̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

British Academy elects Cambridge researchers to Fellowship

ta385 — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 10:59:00 +0000

They are among 86 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in fields ranging from medieval history to international relations.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:

Professor Elisabeth van Houts (History Faculty; Emmanuel College)

Professor Tim Harper (History Faculty; Magdalene College)

Professor Rosalind Love (Department of ASNC; Robinson College)

Professor James Montgomery (FAMES; Trinity Hall)

Professor Ayşe Zarakol (POLIS; Emmanuel College)

Professor Tim Dalgleish (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit)

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1700 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas.

Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb. ̽��ֱ��Academy is also a funder of both national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.

In 2024, a total of 52 UK Fellows, 30 International Fellows and 4 Honorary Fellows have been elected to the British Academy Fellowship.

Professor Ayse Zarakol said: “I am absolutely delighted to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of my interdisciplinary work at the intersection of international relations, global history and historical sociology. It is an honour to join such a long line of distinguished scholars. I very much look forward to working with the Academy to advance research on the big questions of our day and to ensure that UK remains a hospitable environment for social sciences and humanities research that attracts the best talent from around the world.”

Professor Rosalind Love said: “As a grateful recipient of one its Postdoctoral Fellowships, I have always revered the British Academy and am deeply humbled by this honour. It shows that the Academy values the teaching of Medieval Latin, and research in that area, at a time when the subject faces cuts elsewhere. I’d like to express sincerest gratitude to the teachers who gave me a solid grounding and to all who have supported me over the years: they made this possible. I look forward to working with other FBAs to shape the future of the Humanities.”

Professor Tim Harper, Head of Cambridge’s School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, said: “It is an honour to be elected a fellow of the British Academy. As a historian, I am very aware of the challenges and opportunities for the humanities and social sciences that we collectively face. I look forward to continuing to strive to strengthen their position.”

Welcoming the Fellows, President of the British Academy Professor Julia Black said: “We are delighted to welcome this year’s cohort of Fellows, and I offer my warmest congratulations to each and every one. From the Academy’s earliest days, our Fellows are the lifeblood of the organisation, representing the very best of our disciplines – and we could not do all that we do without their expertise, time and energy. I very much look forward to working closely with our new Fellows – the breadth and depth of their expertise adds so much to the Academy.”

Six academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences.

It is an honour to join such a long line of distinguished scholars.

Ayşe Zarakol

̽��ֱ��British Academy

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

ta385 — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 07:00:00 +0000

A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th Century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD student at Cambridge. Rishi Rajpopat made the breakthrough by decoding a rule taught by “the father of linguistics” Pāṇini.

Discarded history: Cairo Genizah treasures

zs332 — Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 +0000

How the discovery and study of ancient deeds, fables, letters, magical amulets, contracts and lists in a sacred storeroom created unparalleled engagement with a forgotten chapter of Jewish history.

Forgotten heroes: Study gives voice to China's nationalist WWII veterans

ta385 — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 11:30:00 +0000

As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 100th anniversary, new research gives voice to the country's still controversial nationalist (KMT) veterans and the volunteers determined to honour them.

Twelve Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

sc604 — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Two hundred and nine senior scientists from across Europe were awarded grants in today’s announcement, representing a total of €507 million in research funding. ̽��ֱ��UK has 51 grantees in this year’s funding round, the most of any ERC participating country.

ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. ̽��ֱ��sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists in any field with a recognised track record of research achievements in the last ten years. Apart from strengthening Europe’s knowledge base, the new research projects will also lead to the creation of some 1,900 new jobs for post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and other research staff.

Professor Melinda Duer from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry has been awarded a grant for her EXTREME project to explore the chemistry that happens when a biological tissue stretches or breaks.

So-called mechanochemistry leads to molecules being generated within the tissue that may be involved in communicating tissue damage to cells. Detecting and understanding this chemistry is highly relevant for understanding ageing, and for developing new therapeutics for degenerative diseases and cancer.

“This award means I can do the research I’ve been dreaming about for the last ten years,” said Duer. “I am extremely grateful to the European Research Council for giving me this amazing opportunity. ̽��ֱ��ERC is one of the few organisations that understands the need for longer-term funding for high-risk, high-reward research, which is essential for this project. I really couldn’t be more delighted and I can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Manish Chhowalla, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, received funding for his 2D-LOTTO project, for the development of energy-efficient electronics.

“This grant will enable our research group to realise the next generation of energy-efficient electronics based on two-dimensional semiconductors,” he said. “ ̽��ֱ��funding will also support a team of students, early career researchers and senior academics to address the challenges of demonstrating practical tunnel field effect transistors.”

Professor Henning Sirringhaus from the Cavendish Laboratory received funding for his NANO-DECTET project, for the development of next-generation energy materials. “Worldwide, only about a third of primary energy is converted into useful energy services: the other two thirds are wasted as heat in the various industrial, transportation, residential energy conversion and electricity generation processes,” said Sirringhaus. “Given the urgent need to mitigate the dangerous consequences of climate change, a waste of energy on this scale needs to be addressed immediately.

“Thermoelectric waste-heat-to-electricity conversion could offer a potential solution, but the performance of thermoelectric materials is currently insufficient. In this project we will use the unique physics of molecular organic semiconductors, as well as hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors, to make efficient, low-temperature thermoelectric materials.”

Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres from the Department of Archaeology received funding for his REVERSEACTION project, which will study how societies in the past cooperated. “Many prehistoric societies did pretty well at maintaining rich and complex lives without the need for permanent power hierarchies and coercive authorities,” he said. “Arguably, they chose to cooperate, and not just to ensure survival. ̽��ֱ��lack of state structures did not stop them from developing and sustaining complex technologies, making extraordinary artefacts that required exotic materials, challenging skills and labour arrangements. I’m keen to understand why, but also how they managed.

“This grant couldn’t have come at a better time, as collective action is increasingly recognised as the only way to tackle some of our greatest global concerns, and there is value in studying how people collaborated in the past. With our labs freshly revamped through our recent AHRC infrastructure grant, we are ready to take on a new large-scale, challenging archaeological science project.”

Professor Marta Mirazon Lahr, also from the Department of Archaeology, was awarded funding for her NGIPALAJEM project, which will bring a new understanding of how the evolution of our species is part of a broader and longer African evolutionary landscape.

“My research is in human evolution, a field that advances through technical breakthroughs, new ideas, and critically, new fossils,” said Lahr. “A big part of my work is to find new hominin fossils in Africa, which requires not only supportive local communities and institutions, but long-term planning and implementation, a dedicated team, significant funds and the time to excavate, study, compare and interpret new discoveries. This new grant from the ERC gives me all this and more – and I just can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Richard Samworth’s RobustStats project will develop robust statistical methodology and theory for large-scale data. “Large-scale data are usually messy: they may be collected under different conditions, and data may be missing or corrupted, which makes it difficult to draw reliable conclusions,” said Samworth, from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. “This grant will allow me to focus my time on developing robust statistical methodology and theory to address these challenges. Equally importantly, I will be able to build a group of PhD students and post-docs that will dramatically increase the scale and scope of what we are able to achieve.

Professor Zoran Hadzibabic from the Cavendish Laboratory was awarded funding for his UNIFLAT project. One of the great successes of the last-century physics was recognising that complex and seemingly disparate systems are fundamentally alike. This allowed the classification of the equilibrium states of matter into classes based on their basic properties. At the heart of this classification is the universal collective behaviour, insensitive to the microscopic details, displayed by systems close to phase transitions.

A grand challenge for modern physics is to achieve such a feat for the far richer world of the nonequilibrium collective phenomena. “Our ambition is to make a leading contribution to this worldwide effort, through a series of coordinated experiments on homogeneous atomic gases in two-dimensional (2D) geometry,” said Hadzibabic. “Specifically, we will study in parallel three problems – the dynamics of the topological Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, turbulence in driven systems, and the universal spatiotemporal scaling behaviour in isolated quantum systems far from equilibrium. Each of these topics is fascinating and of fundamental importance in its own right, but beyond that we will experimentally establish an emerging picture that connects them.”

Dr Helen Williams from the Department of Earth Sciences said: “By funding the EarthMelt project, the ERC has given me the amazing opportunity to study the early evolution of the Earth and its transition from a largely molten state to the habitable planet we know today. This funding will also help me to develop exciting new instrumentation and analytical techniques, and, most importantly, mentor and support the next generation of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working in geochemistry.”

Professor Sir Richard Friend from the Cavendish Laboratory has been awarded funding for his Spin Control in Radical Semiconductors (SCORS) project, which will explore the electronic properties of organic semiconductors that have an unpaired electron to give net magnetic spin. ̽��ֱ��project is based on a recent discovery that this unpaired electron can couple strongly to light, allowing very efficient luminescence in LEDs. Friend’s group will explore new combinations of optical excited states with magnetic spin states. This will allow new designs for LEDs and solar cells, and opportunities to control the ground state spin polarisation in spintronic devices.

Professor Christopher Hunter’s InfoMols project is focused on synthetic information molecules. “ ̽��ֱ��aim of our project is replication and evolution with artificial polymers,” said Hunter, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “ ̽��ֱ��timeframe for achieving such a breakthrough is unpredictable, and it is the flexibility provided by an ERC award that makes tackling such challenging targets possible.”

Professor Mark Gross from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics received funding for his Mirror symmetry in Algebraic Geometry (MSAG) project, and Professor Geoffrey Khan from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies was awarded funding for ALHOME: Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Near East.

Twelve ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have won advanced grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premier research funding body. Their work is set to provide new insights into many subjects, such as how to deal with vast scales of data in a statistically robust way, the development of energy-efficient materials for a zero-carbon world, and the development of new treatments for degenerative disease and cancer. Cambridge has the most grant winners of any UK institution, and the second-most winners overall.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Top, left to right: Helen Williams, Richard Friend, Richard Samworth, Melinda Duer. Bottom, left to right: Chris Hunter, Marta Mirazon Lahr, Marcos Martinon-Torres, Manish Chhowalla

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Displaced lives: Investigating Europe's handling of the refugee crisis and giving voice to asylum-seeking migrants

ta385 — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:00:00 +0000

For the last three years, the RESPOND project has been investigating migration governance in 11 countries by foregrounding the insights of asylum-seeking migrants. Now principal investigator Dr Naures Atto has launched a digital exhibition featuring work by migrant artists.

̽��ֱ��student linguist who started a pro-refugee fashion revolution

cg605 — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 17:15:08 +0000

Tiara Sahar Ataii has just been named Undergraduate of the Year for Impactful Social Action. She shares how her love of languages and exploration of her Iranian roots took her on unexpected paths, and led her to found a charity using fashion to fund legal aid for refugees.

Cambridge academics elected to British Academy fellowship

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 12:49:00 +0000

They are among 86 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in the fields of law, economics, Middle Eastern studies, geography, history of science, art and architecture, classics, and English literature.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:

Professor Catherine Barnard (Faculty of Law; Trinity College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on European Union law, especially the single market; Brexit and the UK-EU future relationship; employment law, especially equality law, and its European dimension.
Professor Giancarlo Corsetti (Faculty of Economics; Clare College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work in the field of economic policy and international economics, with focus on currency, financial and debt crises, European monetary union and open economy macroeconomics.
Professor Khaled Fahmy (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; King's College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on modern Middle Eastern history, history of Islamic law, the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Professor Sarah Radcliffe (Department of Geography; Christ's College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on critical development and political geography; postcolonial and decolonial geography; indigeneity; intersectionality in socio-spatial inequalities; these themes in relation to Andean lives, contestations and knowledges.
Professor James Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science; Christ’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on history of science; science communication; natural history, evolution and geology in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Professor Caroline van Eck (Department of History of Art; King’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on the history of European art and architecture c. 1800 in a globalising world.
Professor Timothy Whitmarsh (Faculty of Classics; St John's College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on ancient Mediterranean literature, culture and thought; Greek literature, especially of the Roman Empire; cultural contacts in the ancient world; ancient religion and scepticism; literary and cultural theory.
Professor Clair Wills (Faculty of English; Murray Edwards College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on 20th-century British and Irish cultural history; contemporary writing; the literature and social history of migration.

̽��ֱ��British Academy has also welcomed four new honorary Fellows, among them Bridget Kendall MBE, Master of Peterhouse Cambridge. Kendall is a broadcaster and writer with a particular interest in Russia, international diplomacy and security and promotion of language learning.

̽��ֱ��new Fellows join a community of over 1,400 leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while current honorary Fellows include Dame Joan Bakewell, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Baroness Brenda Hale.

Professor Whitmarsh said: “I have owed much, along the way, to the British Academy, who funded my postgraduate studies and awarded me a Mid-Career Fellowship in 2012-2013, which allowed me to write my book Battling the Gods. I am now greatly honoured, and genuinely humbled, to have been elected a Fellow.”

Professor Sir David Cannadine, President of the British Academy, said: "I would like to extend a warm welcome and hearty congratulations to the individuals who have joined the British Academy Fellowship. This is a time to reflect on the many invaluable contributions these academics have made to their disciplines. It is also a time for celebration, and I hope that, social distancing measures notwithstanding, each of our new Fellows is able to do so in ways great or small."

As well as a fellowship, the British Academy is a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.

Eight academics from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social sciences.

I have owed much, along the way, to the British Academy ... I am now greatly honoured, and genuinely humbled, to have been elected a Fellow

Timothy Whitmarsh

̽��ֱ��British Academy

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