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Fellowships

Summer research fellows

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.

Andrii Pastushenko

Associate Professor of the International Economic Relations Department of

Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, Ukraine

Research interests:

I had the brilliant opportunity to spend 13–22 July 2026 as a Humanities Research Centre Visiting Fellow at the University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. The Centre provided an excellent environment in which to work on my new book about British and Irish naval personnel in Spanish service during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). In particular, during the fellowship I analysed digitised copies of Spanish naval payrolls from 1589–90 that I had obtained from the General Archive of Simancas. Working with these complex financial records requires considerable concentration, and the environment at the Centre was highly conducive to this kind of focused research. I also had access to the University of York Library, where I was able to consult relevant literature for my research.
I greatly appreciated the green surroundings of the university campus, its very pleasant atmosphere, and the good company of local researchers and visiting fellows. The fellowship therefore enabled me not only to focus fully on my research but also to develop my connections with British academia. Our meetings were extremely interesting, thought-provoking and simply delightful.
I am grateful to everyone involved, and especially to Dr Emilie Murphy, Dr Bill Sheils, Dr Simon Ditchfield, Dr Liesbeth Corens and Matthew Whiteley, for making this such a memorable experience

Liesbeth Corens

Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History

Queen Mary University of London.

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.

Liesbeth Corens Research Books
Hull History Centre, Papers of the Constable Maxwell Family of Everingham, Caerlaverock and Terregles, U DDEV/67/1: 'Sufferings of the Catholicks', Vols. 1 - 5., compiled by John Knaresborough.
Compilation of John Knaresborough