Manchester academics named National Humanities Center Fellows

29 Apr 2019

Dr Alexia Yates and Professor Ian Burney and are two of just 37 academics who have been named Fellows of the US-based National Humanities Center (NHC)

Dr Yates, a lecturer in Modern History based in the Faculty Of Humanities’ School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, and Ian Burney, Professor of History based in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) and are two of just 37 academics who have been named Fellows of the US-based National Humanities Center (NHC)

Selected from over 600 applicants from around the world, the 2019-20 NHC Fellows represent the very best of humanistic scholarship covering a wide and varied range of disciplines including: African studies; history; philosophy; film and media studies; musicology; rhetoric; feminist, gender and sexuality studies; and East Asian languages and literature - to name but a few. Alexia and Ian are the only two UK-based academics to have been invited to the NHC this year, a real reflection of the world-class research in the Humanities being done across our University.

As NHC Fellows, Alexia and Ian will have the opportunity to share their research in seminars, lectures, and conferences at the Center when they take up their 12-month residency in North Carolina in September 2019.

Dr Yates’s field of expertise is modern European history; the cultural and social history of France; urban history; and the history of economic life. Her current research explores how the stock market came to be understood as a key daily element of French economic life in the nineteenth century and how this understanding changed throughout the twentieth century.

Professor Burney’s research covers social and cultural histories of medicine, science, and the law, and has resulted in the publication of three books: Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest (Hopkins, 2000); Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester, 2006); and Murder and the Making of English CSI (Hopkins, 2016). His most recent publication is a collection of essays - Global Forensic Cultures: Making Fact and Justice in the Modern Era (Hopkins, 2019).

Commenting on the award, Dr Yates said:

“The Fellowship is an invaluable opportunity to share ideas and network with academics from around the world at the prestigious National Humanities Center - and of course to continue to develop my current research. I’m very much looking forward to taking up my residency next year.”

Professor Burney added:

“It’s a great honour to have been awarded an NHC Fellowship which together with a recent Guggenheim Fellowship will help me to develop my new research project on ‘a history of innocence’.”