SALC academic named National Humanities Center Fellow

Dr Alexia Yates, Lecturer in Modern History in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC), has been named Fellow of the US-based National Humanities Center (NHC).

Also named as Fellow is Ian Burney, Professor of History based in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Alexia and Ian are the only two UK-based academics to have been invited to the NHC this year, a real reflection of the world-class research in the Humanities being done across our University.

Selected from over 600 applicants from around the world, the 2019-20 NHC Fellows represent the very best of humanistic scholarship covering a wide and varied range of disciplines including: African studies; history; philosophy; film and media studies; musicology; rhetoric; feminist, gender and sexuality studies; and East Asian languages and literature - to name but a few.

As an NHC Fellow, Alexia will have the opportunity to share her research in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the Center when she takes up her 12-month residency in North Carolina in September 2019.

Alexia’s field of expertise is modern European history; the cultural and social history of France; urban history; and the history of economic life. Her current research explores how the stock market came to be understood as a key daily element of French economic life in the nineteenth century and how this understanding changed throughout the twentieth century.

Commenting on the award, she said: “The Fellowship is an invaluable opportunity to share ideas and network with academics from around the world at the prestigious National Humanities Center - and of course to continue to develop my current research. I’m very much looking forward to taking up my residency next year.”

Ian added: “It’s a great honour to have been awarded an NHC Fellowship which together with a recent Guggenheim Fellowship will help me to develop my new research project on ‘a history of innocence’.”