SALC Research Associates and Postdoctoral Researchers
The School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is home to a thriving community of research associates and postdoctoral researchers who are either working on individual research projects as Leverhulme Early Career Fellows, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellows, or Hallsworth Fellows, or who are affiliated to externally funded grants. Some of these researchers are also attached to the John Rylands Research Institute. Below is a list of current research associates and postdoctoral researchers in SALC. Please see below for a list of current Research Associates and Postdoctoral Researchers based in SALC.
The School’s Strategic Funding Team works actively with researchers across SALC and with potential applicants to postdoctoral funding schemes, supporting them through the application process via peer-review and tailored workshops. As part of these activities, CIDRAL contributes to events run by the Strategic Funding Team designed to benefit potential applicants to fellowships such as the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships, and the Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowships.
Maxim Alyukov
Maxim Alyukov is a political sociologist specialising in media, political communication, and political cognition in autocracies, with a particular focus on Russia.
He is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester and a research associate at King’s Russia Institute, King’s College London. Currently, Maxim is working on the project Reflexive Propaganda: Authoritarian Political Communication in a Hybrid Information Environment, supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
Maxim holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki and has published his research in many journals, including Political Communication, Politics, Qualitative Psychology, and Europe-Asia Studies. He is also a member of the independent research group Public Sociology Laboratory and an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment.
Lauren Banko
Dr. Lauren Banko is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities within the Department of History at the University of Manchester (2022-25). She is a social historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the history of pre-1948 Palestine.
She received her PhD in Near and Middle Eastern History from SOAS, and is currently working on her second monograph which is a social history of borders, illicit crossing of them, and the migrants and displaced persons who crossed them between Palestine and neighbouring territories during the 1920s-1940s.
Lauren's Wellcome Trust Fellowship project, Medical Deportees: Narrations and Pathographies of Health at the Borders of Great Britain, Palestine and Egypt, 1919-1950 considers the medico-legal border and its operations of immigration control in the experiences of mentally and physically ill or infirm migrants, refugees, and labourers from the Middle East.
She was also a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Reckoning with Refugeedom: Refugee Voices in Modern History here at Manchester. Lauren has recently published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, Social History, Immigrants & Minorities, and the Journal of Global History.
Alison Bennett
Ali Bennett is a Hallsworth Fellow in Political Economy. She is an historian of the British Empire with special interests in the colonial history of eastern Africa.
She studies this topic predominantly through a cultural, visual, and material lens, and is particularly interested in the intersections between material and visual culture, imperial politics, and religion in Uganda. Her current research project explores the history of the eastern African ivory trade.
Hayley Jayne Bradley
Hayley Jayne Bradley is the Research Associate for the Vice Dean for Research and is currently developing a project on late 19th– mid-20th Century Popular Theatre, Film and Performance.
Her research interests span Victorian/Edwardian popular theatre and culture including early film, stage technology and spectacle, collaboration, and adaptation.
Hayley has published on Ouida, theatrical artisan Henry Hamilton, autumn dramas at Drury Lane, Edwardian fashions, and sensation scenes.
Hayley is currently collaborating on a project with Dr Janice Norwood based around ‘Deathly Spectatorship.’
Jane Caple
Dr Jane Caple is a Research Fellow working with Professor Erica Baffelli (Japanese Studies) on the Leverhulme Trust project Fear and Belonging in Minority Buddhist Communities (2023–2027).
She is the author of Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet (UHP, 2019) and co-editor of special issues on Histories of Religious Fundraising (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023), The Aesthetics and Emotions of Religious Belonging (Numen, 2021), and Religious Authority in East Asia (Asian Ethnology, 2019).
Freddy Foks
Freddy is a historian of Britain and its empire. His first book is Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development and the Reinvention of Society in Britain.
It is about the history of social anthropology between the 1900s and 1960s.
As a Simon Fellow he is working on a project about emigration and the British state. He recently published a pilot paper about this new research in the Journal of Historical Sociology.
Siobhán Hearne
Siobhán Hearne is a historian of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
She is currently a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History working on a project on the history of the Soviet Red Cross, 1953-1991.
She is the author of Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (OUP, 2021), as well as numerous articles on the history of gender, sexuality, and health in the Russian imperial and Soviet contexts.
Elise Imray Papineau
Dr Elise Imray Papineau is trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist and ethnographer. At present, she is working as a postdoctoral research associate on the CARE (Care Aesthetics Research Exploration) project at the University of Manchester. She is leading a case study with local Manchester community members about food-sharing practices and care aesthetics.
Elise’s academic work is deeply rooted in activism. She completed her PhD at Griffith University in Australia in 2023. Her PhD research focused on women in grassroots activist communities in Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, exploring feminist care ethics, creative strategies of resilience and the role of DIY. Her previous research explored the interplay of punk, politics and piety on the Indonesian island of Java.
Beyond grassroots activist communities and punk scenes, Elise’s research interests include radical lifestyle politics, feminist and queer studies, social movement studies, theories of care ethics, critical debates around ethnographic methods, and socio-cultural studies in Southeast Asia.
Megan Kuster
Megan Kuster is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the FHUM New Investigator Fellowship for Mid-career Researchers-funded ‘Avian Poetics and Natural History in the Industrial Revolution' project led by Dr Clara Dawson. She has published articles on Katherine Mansfield, and natural history collecting in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Her main research interests are in colonial science in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, especially around issues of race, labour, and capital.
Chrisoula Lionis
Chrisoula Lionis is a writer and cultural producer based between Athens and Manchester.
Lionis holds a PhD in Visual Culture (UNSW Australia, 2013) and is the author of books Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016, 2022) and (ed) Comedy in Crises: The Weaponisation of Humour in Contemporary Art (Palgrave, 2023).
Lionis is the co-director of the pedagogical platform Artists for Artists, and is currently a Research Fellow on Understanding Displacement Aesthetics - an AHRC project that analyses the impact of artistic responses to displacement and refugeedom.
Martyna Ewa Majewska
Martyna Ewa Majewska is an art historian specialising in performance art and its mediatisation. As a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in Art History and Cultural Practices, she examines site-specific group performances and speculative reenactments organised by visual artists in the United States. Her forthcoming book studies performance-generated photography and video by African American artists active since the late 1960s.
Henry McPherson
Henry McPherson is a musician and Research Associate with Creative Manchester, where he works across a variety of projects exploring the role of arts and creative practices in interdisciplinary research. His postdoctoral project ‘Improvising in the Field’ is investigating improvised creativity in music, dance, and theatre, as applied for social and environmental benefit across the United Kingdom.
Henry is a co-researcher on the UMRI funded ‘Moss Worlds’ project, which brings together interdisciplinary researchers to examine the botanical, political, and aesthetic properties of urban mosses. His wider research interests include plant-based art-making and botanical music, queer epistemologies and kinesonic performance practices.
Gloria Moorman
Dr Gloria Moorman (PhD, Warwick) is a book historian and Italianist, based at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures (Italian) and the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.
Currently, Gloria works on the AHRC-funded project ‘Envisioning Dante, c. 1472–c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page,’ based at the universities of Oxford and Manchester.
She is also a Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (CSR), University of Warwick.
Samuel O'Connor Perks
Samuel O'Connor Perks holds degrees in Philosophy from the University of Sussex (BA), the University of Amsterdam (MA), and the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (PhD).
His research covers the interaction between culture, religion and politics in the 20th century, especially in France and the United States.
He is currently working on two book projects.
The first analyses encounters between Catholic intellectuals and modernist architects and the second covers Catholic activist critiques of capitalism.
Alessandra Palidda
Music as both practice and scholarship is central to my life and career. I trained as a classical singer while also studying musicology at the universities of Milan and Cardiff.
Since my PhD (2018), I have lectured at several British universities and disseminated my research through international conferences and prestigious publications, e.g., with Brepols, Taylor&Francis and Cambridge University Press.
I am currently part of international research groups on music, print culture and the cultural market in the long nineteenth century, on operetta and media, and on music at the transnational courts of Northern Italy.
Sarah Parkhouse
Sarah is a religious historian, focusing on the ancient Mediterranean and the emergence of Christianity within the Greco-Roman-Egyptian context. She specialises in non-canonical gospels and martyrdom. She currently holds a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship through which she examines Coptic literature in relation to the landscape of Egypt.
Reka Polonyi
Reka is an Associate Researcher at the Drama Department, University of Manchester, on the (AHRC) Care Aesthetics Research Exploration (CARE) Project.
She is also a freelance theatre maker. Her work focuses primarily on immigrant rights advocacy through theatre. Her PhD investigated creative and playful forms of civil disobedience.
Her interests are in bridging the knowledge gap between arts scholars and socially engaged arts practitioners, and the role of researchers-as-activists.
Reka is the recipient of the New Scholars Prize (2021), International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), and a trained street performer.
Marilene Ribeiro
Marilene Ribeiro is an award-winning visual artist and researcher from Brazil. Her practice is focused on interdisciplinary endeavours, bringing together photography, video, intervention and collaboration, with a special interest in the political agency of photography and in the role of image-based media in society.
Her projects tackle the environmental and the Human Rights agendas, from a decolonial perspective from the Global South. You can see examples of her work on her personal website.
Isabel Taube
Isabel Taube is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project ‘James Baldwin and Britain’.
She has recently completed her doctoral thesis in History at Manchester Metropolitan University on the commercial television company, Granada, where her research focused on the broadcaster’s reputation for innovative programming, and explored its relationship to themes of gender, ‘race’, class, the visual arts and representation of young people from the North of England. Her writing on the Belgian filmmaker, Chantal Akerman, was published in The Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook (A Nos Amours, 2019).
Jo Tierney
Jo Tierney is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History. Her research centres on the history of global trade, business and cross-cultural exchange.
Her current project is entitled 'The African Consumer: How Trade and Empire Shaped African Consumption 1870-1930.' It considers the growing trade from the late nineteenth century in European branded goods across Africa from two perspectives, examining both the operations and activities of European multinationals in Africa, and the experiences of African consumers who engaged with (or chose not to engage with) imported branded goods.
As such, it explores how European multinational businesses operated in colonial Africa, how they adapted to different market conditions, how they exploited the advantages offered by colonial economic infrastructures and how they communicated with local consumers. It also examines how African consumers engaged with and mediated these processes, exploring the ways in which individuals and communities exercised agency through consumption during this critical period in the expansion and consolidation of European rule in Africa.
Huw Wahl
Huw Wahl is a filmmaker and research associate on the AHRC funded project Creative Adaptive Solutions for Treescapes Of Rivers (CASTOR).
His films have won awards and screened internationally, his writing published in book chapters, journal articles and magazines. He has taught film and photography here and abroad, curated film seasons and been part of international film festival juries.
Current projects also include a film about the artistry of engineless sailing and a film about expiry made with the artist's father. Full CV on personal website.
Hannah Yip
Hannah is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester.
She specialises in the cultural and emotional lives of early modern English clergymen. Her current project is entitled ‘The Clergy and Artistic Recreation in Early Modern England’.
Her work has been published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Reformation, and The Lancet Psychiatry. She has also co-edited a collection of essays, Writing Early Modern Loneliness, which is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.