SSEES Lecturer Dr Ben Noble wins British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award

The British Academy Rising Star Engagement Awards, funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, are held for a 12-month period and provide funding for up to £15,000 per winner. The awards are designed to encourage wider engagement with the humanities and social sciences within and beyond academia through events, training, and mentoring activities.

On winning the award, Dr Noble says “it's a great honour to be awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, and I look forward to using this opportunity to engage more with the Academy's activities and to help further its goals."

Director of SSEES, Professor Diane P Koenker, shares that the Department “are delighted to congratulate Ben on this recognition.  The workshop that the award will support offers an impressively agile combination of disciplinary and regional knowledge, very much in the spirit of SSEES”.

Dr Ben Noble’s work will examine why authoritarian leaders close down legislatures. Ben explains that this new project “will bring together scholars with expertise on different regions – from Latin America to Southeast Asia, from the Middle East to Central Asia – to focus on episodes when authoritarian leaders shutter legislatures. These moments – such as the suspension of the Venezuelan National Assembly's powers in 2017 – are clear assaults on the bodies most clearly associated with representative democracy. As a result, they capture headlines. But we know very little of why, and how, parliaments are closed”.  

As part of this year’s Rising Star Engagement programme, the award holders will be organising engagement activities in a wide range of different areas. In his workshop, Ben plans to bring together historians, political scientists, and government research analysts to discuss these moments of closure.

In addition to the workshop, a further output of the project will be an event in which the initial findings of the project will be presented. Ben explains the aim of this event is to help “shed light on these pivotal episodes, but also a view to enabling members of the public to shape the future direction of this research. By showing how academic research can help make sense of political events, this project will reinforce the British Academy's mission to demonstrate the public value of humanities and social science scholarship.”

Further information on the awards can be found on the British Academy website.