2025 RIC Fellows Appointed

2025 was another year of excellent applications and we thank everyone who took the time to apply for our fellowships. 

Liberating the Collections Fellow - Andrew Whiteman

Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings.

Andrew’s research will focus on experimental Anglo-American audio and audio-visual material from 1960-1990 using recorded voices of poets, or possible “scores” of poetic sound art, or field recordings made from events, creating hybrid works which re-present marginalised voices anew. This timeframe saw an explosion in the production and reception of postmodern/”new” writing practices, diasporic self-publication, and “archaic” writing discoveries, radically expanding the categories of poetics and poetry.

Museum Collections Visiting Fellow - Amira Fawzy Ali Ibrahim

Dr. Amira Fawzy Ali Ibrahim is an Egyptologist specializing in archaeological documentation and the material culture of the Late Period. She got her Ph.D. from South Valley University in 2021, focusing on unpublished artifacts excavated in front of the First Pylon at Karnak. Dr. Ibrahim has over 15 years of field experience and has worked extensively with international missions, including the French-Egyptian Center for the Study of the Temples of Karnak (CFEETK), New York University, and the British Museum.

Dr. Amira Fawzy Ali Ibrahim will be looking at baked clay plaques of women in the Petrie Collections. Ceramic figurines of nude females have been a subject of academic interest since the early days of Egyptian archaeology, appearing consistently in excavation reports, museum catalogues, and specialized studies. In recent years, Egyptian female figurines have featured prominently in studies exploring the topics of women and private religion in ancient Egypt. Even with significant numbers of female figurines appearing in publications from the 1890s onwards, however, the exact function(s) of the objects has remained elusive. Among the research aims are providing new insights into the function and significance of Late Period coroplastic art, particularly with regard to personal piety and fertility practices and contribution to the scholarship on Egyptian art by offering a detailed study of figurines and their cultural and ritual contexts. 

Special Collections Visiting Fellow - Michelle Reynolds

Dr Michelle Reynolds is a researcher in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture. Her PhD thesis, which she completed at the University of Exeter, considered the professionalisation of women illustrators and cartoonists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and their relationship to the socio-political and cultural phenomenon of the New Woman. Her research interests include women artists and designers, illustration and book studies, gender and sexuality, reform movements, dress histories, and graphic satire.

Michelle’s research will explore the range of printed and visual material produced by Laurence Housman supporting women’s suffrage, considering the context of his life as an early gay rights activist, pacifist, and socialist. The work aims to recover new histories of the women’s suffrage movement by focusing on Housman’s unique role in the movement and the continued significance of art production.