Two early career affiliates of the Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment Hub have been awarded highly competitive fellowships in Berlin and Oxford by external funding bodies. Dr Jessica Stacey, Career Development Fellow in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford, received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin; Dr Roman Kuhn, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität, won a Newton International Fellowship to work on his next project at the University of Oxford.

 

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships have been created by the European Union to support excellent research projects in the European Research Area. The Newton International Fellowships have been established by the British Academy and the Royal Society with the aim of attracting promising early career researchers from overseas to British universities.

Dr Stacey and Dr Kuhn will maintain their links to the Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment Hub, an interdisciplinary research group established in 2018 as part of the broader Research Partnership between the University of Oxford and the Berlin University Alliance (BUA), a consortium of Berlin-based universities and research institutions.

 

Dr Jessica Stacey of The Queen’s College, Oxford, will be based at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where she will be affiliated with the Collaborative Research Centre “Episteme in Motion”. She will work on the project ‘Rust and Revolution: Understanding Social Technologies in Enlightenment Europe through Metaphorology’. Her project investigates the interaction of texts implicated in three so-called Revolutions: the Chemical, the French and the Industrial. The central question of Dr Stacey’s project is how discourse on rust links political history, the history of science and technology, philosophy, and poetics.

Dr Roman Kuhn of the Freie Universität and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin will conduct his research at Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation on a project entitled ‘Communicating Enlightenment in Ephemeral Poetry: Subversion, Sociability, and Gossip in 18th-Century Poésies Fugitives’. The little-studied phenomenon of ‘fugitive poetry’ refers to items that claimed to belong to a private domain, from which they have allegedly ‘escaped’ unintentionally into the public realm. The project contains an important element of Digital Humanities research, and this juxtaposition of the public and the private should significantly change our understanding of the Enlightenment its public sphere.

 

Professor Anita Traninger of the Freie Universität, currently a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, commented: “I am delighted the Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment Hub was able to help forge the contacts that eventually led to successful grant applications. Early career scholars are vital to the Oxford-Berlin research partnership, and I very much hope that many more will follow Jessica’s and Roman’s example.”

 

Professor Nicholas Cronk, Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford, said: “The Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment hub has been co-ordinated in Oxford by the Voltaire Foundation, and I am delighted by the successes of these two young scholars. Colleagues join me in wishing them all the best for their research projects and in looking forward to many more such young researchers in the years to come.”

 

 

Further information:

 

The Oxford-Berlin Enlightenment Hub: http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/home/research-community/the-oxford-berlin-enlightenment-hub/ (Principal Investigators: Mark-Georg Dehrmann of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Avi Lifschitz of the University of Oxford, and Anita Traninger of the Freie Universität Berlin.)

Dr Jessica Stacey: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-jessica-stacey

Dr Roman Kuhn: https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/we05/institut/mitarbeiter/kuhn/index.html

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships: https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctoral-fellowships

Newton International Fellowships: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/newton-international-fellowships/