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.
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.
Malena Bedoya
Dr Malena Bedoya is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Comics and Race in Latin America.
Her work has focused on the discussion of collections, museums and archives in different countries of the Andean region in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work has also explored the processes of musealization in the context of Universal Exhibitions.
Her curatorial projects are based on the theoretical and methodological approaches of microhistory, visual studies, material culture and public 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).
Catherine Evans
Catherine Evans works on the literature and culture of the early modern period.
Her current project, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship, is entitled Reflecting Devotion: Lustrous Materials in England, Scotland and Ireland 1603-1700.
She examines how reflective materials, specifically pearls and glass, played a part in seventeenth century protestant devotion.
She has published on the early modern book trade, reading practices and women’s writing.
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.
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.
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.
Benjamin Pope
I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, working on a project that examines the formation of social identities in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire through the development of binary ‘town’ and ‘noble’ identities, and (in particular) discourses of the supposed ‘oppression’ of the nobility by the autonomous towns or city states of Upper Germany between c.1380 and 1525.
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.
Angeliki Roussou
Dr Angeliki Roussou is Research Associate in the AHRC-funded project 'Understanding Displacement Aesthetics' (2021-24).
Publications include ‘Social Justice and Work in Art Institutions’ (2021), the co-authored monograph Understanding Displacement Aesthetics: History, Art and Refugeedom (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), and a forthcoming article on migrant sex work and contemporary art.
She has co-curated ‘Traces of Displacement’ (2023-24) and ‘Rethinking the Grand Tour’ (2022-25).
She has taught in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh.
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.
Leah Astbury
Leah Astbury is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome funded 'Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World' project led by Professor Sasha Handley. She has published on the history of gender and medicine and is currently interested in health, animals and the environment in early modern England and America.