Fellowships
Liesbeth Corens
Research interests:
In my current project, I have identified an unprecedented upsurge in record-keeping practices among English and Dutch Catholics at the turn of the eighteenth century. In both Protestant countries, the Catholic minorities acted to preserve their own story of the recent past and gather the evidence of their ancestors' deeds. What can these collections tell us about the priorities of minorities? What do they deem vital to their survival?
I am tracing the footsteps of one of the English record-keepers, John Knaresborough, who resided on York and was well-connected with local antiquaries and gentry. Contrary to an image of Catholics separated from Protestant English society, Knaresborough's work shows a lively intellectual community.
Smriti Verma
Third-year DPhil candidate in English at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
Research interests:
My doctoral project, titled "Autofictional Affordances and Critical Feminist Engagement in Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk and Xiaolu Guo, 2000–2024," examines autofictional methodology, feminist engagement and narrative form in contemporary women's life-writing in the United Kingdom. I applied for the Humanities Research Centre’s Summer Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship at University of York, aligned with the Centre for Modern Studies.
As part of the fellowship, I was able to access Julia Pascal's papers, a British playwright active since the 1980s, at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, and think of autofiction's intersections with theatre.