Introducing the 2026-27 Fellows

June 25, 2026
A word cloud, showing keywords from IASH projects, including Censorship, Care and The Slop Economy

The Institute is proud to announce the Fellowship cohort for academic year 2026-27. From more than twenty countries, the Fellows will work with mentors and collaborators across all of the Schools within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and beyond. They range from recent PhD graduates to eminent senior scholars, but are united by IASH's core mission of interdisciplinary working.

As usual, the research projects will be immensely varied, from trans/queer erasure in Russian culture to the algorithmic pollution of generative AI 'slop'. This is just a snapshot of the multitude of exciting scholarship that we'll be hosting.

Within themes of climate and health, Fellows will variously embark on an investigation into chemical weapons in twentieth-century Britain, and create a plant-dyed patchwork quilt to explore everyday environmental relationships and slow making. Amaris Ketcham from the University of New Mexico will develop a graphic memoir research project that examines how Scotland's blue and green places support wellbeing, from Victorian hydrotherapies to today's wild swimming and forest bathing. Declan Wiffen of the University of Kent will use lichen as a model for rethinking contemporary nature writing.

Race and the far-right is an area of interest for numerous Fellows, from David Farrell-Banks' examination of how Christian heritage is being mobilised among far-right groups, and the potential for theologically-rooted progressive opposition to far-right extremism, to Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa's walking ethnography exploring Black mobility, surveillance and anti-migrant discourse in post-Brexit Britain. Victoria Camille Westmont of the University of Alabama at Birmingham goes further back in time to unpick the far-right's weaponized nostalgia for an imagined industrial past in both the UK and the US.

The law offers scope for a series of projects, including Lady Sarah Woolfe's project on gender within the senior judiciary of Scotland, and an investigation into the intersecting legal, institutional and moral-religious structures that aim to regulate child sexual offending in Pakistan, led by Adnan Ashraf. Also centred on Pakistan, Fatima Naveed returns to IASH to complete her research on censorship, sedition and blasphemy.

African Fellowship Dr Iqra Atif University of the Witwatersrand 1 Dec 2026 - 31 Jan 2027 Urban Heat Exposure, Space, and Inequality: A Socio-Ecological Interpretation Using Geospatial Technologies
African Fellowship Dr Johannes Machinya University of the Witwatersrand 1 Dec 2026 - 31 Jan 2027 Datafying Self-care: Sociotechnical Logics of Data Extraction, Sharing, and Monetisation in South Africa’s mHealth Apps Landscape
American Philosophical Association Fellowship Professor Cressida J. Heyes University of Alberta 1 Nov - 31 Dec 2026 Sleep is the New Sex: A Feminist Philosophy of Sleep
American Philosophical Society Fellowship Dr Kaitlin Moore Wake Forest University 1 Jan - 31 Mar 2027 Quantum Currents: Indigenous Cosmologies and Virtual Reality Poetics
Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship Dr Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil Manipal Academy of Higher Education 1 Feb - 30 Apr 2027 Designing a Digital-Analogue Archive and Exhibition on Gulf Migration based on Malayalam Gulf Migrant Memoirs
Charles Wallace Pakistan Trust Fellowship Dr Adnan Ashraf Paraplegic Center Peshawar / College of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation 1 Jan - 31 Mar 2027 Governing Child Sexual Offending in Pakistan: Masculinity, Moral Authority, and Institutional Responses to Rehabilitation
Daiches-Manning Memorial Fellowship in 18th-Century Scottish Studies Dr Thomas Archambaud University of Glasgow 1 Jan - 31 Mar 2027 The Colonial Politics of Distance: Kenneth Murchison, East India Company Networks and Edinburgh’s Medical Enlightenment
Digital Research Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Pratiksha Ashok Tilburg University 1 Jan - 30 Jun 2027 The Slop Economy: Algorithmic Pollution and the Externalities of AI Content
Digital Research Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Alasdair Milne University of Glasgow 1 Nov 2026 - 30 Apr 2027 Collaborating Around Machines: Towards an Ontology of Collaboration for Machine Learning Art Practice beyond Generative AI
Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Hilal Alkan Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient 1 Jan - 28 Feb 2027 Olive Displacements: Trees as Commodities in the Shifting Olivescapes of Turkey
Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Laura Pottinger University of Manchester 1 Feb - 30 Apr 2027 The Unfinished Quilt: Stitching and Slow-Making Intimate People-Plant Relationships for the Environmental Humanities
Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship Professor Peter Thorsheim University of North Carolina at Charlotte 1 Sep - 30 Nov 2026 Chemical Weapons, the Environment and Health in Britain and the British Empire
Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Declan Wiffen University of Kent 1 Jun - 31 Jul 2027 Thallus
Fulbright Scotland Distinguished Scholar Amaris Ketcham University of New Mexico 1 Sep 2026 - 28 Feb 2027 Sea Cure: Centuries of Healing on Scottish Shores
GENDER.ED Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Manal Shqair Independent scholar 1 Sep 2026 - 30 Jun 2027 Palestinian Women’s Eco-Sumud: Nomadism, Settler Colonialism and Environmentalism
Heritage Collections Research Fellowship Dr Yasmin Akhter University of London 1 Sep 2026 - 28 Feb 2027 Locating African Lives in the George Shepperson Papers
Heritage Collections Research Fellowship Dr Robert Fell Independent scholar 1 Jan - 30 Jun 2027 Heritage Dialogues: Mapping Connections, Legacies and Futures in the School of Scottish Studies Archives
Heritage Collections Research Fellowship Dr Anisha Palat Tamil Nadu Council of Historical Research 1 Sep - 30 Nov 2026 Colonial Legacies & Ecological Erasure in Hunting Photography, India, c.1800-1950
IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Ehsan Kashfi University of Copenhagen 1 Sep 2026 - 30 Jun 2027 Dis-Islamia in Europe: Migration and the Politics of Anti-Islamic Sentiments in the Iranian Diaspora
IASH-CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellowship Dr David Farrell-Banks University of Edinburgh 1 Sep 2026 - 30 Jun 2027 The Church and the Far-Right in Scotland: Participatory Peacebuilding at a Time of Increased Far-Right Christian Nationalism
IASH-National Museums Scotland Fellowship Dr Sha Huang Texas Tech University 1 Sep 2026 - 28 Feb 2027 A Transferable Pilot Workflow for Community-Responsive Digital Cultural Heritage Using Hmong Batik
IASH-SSPS Research Fellowship Dr Mathieu Thierry Ngosso University of St Gallen 1 May - 30 Jun 2027 Firms, Climate Change, and Political Responsibility
IASH-SSPS Research Fellowship Dr Ferran Pérez Mena Durham University 1 Sep 2026 - 30 Jun 2027 Scottish Universities and the Development of Sino-British Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks from 1970s to 1990s
IASH-SSPS Research Fellowship Dr Suddhaseel Sen IIT Bombay 1 Jan - 30 April 2027 Towards a Relational History of South Asian Environmentalism: Indo-British Interrelations, 1850-1950
Medical Humanities Fellowship Dr Chisomo Kalinga University of Edinburgh 1 Sep 2026 - 31 Aug 2027 Creating a Critical Disabilities and Medical Humanities Hub
Nominated Fellowship Dr Nat Cutter University of Melbourne 1 Oct - 21 Dec 2026 Reading the Maghreb in Early Modern Britain: Marginalia and Networked Imaginaries, 1550-1750
Nominated Fellowship Professor Keya Ghosh Swami Vivekananda University 11 Aug - 15 Oct 2026 Community-Embedded Financial Cooperativism: Reconstructing SHG Institutions through Tagorean Rural Thought 
Nominated Fellowship Dr Asma Naureen Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 1 Oct - 31 Dec 2026 Cinema and Visual Culture in Late Colonial Punjab, 1920-1950
Nominated Fellowship Dr Shabnur Parveen Government College University Faisalabad 1 Nov - 31 Dec 2026 The Gendered Dimension of Racial Emotions: Muslim Women in India 
Nominated Fellowship Professor the Hon Lady Sarah Wolffe University of Strathclyde 8 Sept 2026 - 26 Mar 2027 Gender in the Senior Judiciary of Scotland
Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Gemma Curto University of Liverpool 1 Aug 2026 - 30 Apr 2027 + 1-31 July 2027 Solar Storm Narratives: Space Weather in Literature and Popular Science from 1859 to Present
Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Yawen Li Kings College London 1 Jan - 30 Jun 2027 Cultural Afterlives of Anticolonial Internationalism in Present-Day China
Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Fatima Naveed University of Exeter 1 Feb - 31 May 2027 Censoring a Nation: Blasphemy, Obscenity, and Sedition in Pakistan
Postdoctoral Fellowship Dr Thatshisiwe Ndlovu University of the Witwatersrand 1 Sep 2026 - 30 Jun 2027 Objects That Remember: Women’s Material Memories of Apartheid Struggle
Public Engagement Fellowship Dr Kadija Bouyzourn University of Sheffield 21 Sep 2026 - 21 July 2027 Voicing Care: How Migrant Women Share and Navigate Care through Oral and Relational Practices
Public Engagement Fellowship Dr Sara Caneva Independent scholar 1 Oct 2026 - 31 Jul 2027 Music for Moving Together: Composing with Scottish Country Dance
RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellowship Dr Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa Aston University 1 Mar - 31 Jul 2027 What more is there to say about 'race'?: Black (Spatial) Politics, Black Life and the Anti-Migrant Conjuncture
Sabbatical Fellowship Dr Ben Collier University of Edinburgh 1 Mar - 31 May 2027 Never Mind The Bollards
Sabbatical Fellowship Professor Alan Gillis University of Edinburgh 1 Mar - 31 Jul 2027 A poetry book
Sabbatical Fellowship Professor Lotte Hoek University of Edinburgh 1 Aug - 31 Dec 2026 Film Society: Cinematic Form and Social Change in Bangladesh
Sabbatical Fellowship Dr Eugénia Rodrigues University of Edinburgh 1 Aug - 31 Dec 2026 Infrastructures of Knowledge-Making and Digital Participation in Biodiversity and Nature Conservation
Sabbatical Fellowship Dr Elizabeth Williams University of Edinburgh 1 May - 31 Dec 2027 Black Sisters on Whose Shoulders We Stand
Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Lina Fadel Heriot-Watt University 1 Nov 2026 - 30 Apr 2027 Staying, Speaking, Refusing: Ethics Beyond Compliance in Decolonial Research with Syrian Minority Women Who Remain
Visiting Research Fellowship Professor Chris Herbst Arizona State University 1 Jun - 31 Jul 2027 Public Child Care Expansions, Parental Employment, and Household Well-Being: Evidence from Scotland
Visiting Research Fellowship Professor Dr Sara Nabil Queen's University 1 Jan - 30 Jun 2027 Expressive Embroidered Language: Exploring Braille as a Form of Expression Through DIY Maker Culture
Visiting Research Fellowship Professor Nicola Royan University of Nottingham 1 Jan - 31 Mar 2027 Scottish Responses to European Humanism, 1450-1550
Visiting Research Fellowship Professor Jenna Sciuto Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts 1 May - 30 Jun 2027 Northern Spaces and the Edges of the Self
Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Heather Stanley University of Lethbridge 1 Jun - 31 Jul 2027 Maternal Darkness: Maternal Mental Illnesses in Canada, 1880-1960
Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Margarita Vaysman University of Oxford 1 Sep - 31 Nov 2026 A Brave Life: Transgender and Queer Erasure in Russian Culture
Visiting Research Fellowship Dr Victoria Camille Westmont University of Alabama at Birmingham 1 Jan - 30 Apr 2027 Reimagining the Industrial Past: Far-Right Political Groups and the Creation of Heritage Narratives

NOTE: Some dates may change.

There are still some Fellowships to be announced - the British Council 90th Anniversary Research Fellowship is open for applications until 31 July, and we'll be advertising for our 2027 playwright-in-residence via the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship later this summer.