Introducing the 2026-27 Fellows

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.

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.