HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellows 2025-26

Bryony Aitchison

Bryony Aitchison is a researcher, writer, and creative workshop facilitator based in York. She recently completed her AHRC-funded PhD at the University of York, where her research explored queer gardens in the poetry and life writing of modernist women writers. Her doctoral project examined how the embodied act of gardening generates queer organic forms in modernist texts, intervening in current critical conversations about queer ecologies.

Alongside her academic work, Bryony engages in creative practices that respond to landscape through walking, writing, and visual media. Her 2023 book Spanscapes (Modernist Society) documents her walks through communal gardens in Span housing estates across London, Oxford, and Kent. Combining text and photography, Spanscapes explores the relationship between Span’s ethos of creating community and the organisation of green space at the estates.

For the HRC postdoctoral fellowship, Bryony will collaborate with York-based sound artist Dr Gaia Blandina to lead the creative research project, ‘Side Quests: Transdisciplinary Art Walks in North Yorkshire.’ Founded in September 2024, ‘Side Quests’ uses walking as both as a creative practice and a research tool, inviting participants to engage with North Yorkshire’s landscapes through activities related to ecopoetics, sound, and multimedia art. Embracing detours and unexpected encounters, the project fosters new ways of interacting with, observing, and listening to places.

Lore Lixenberg

Lore Lixenberg is a mezzo-soprano, sound artist, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work investigates the intersection of digital and analogue formats in opera and extended music theatre. Her practice-based research focuses on the development of new performance structures she terms AppEra—opera works conceived within and across digital platforms, app environments, and physical performance spaces. Drawing on extended vocal techniques, conceptual systems, app building and participatory dramaturgies, Lixenberg’s work interrogates the evolving role of voice in technologically mediated performance.

She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2025, where her doctoral portfolio included SINGLR, a participatory vocal performance détourning dating app mechanics; VOXXCOIN, a conceptual operatic work engaging blockchain infrastructure through speculative voice economies; and LETHE, a phantasmagorical “operamentory” exploring the amnesia of the internet in relation to analogue forgetting. LETHE frames temporary forgetting as a necessary altered state in performance practice, and is currently evolving into a hybrid analogue-digital game environment. Across these works, Lixenberg repurposes the logics of digital systems—protocols, transactions, user flows—into compositional and dramaturgical forms that reconfigure the everyday into vocal performance.

Her research also interrogates the voice as a site of political potential and instability. In The Sonic Voice Party, she founded a political movement with a pedagogical opera-bot designed to intervene in online discourse and satirically confront political language systems, teaching by insult. By embedding vocality within both activist and algorithmic contexts, Lixenberg continues to explore how performance can engage—and subvert—the infrastructures of contemporary power and communication.

Her broader concept of extended music theatre is concerned with how voice, space, and format interact across cultural and technological regimes. Drawing from postdramatic theatre, experimental music, and critical media theory, her work foregrounds the voice’s capacity to inhabit multiple selves, negotiate unstable time, and construct porous dramaturgical structures. Working across code, vocal embodiment, and spatial composition, Lixenberg’s performances—ranging from ambisonic installations to app-based micro-operas—challenge established operatic form and create new frames for listening, acting, and voicing in the present.

About the research

This research fellowship will explore how artificial intelligence can reimagine the vocal and compositional techniques of the medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut. Working with AI visual artist Erin Robinson, composer Dr Federico Reuben, and Palestinian oud player and composer Habib Hanna Shehadeh, the project applies neural audio synthesis (NAS) to medieval vocal music, generating new voices and soundworlds that reflect and transform the polyphonic practices of the 14th century.

Guillaume de Machaut’s motets and songs represent some of the earliest systematic approaches to multi-voiced composition. His work built on techniques developed at the Notre Dame school—melismatic elaboration, modal structuring, and voice-adding—which shaped the evolution of Western music. Rather than treating Machaut’s music as static historical artefact, this project uses AI not only to analyse these techniques but also to extend them creatively, asking how contemporary technologies might offer new ways of hearing, performing, and engaging with medieval music.

A recent performance at Café OTO, Machaut Mash-up, served as a pilot for this new research direction, where Machaut’s music was processed through the RAVE AI model and embedded within a spatial acoustic simulation of Notre Dame Cathedral. Live vocals interacted with real-time AI outputs and immersive visuals created by Erin Robinson, transforming the performance space into a digital cathedral. While that event demonstrated the artistic potential of these ideas, the fellowship significantly extends this early work, developing new datasets, systems, and analytical frameworks, and deepening the creative integration of AI with historical materials.

By training AI voice models on recordings of Machaut’s compositions, the project explores how algorithmic transformation can mirror and extend medieval compositional processes. It asks what parallels exist between historical voice-building and AI synthesis, and how these techniques might be meaningfully brought into conversation. The outcomes will include new performances that combine live voice, AI processing, spatial sound, and visuals—staged at York Minster, the National Centre for Early Music, and the Rymer Auditorium—as well as scholarly articles, digital tools, and educational resources.

A key strand of the project is accessibility: how can these complex musical legacies be made more porous and inviting to contemporary audiences? A prototype app is being developed that allows users to remix and interact with Machaut’s music through AI-generated voices and visuals, offering new ways into medieval sound worlds. Alongside this, a public digital archive will document the process, share datasets and models, and make the creative tools open and available to others working at the intersection of music, history, and technology.

This is a project about revoicing: not just Machaut, but also our relationship with the past, with machines, and with each other. It reimagines the boundaries between performer and system, human and non-human, tradition and experiment. Through collaboration, code, and composition, it invites us to listen differently—to the past, to technology, and to the voices that emerge between them.

Marisa Michaud

My doctoral research examined a c.1470-1475 illuminated manuscript copy of the hagiography of Colette of Corbie (1381-1447). This was the first study to make this manuscript its exclusive focus, supported by the first ever transcription of its text. The manuscript, owned by Margaret of York (1446-1503) and later gifted by Margaret to the Ghent Colettine Poor Clares, contains the most extensive pictorial cycle of Colette’s life, likely devised specifically for this copy. Using interdisciplinary methods, my research examined the early visual culture of the Colettine Poor Clares, revealing the complexities and tensions behind the iconographic construction of a ‘new’ saint for whom no visual models existed at the time of the manuscript’s creation. As such, my research demonstrated that, for the early iconographic development of Colette, text, image, and patron were mutually inseparable exegetical components. This research further recentred Margaret of York and the Colettine Poor Clares in the construction of a saintly Colette and challenged the traditional confinement of Colette within the walls of the cloister.

During my time as a HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, I will be pursuing further avenues for research which I identified during my doctorate and continuing my work on late-medieval manuscript illumination, text/image relationships, patronage, and the early visual culture of the Colettine Poor Clares. Alongside this. I will be refining my doctoral thesis for publication as a monograph, with further work to be published in journals. Additionally, collaboration and community have shaped my career, and I look forward to contributing to the HRC community.

Ishita Krishna

My research engages with a study of objects in western modernist drama, looking at the different representations of objects, objectification, and subject-object encounters in text and theatre. My interdisciplinary work explored objects as lenses as well as subjects of study and analysis, weaving interventions from theatre, literature, modernism, and nonhuman studies, and theoretical frames from feminist, disability, affect, and queer studies. My research further shows that engaging with theatrical and literary objects reveals the relationship between the self, the non/human other, and the larger processes of othering that circulate within and outside theatre.

During the HRC postdoctoral fellowship, I will work on developing a book proposal for publication of my research as a monograph. I will also be working on edits for my post-peer review article and potentially develop more articles for publication. I am interested in organising a mixed-format, interdisciplinary seminar/workshop around object and nonhuman studies, a field that is current and developing across humanities disciplines.

Robin Pawlett-Howell

My main research specialisations are in existential phenomenology and social/political philosophy. For my purposes, these areas of thought touch upon two main themes: how a pre-reflective sense of agency underpins the structure of first-person experience and how we make sense of the shared norms and values that binds society together, or, on occasion, rends it apart. In my PhD, I employed Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective consciousness to criticise and reconstruct Rawls’s argument from congruence, i.e. the claim that a theory of justice is stable when the desire act on moral principles accords with an individual’s conception of ‘the good’ (their version of a life well-lived). Specifically, I argued against Rawls’ characterisation of goodness as consisting in a rational life plan. Instead, I demonstrated that the process of life-planning is an extension of what the agent already takes to be good, which is more aptly described through a non-thetic, dynamic framework of commitments.

During the postdoctoral fellowship, I will use my expertise in pre-reflective consciousness and the psychology of planning to explore an underappreciated issue within philosophy: why do some people plan to take their own lives? In my view, investigating the nature of planning can offer much-needed insight into the nature of suicidal intent, and vice versa. Employing a broadly Sartrean approach, I will sketch a phenomenological model through which the transition from ostensibly ‘impulsive’ suicidal behaviour to ‘thought-out’ suicide plans might be understood. From the viewpoint of existential psychology, such plans refer to unthematized, project-like structures which reveal more and more about the individuals’ values and intentions. As a result, I will de-intellectualise the discussion around suicide-planning (thus challenging and reframing the traditional issue of whether such plans are appropriately ‘rational’) by recognising its foundation within a complex tapestry of pre-reflective commitments.

Sarah McKeagney

I am a late-medieval social historian, with a particular focus on law and the courts in fifteenth-century England. My PhD thesis offered the first comparative analysis of breach of faith and perjury litigation in late medieval England, capacious forms of litigation that allowed litigants to contest broken oaths before an ecclesiastical judge. Using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, I examined how accusations of breach of faith and perjury enabled late medieval parishioners to interrogate the economic and social hierarchies that shaped their everyday lives.

During my time at the HRC, I am hoping to refine the arguments made in my thesis, and expand my comparative analysis from three case studies to five, digging into the rich archives available to me in York. I also hope to continue to work on journal publications that reflect my interest in the histories of people that left few historical traces; these cover a range of topics such as cross-dressing and masculinity in fifteenth-century England, networks of hucksters in medieval London, and the traces left by nonwhite residents of English towns in the fifteenth century.

I look forward to both participating in and contributing to the rich collaborative life of the HRC in its new home at Heslington Hall.

Xinrui Zhang

My doctoral research examined how international artists have facilitated public discourse on China’s ecological issues in relation to the country’s environmental governance. My thesis reassessed from an art-historical perspective sociologists Guobin Yang and Craig Calhoun’s concept of China’s green public sphere as an arena where citizens produce and circulate critical environmental discourse. I analysed four case studies, ranging from site-specific performance art in the 1990s and a public park in Chengdu designed by an American artist to an ongoing transnational participatory art project disseminated via the internet. My work redressed the absence of literature on the role of art in facilitating environmental discourse in contemporary China. It revealed how China’s green public sphere is also shaped through bodily engagement mediated by art.

During the HRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, I will develop my thesis into a monograph on the relationship between performance-based artistic practices and green discourse. I will work on a new project examining artists’ impact on sustainable development amid a growing backlash against green policies, despite more frequent extreme weather taking place worldwide. Alongside my research, I hope to contribute to HRC graduate training sessions.

Yorgos Paschos

My PhD research, in collaboration with the York Music Venue Network and funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities, assessed the subcultural heritage significance of grassroots music venues. It argued that the value of GMVs extends beyond their physical structures to include the emotional, communal, social and cultural practices they sustain. I also explored how GMVs foster affective values and create heritage atmospheres, shaping identities and community attachments. Hence, the study demonstrated how informal, grassroots modes of value-making can challenge dominant heritage frameworks that prioritise material and authorised narratives. By conceptualising GMVs as dynamic sites of subcultural heritage, the thesis offered new approaches for recognising and safeguarding everyday heritage places in the face of urban change and policy neglect.

For the HRC postdoctoral fellowship, building on my PhD work, I will conduct research that focuses on the role of euphoric value in heritage significance assessment. Euphoric value acknowledges the importance of intense, fleeting emotional experiences within heritage sites, particularly in third places. By applying innovative qualitative methods such as sensory observation and affective diaries, the research will evaluate how momentary yet transformative encounters contribute to place attachment within music clubs and venues and analyse how bodily engagement, emotional intensity, and shared rituals influence perceptions of heritage significance. As such, this project aims to provide concrete evidence for defining and integrating euphoric value into heritage frameworks. Three case study venues are selected for this research: The White Hotel in Salford, the Adelphi in Hull and the National Centre for Early Music in York. Focusing on these venues allows the exploration of euphoria in diverse, non-traditional heritage third places, capturing sensory and emotional engagement that challenges traditional frameworks and emphasises the significance of ephemeral, community-driven experiences.