Alice Stevenson and Yijie Zhuang awarded British Academy Fellowships

The British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship scheme allows successful applicants to obtain time freed from normal teaching and administrative commitments which can then be devoted to the completion of a major piece of research.  Mid-Career Fellowships are designed both to support outstanding individual researchers with excellent research proposals and to promote public understanding and engagement with humanities and social sciences. Therefore, the British Academy also looks for evidence of a clear commitment to a strategy of public engagement with and communication of the results of the research during the period of the Fellowship.

Alice Stevenson's Fellowship project entitled 'Exhibition Experiments around Egyptology: The role of contemporary art' will evaluate three high-profile exhibitionary experiments in the museum display of ancient Egypt in order to: critically extend histories of museum representation of ancient Egypt to encompass late 20th- and early 21st-century developments; highlight the significance of these experiments for constructing knowledge about the Egyptian past, and the political and historic contexts of those experiments; and establish the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of such critical practice for Egyptian archaeology and its museum framing.

Yijie Zhuang's Fellowship project entitled 'The Power and historicity of water: An interdisciplinary investigation on the origins of hydraulic societies in late prehistoric China' will focus on the origins of hydraulic societies in late prehistoric China and their environmental and technological contexts, and how such processes stimulated the formation of some salient characteristics of power and governance structures of China. The project will involve analysis and synthesis of archaeological, experimental, and palaeo-environmental data from three selected sites that represent diverse models of urban development emerging in different environments, sustained by different agricultural economies, and supported by various technologies.

Congratulations Alice and Yijie!