Cambridge welcomes new Wolfson Postgraduate Scholars in the Humanities and secures funding for further cohort to join in 2021
Wolfson Foundation giving for postgraduate scholarships in the humanities surpasses £20 million
The Wolfson Foundation has announced a new round of funding for exceptional postgraduates in the humanities. The 2021 Wolfson scholars will begin their postgraduate degrees at nine universities in the UK. Scholarships of up to £30,000pa per student cover the cost of a PhD, including a travel and training allowance.
Four Cambridge postgraduates have received Wolfson scholarships to begin their degrees in 2020. Their PhDs focus on subjects including architectural history, Latin American literature and British cultural history.
Since 2012, the Wolfson Foundation has awarded over £20 million to postgraduate scholarships in the humanities, supporting more than 300 exceptional students to advance their research and support their developing academic careers.
Dr Lea Niccolai was a Wolfson scholar studying Classics at Kings College, Cambridge, and won the University's Hare Prize in 2020 for the best PhD thesis in Classics, titled "Age of Philosophy: the Self-Representation of Power in the Post-Constantinian Empire." She is now a postdoctoral fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. She reflects on what the Wolfson scholarship meant to her:
"Funding for postgraduate scholarships in the humanities is crucial. Our commitment to this field is demonstrated by committing over £20 million to scholarships, and we are delighted to be announcing the renewal of this programme. The sheer range of topics covered by these immensely talented scholars is dazzling. On a personal note, it has been wonderful to see individuals use the funding to produce brilliant pieces of research, growing in confidence along the way. Many of them are going on to remarkable academic careers."
Meet the 2020 scholars
Mohamed Derbal
Mohamed's PhD in the Department of Architecture focuses on German architectural history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His thesis is titled 'Space, time and community: German architectural discourse and the search for national unity, 1890-1914.'
His research investigates how Wilhelmine architectural discourse acted as a nation-building tool against transnational patterns of industrialisation and strong regionalism in architecture and design.
Prior to undertaking an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies at Cambridge, he received an MA in Transnational History from the Ecole Normale Superieure and a first degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne.
Leo Temple
Leo plans to undertake a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese, with a thesis entitled 'Mytho-Technical Syncretism and the Economies of Scale in “Modernista” Latin American'.
Leo graduated with a first-class honours degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and received an MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics in 2019.
His research maps the emergence of new technologies, and the economic and perspectival shifts their popular use inculcates, into ‘modernist’ Latin American poetics in the early twentieth century.
Cherish Lucy Watton
Cherish completed her BA in History at the University of Cambridge in 2017. She has a sustained interest in gender and war, exploring the employment of women in timber and forestry during World War Two as an undergraduate, and has been exceptionally committed to advancing scholarship in this field.
Cherish’s research will trace a history of British scrapbooking as a social, cultural and emotional practice from c1914-1980. This period witnessed the evolution of the scrapbook from a homemade cultural artefact to a commercialised prefabricated volume in the 1980s. It will use these previously neglected sources, with a focus on civil society and wartime, to interrogate changes in scrapbooking, together with broader histories of individual and collaborative archiving.
Cherish has received an MPhil in Modern British History from Cambridge and is a winner of the Royal Historical Society Undergraduate Public History Prize.
Oliver Wilson-Nunn
Oliver holds a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from Cambridge.
His PhD research will analyse visual culture produced in and about Latin American prisons, focusing on how incarcerated bodies are represented within diverse forms of postcolonial carceral space. He has identified a striking absence in existing scholarship in relation to the representation of incarcerated bodies and questions of embodiment more generally.
"What is most exciting about being a Wolfson scholar is joining a community of inspiring researchers, all looking to make a difference in their area of study. Without the generosity of the Wolfson Foundation, this would not be possible. "
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