HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2019-20

Jamie Cawthra

I'm interested in how fiction works: what we do when we read a book, watch a film or listen to a dialogue. In particular, I work on how traditional models of engagement with fiction can fail to capture practice. For my PhD, I investigated impossible fiction. These are stories with truly outrageous features, such as contradictions and paradoxes. I showed readers are able to creatively interpret even these weird works of fiction, using examples from Hollywood like Back to the Future and Looper alongside postmodern literature like At Swim-Two-Birds and The Garden of Forking Paths.

My HRC research also focusses on how audiences engage with fiction, but this time I'm looking at accessibility. In particular, I'm looking at audio description and its relation with the work it describes. There are philosophical issues here like adaptation, translation and paraphrasability which I plan to investigate. There are also wider issues about accessibility in fiction and art to discuss. We might expect subtitles and audio descriptions to accompany films, but what about sculpture or portraiture? How much ought artistic vision consider accessibility in general? If you're interesting in discussing these questions, my contact information can be obtained from the HRC.

Jennifer Cohen

For my PhD thesis, I examined the ways in which different forms of knowledge influence expressive timing decisions in the performance of Baroque flute music. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to continue my research through an HRC postdoctoral fellowship. During this time, I will reshape parts of my doctoral thesis for publication, and also extend my research to explore the applicability of my methodology beyond music of the Baroque period. After all, all musical practice is based on the interaction of knowledge, and nuances of timing are significant in all styles and genres. I will, therefore, continue to examine the relationship between epistemic interaction and temporal expressivity in flute performance, but with a focus on music of the twenty-first century. I will use the same methodology as my doctoral research – one that entwines theories from historical musicology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis and embodied cognition with critical reflection on my own practice as a performer-researcher. The outputs of my research will contribute primarily to the field of embodied music cognition, developing the work of Candace Brower, William Echard, Hallgjerd Aksnes and Deniz Peters in particular. My work will be of particular relevance to performer-researchers who are interested in the phenomenon of ‘performer knowledge’ and its role in the interpretative process.

Hannah Jeans

My PhD investigated women's reading habits in seventeenth-century England. I examined how and what women were reading, and the ways in which the act reading was gendered in the early modern period. This included exploring how women represented their own reading habits in letters and diaries, as part of a process of self-representation and self-fashioning within the text. My thesis provided a long-term view of seventeenth-century reading, covering the period 1600 - 1700, in order to investigate how women's reading changed and responded to cultural and political developments. My research was largely based on archival material, and was facilitated by library fellowships in the USA.

During my HRC fellowship, I plan to begin adapting my monograph for publication, and writing an article based on one of my chapters. I will also be working on a digital humanities project looking at women's newsletter reading in the seventeenth century. Drawing on this work, I will then begin thinking about my next research project, investigating how women participated in developing news cultures over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Simon Marginson

Jon McGovern

It was a great honour to be awarded an HRC postdoctoral fellowship. This position allowed me valuable time and space to continue my research after completing my PhD, and provided much-appreciated continuity in terms of access to facilities and resources. Thank you to the university and staff who made my time in York such a pleasure.

Jon McGovern

My doctoral thesis, which I began in September 2016 and defended in September 2019, is a study of rebellion and popular persuasion in Tudor England. It demonstrates that early modern governments resorted to a surprisingly communicative style of politics at times of rebellion, and that loyalists, inspired by Cicero, preferred to influence rebels with rhetoric rather than facing them on the battlefield. During my time as a doctoral student, I also wrote five articles and four scholarly notes on a variety of themes, which have all been published or accepted for publication in leading journals. The most important of these, ‘Was Elizabethan England Really a Monarchical Republic?’, won the Institute of Historical Research’s Sir John Neale Prize in 2018 and has been published in Historical Research. Most recently, during a trip to the Derbyshire Record Office, I was excited to discover notes on a lost sermon by Hugh Latimer, penned sometime between 1547 and 1553 by the Derbyshire lawyer and landowner Anthony Gell. A note I wrote about this discovery has already been accepted for publication in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

I aim to build on these successes during my year as an HRC postdoctoral research fellow. Firstly, I shall revise my PhD thesis into a monograph suitable for a general academic audience. Secondly, I will continue work on my next monograph, ‘Sheriffs in the Tudor Age’, for which I hope to secure longer-term postdoctoral funding in the near future. Although historians have tended to argue that sheriffs were relatively unimportant by the sixteenth century, they were in fact vital officers, with responsibilities for executing royal writs, holding courts, collecting revenue and acting as ‘policemen’. The project will demonstrate the continuing importance of sheriffs, analyse their conduct, and explain how the office evolved over the course of this period, drawing on a wide range of material from national and local archives. It will provide a case-study to illustrate how power was negotiated between central government and the localities in early modern Britain.

Paul Edward Montgomery Ramírez

I am a decolonial heritage specialist and public archaeologist. My thesis, titled ‘Branding Barbarians: A Study into The Use of Renewable Heritage Tourism Destinations as Platforms for Decolonial Options’, used decolonial theory and Indigenous method to examine Archaeological Open-Air Museums (AOAMs). Using visitor interviews and sentiment analysis, and autoethnographic work, I examined how the cases re-present the past and can change visitor perceptions. I also analysed economic factors surrounding these sites, and their capacity as resilient, renewable heritage resources. My research focuses primarily upon decolonization and heritage. This includes the use of heritage resources (such as archaeological sites, museums, and heritage crafts) as instruments for creating economies that bring dignity to marginal peoples. In particular, through a decolonial and Indigenous lens, I examine the uses of museums as platforms to engage with heritage narratives that have been under -and mis- represented.

During my time as an HRC postdoctoral fellow, I plan to continue working on decolonial heritage research. This will include preparing portions of my PhD for publication as articles in journals across numerous disciplines. Research that I have conducted on topics of Indigenous heritages, dignity, and survivance will be written up for publication, as well. I will also conduct surveys for practitioners of European ethnic religions for research on the intersections of cultural heritage management, use of spaces and knowledge about the past, and also concepts of indigeneity among practitioners.

Wei-Min Wu

My PhD research focused on the uses of the deictic verbs when co-occurring with averb phrase in Mandarin Chinese. I argued that the deictic verb is a kind of aspectualmarker, referring to different period of the event, depending on the position ofdeictic verb and which deictic verb is used. For example, when the deictic verb lai‘come’ appears before a verb phrase, such as wo lai kai men (literally: I come opendoor), which means ‘I’ll open the door’, lai ‘come’ refers to the state prior to theoccurrence of the door-opening event. When lai ‘come’ appears after a verb phrase,like jing xia xin lai (literally: calm descend heart come), which means ‘calm down’, lai‘come’ refers to the result state of the calming-down event.The HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship will allow me to develop my PhD thesisinto papers. In addition, the fellowship will also allow me to further investigate theaspectual deictic verbs, such as the different behavior when they appear in the mainclause vs. in the adverbial clause, the asymmetries between the two deictic verbs, lai‘come’ and qu ‘go’, and comparisons of the aspectual uses among languages.