Early Career Fellows: Inclusion, Participation and Engagement

Anenechukwu Kevin Amoke earned his PhD in 2023 from the Department of Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University where he investigated postcolonial African literatures on migration and sex work using gift theories. He is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship that locate literary criticism within the borders of (the gift) economy and anthropological research, especially those targeting projects with demonstrable public impact. Drawing on his thesis, his current project, ‘Interludes: refugee worlding in postcolonial literatures and life writing', explores how asylum seekers – particularly those held in refugee facilities – envision, construct, and embody the world around them through the texts they produce and those produced by others about them. He has taught African and world literatures both at Lancaster University and the University of Nigeria.

Helen King is a Research Associate in the School of English at Newcastle University. She received her PhD from Newcastle University, and her thesis explored the work and archive of children’s author Beverley Naidoo, focusing particularly on the political functions of children’s literature. Her interests include reader response research, radical children’s literature, narratives of displacement and migration, and participatory approaches to childhood studies. Her current work at Newcastle University forms part of a Nuffield Foundation project ‘Understanding Communities’, exploring children’s accounts and experiences of community integration. Her contribution to this research uses school and literary archives to uncover children’s voices and explore children’s experiences of migration to the UK. Her project for the School of Advanced Study builds on her previous research into refugee narratives in children’s books, using New Home, a children’s book written and illustrated by asylum seekers living in the North East of England. This project partners with Tyneside primary schools, involving children as co-researchers in reader response research. This research aims to explore the question: how do we tell refugee stories for children? 

Mai Musie  is an ancient historian and a public engagement professional. She received her PhD in Ancient History from Swansea University in 2019. Her research explores race and ethnicity in the ancient world; she investigates how the ‘other’ is represented in ancient Greek and Roman literary sources. Mai is passionate about exploring the interconnectivity between the ancient Mediterranean world and North-East Africa and has worked with higher education institutions, and charitable-voluntary organisations, managing a diverse range of access and outreach programmes. She has organised and consulted on history and heritage projects that foster co-curation, co-production, and building equitable relationships between communities and researchers. During her Fellowship, she will be working with the Ethiopian-Eritrean diaspora communities to explore themes of forced migration, exile, and blackness by using classical mythological stories centring black ‘Ethiopian’ voices as a vehicle. 

Charlotte Rudman works on the poetry of Chaucer in the fields of contemporary medievalism, sound studies, materialism and speculative fiction. Her current research project, ‘Capturing Medieval London: Framing and Perspective’, uncovers the remaining material fragments of medieval London through contemporary photography. The project seeks to expose the connections between the Middle Ages, and Chaucer’s time especially, and now through the viewing perspective of the photographer and through photographic documentation. Critically, it seeks to offer new understandings of how medieval London exists in and through places that are layered temporally – and it argues that the photograph reveals how these places are framed in the contemporary. She received her PhD thesis entitled ‘Listening to Dreams: Sound in Chaucer’s Dream Vision Poetry’ from King’s College London in 2022. The work examined Chaucer’s knowledge of the science of sound in his dream vision and dream vehicle poems, arguing that Chaucer’s scientific knowledge of echo and motion were key to his construction of dreams. She has appeared on a special programme for BBC Radio 4 entitled A Dream Vision for Our Times, taught on modules across the Middle Ages at KCL and published her own poetry with The Still Point, The Royal Society of Literature and in Glean & Graft, an anthology from Fresher Publishing.

Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researches, and draws. Her work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, and engages with feminist and decolonial methodologies. Among public engagement, participatory and creative projects Darya has worked on are drawing, embroidery, mapping, and oral history workshops, exhibitions and summer schools. Her academic writing in relation to these methodologies can be found in Narrative Culture, Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Ruukku: Studies in Artistic Research, Modern Languages Open, and a co-authored book Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Ukraine). She has also received a Public Engagement Newcomer Award and was highly commended for the Public Engagement Innovation Award from the University of St Andrews (2019). During her fellowship at the School of Advanced Study Darya is working on a book manuscript about the environmental impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine, forthcoming with Polity. Darya was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2022-23) having received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2021, graduating with the Principal's Medal. Her publications on knowledge, coloniality, ethics and inclusion have appeared in the Journal of International Relations and Development, Nature Human Behaviour, Kajet, The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, and many other platforms.

Kadija George Sesay, FRSA, Hon. FRSL, works in literary project management and creative professional development with adults and young people of African descent. She received her PhD from Brighton University and her current project builds on her thesis on Black British Publishing and Pan-Africanism to be published by Africa World Press. She is the Publications Manager for Inscribe/Peepal Tree Press, for which she has commissioned a series of anthologies in Black British literature, the latest one being GLIMPSE: Speculative Fiction by Black British Writers (2022). She has edited/co-edited anthologies for other publishers too. The objectives of her project on Black British Magazines in the 90s were to begin recording the histories of the Black British magazine publishers of that period and to do so through an experimental method of the public collective interview. She is currently developing her Arts Council funded-project AfriPoeTree, a Selective Interactive Video of Poetry and Pan-African History and has also published and broadcast her own creative work including a poetry collection, Irki (2013). In 2020 she received an MBE for services to Literature and an Honorary Fellowship from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Devika Mehra is a Post-doctoral Research Associate in the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle University. Her current research project combines two interconnected strands: exploring the importance of archival material of Grace Nichols/John Agard, Grace Hallworth, and Valerie Bloom to address issues of race and diversity in archive centres and museums; and the role of young people's voices in increasing representation in children's book awards and prize culture. Before this she was a Fellow at the Internationale Jugendbibliothek, Munich, in 2020. She worked on select British children's fantasy literature by women writers to understand the generic development of and the construction of childhood in 20th-century children's fantasy. Her doctoral thesis defined and analysed the evolution of children's cinema as a genre in India, its emergent trends and transitions. Her areas of interest include 20th-century middle-grade children's fiction (British, American and South Asian), children's cinema (non-Western and Western), global and South Asian film studies, contemporary graphic novels and digital texts for children, and transnational digital media politics. She has worked as a Lecturer in the Department of English (University of Delhi) from 2015 to 2019 and has taught modules on contemporary and 20th-century literature and academic writing to undergraduates.

Yewande Okuleye’s interdisciplinary research praxis in science, health humanities, literature, art, cultural history, and public engagement investigates methods and systems which reveal and recover overlooked, misrepresented, and forgotten histories. She received her PhD from the University of Leicester and her thesis on the emergence of medical cannabis provided policy insight (Written evidence to the Select Committee for the Government Review on Cannabis), Public Engagement (BBC expert, The Conversation), Patient Engagement (PLEA trustee), and Drug Reform (Transform trustee). Yewande invokes art, music, poetry, performance, dialogic learning, and collaborative writing as channels to encourage critical thinking and discussion about blackness, social identity, and power. Her new project investigates multilingual poetry as an emancipatory and liberatory practice for marginalized populations. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a published poet herself, recently commissioned to author a poem to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Anne Hathaway Shakespeare’s death (in Anne-Thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare, 2023), and the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio. She has taught at the University of Oxford, Cambridge, Leicester, Liverpool, and the University of the Arts. 

Annie Webster is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London, in 2020. Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature and culture, particularly how cultural production in the Middle East engages with experiences of conflict and forced migration from the region. Her current project, 'Stories of the Syrian New Scots: Resettlement Geographies in Refugee Arts,' looks at storytelling practices among Syrian refugees resettled in Scotland, especially in rural and remote communities. Her work has been published in Comparative Critical Studies, Wasafiri, and Literature & Medicine. She has taught Arabic literature at the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and SOAS.