Department of English Lecturer, Joanna Hofer-Robinson, has been awarded three prestigous grants for upcoming projects.

She received the IRC New Foundations Award for a project entitled Breaking the Network: Cultural Fracture and Community Segmentation. The award funds a two-day interdisciplinary symposium that builds toward a new theoretical framework for conceptualising the coexistence of social fragmentation with shared economies, communities, and spaces.

She has also received the Huntington Library Short-Term Fellowship for a project entitled Unsung and Unstaged: The Plays of Charles Dickens. The fellowship funds primary research to enrich a pioneering new edition of Charles Dickens’ plays,  co-edited with Dr Peter Orford (The University of Buckingham, UK). This new edition of five plays by Dickens, written between 1836 and 1851, makes three significant interventions to encourage further research in the field: 

Lastly, Dr Hofer-Robinson has also been awarded British Academy Seed Funding (BA/RIA Knowledge Frontiers) for a project entitled (Non)Spectacular Infrastructure: Enacting Resource Circulation in Stages, Studios and Communities. The award funds a two-day workshop which brings together scholars working in fields of film, literary and theatre studies and human geography, for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange and collaborative practice-led research. This workshop will focus on a particular aesthetic characteristic of infrastructures: how they alternate between mundane invisibility and spectacular foregrounding. This is a collaborative project with Dr Jeremy Brice (Economy, Risk & Society, LSE) and Dr Adam O’Brien (Film Studies, University of Reading).