Former CECS student awarded Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

7,178 project proposals were submitted to the 2023-24 call for the European Postdoctoral Fellowship, with 1,249 projects selected for funding.  The cut off score for selection was 94.6% - Sharon's project scored 97.8%.

Sharon's fellowship grant is €214,934 over 24 months to fund her project, Death Rituals and Britain’s Body: Antiquarianism, Scandinavia, and Cultural Politics (DEATHRIT). She will be based in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, working with Dr Robert W. Rix, a leading expert in Nordic Romanticism, Anglo-Nordic cross-cultural transfer, and eighteenth-century antiquarian studies.  

DEATHRIT will examine how language and imagery, borrowed from Norse tradition, contributed to shaping the concept of “Britishness” during the eighteenth century - a period when the British Isles were establishing emergent ideas of national identity and independent cultural artefacts by seeking vernacular literary traditions. Through a historical-contextual analysis of British texts, DEATHRIT will address the origins of current British cultural political discourse in different historical iterations, specifically how eighteenth-century nations and communities used alternate historical and ethnic heritages to affirm or transform their own cultural identity. In this way, the project aims to confirm Scandinavia’s complex role in the development of Britain’s body politic and cultural political beliefs on a local and European stage.

DEATHRIT will build on Sharon's doctoral research on Blake, Old Norse, and Disability theory, and the interdisciplinary and cross-temporal approach that she developed at York’s Department of English and at CECS.  She will continue to work across Eighteenth Century Studies, Norse Reception Studies, and Disability Studies, and will further develop her theory of the dis/abled body politic metaphor through Death Studies and the Medical Humanities.

The funding will primarily result in a monograph that will be pitched to Routledge’s series, Studies in Comparative Literature, post-Fellowship.