turkey between c. 1950 and 1980 and resettled in Greece. Drawing on oral testimonies, written documentation, and participant observation, I documented how the expatriated Greeks of Turkey appealed to and reworked the past as they attempted to establish belonging in their new place of residence by emphasising the particularities of their local heritages. I have also conducted research into the representation of the 1974 Cyprus conflict in Greek Cypriot oral testimonies.
During the fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre, I will be preparing a new research project investigating the construction of transcultural solidarities between Armenian and Kurdish diaspora activists from the 1970s onwards, focusing in particular on Kurdish recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Through this research, I will seek to offer a hitherto neglected social historical perspective on transcultural collective memory. I will also be developing my public engagement project Personalising History, which explores the role of audiovisual testimony in teaching the Holocaust and genocide in secondary and higher education, as well as working for the Department of History as a Teaching Fellow.
The HRC Postdoctoral Fellowship has been an excellent bridge from PhD to early career research. Affiliation with the HRC gave me access to a vibrant and supportive research community, and a base from which to work on publications and postdoctoral projects. During my tenure, I have been able to work on a book manuscript and an article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and to develop a new postdoctoral project with which to apply for future funding. In July 2017, I hosted a conference at the HRC entitled Placeless Memories: Digital Constructions of Memory and Identity, which helped to increase my visibility in the field of digital history, and has led to further conference participation and an edited collection. The Postdoctoral Fellowship also allowed me to continue to develop my teaching portfolio with the Department of History, as well as providing an invaluable addition to my CV, demonstrating to employers and funders that I was continuing to be involved in active research. Above all, however, holding the Postdoctoral Fellowship gave me a sense of identity, belonging, and purpose as I made the transition from PhD life to the academic job market.
Ella Jeffries, Language and Linguistic Science
My PhD research at the University of York investigated children’s perception of regional accent variation. This involved running a series of experiments with pre-school and primary school children in York to investigate the question of how their awareness of regional accents developed during these years. My research has incorporated approaches from different fields of linguistic research, including language variation and change, sociophonetics, language acquisition and speech perception.
The HRC postdoctoral research fellowship will enable me to develop my research profile and I aim to submit two articles for journal publications, based on the work from my PhD. Furthermore, during the fellowship year I will pursue my ambitions for further work, which aims to uncover both explicit and implicit social attitudes that children develop towards accent categories. I have already drafted a research plan for this work and would like to spend the time as a research fellow seeking advice from other academics and refining my ideas.
I look forward to continue being part of, and contributing to, the vibrant interdisciplinary research community of the HRC, through participation in impact based research initiatives such as the York Festival of Ideas.
My PhD and present research interest within the field of Historical Archaeology lies in the previously unstudied phenomena of timber-built seacoast piers. These were the most important infrastructure assets of many coastal communities who would often go to enormous lengths in order to maintain and rebuild these ‘limited life’ structures. Having already established the broad social and environmental contexts of these piers, as well as their technical forms, for eastern England at least, I intend to use my time with the HRC Fellowship to develop key elements of this topic for publication. In particular I am looking forward to refining the broader European distribution of these sites and further exploring their use by the European maritime powers as ‘enabling tools’ within the processes of exploration and domination/exploitation of New Worlds.
I have recently (2016) completed my PhD in Philosophy here at York. My main research interest lies within the Philosophy of Mind (in particular, I am interested in the nature of misleading experience (i.e. dreams, hallucinations, and illusions) and whether or not what we say about them must then inform how we conceive of our ordinary non-misleading experiences). Other research interests include the Philosophy of Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Epistemology.
The HRC Fellowship will allow me to develop my theory of dreaming which I introduced in my PhD: specifically, I aim to clarify, and independently motivate, the emerging claim that dreams are convincing perception-like imaginings (i.e. imaginings that are introspectively indistinguishable from perceptual experiences), and then integrate this work into a wider theory of the imagination. This should then shed light on the nature of the imagination more generally.
I am looking forward to participating in HRC life by organizing a conference on dreaming, and other events during my fellowship.