2024 news archive

Michael is a playwright, dramaturg, and theatre producer from the north coast of Ireland. In 2019, he was awarded the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Original New Voice for his play Akedah. His second play, This is Paradise, was staged at the Traverse Theatre during the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received five-star reviews and won the Popcorn Writing Award.

Dr Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell is a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2024-25, and a researcher, writer and artist. Informed by their creative work, Evelyn’s research attempts to develop strategies of trans theorising and practice that challenge the foreclosure of gender transition as material reality. Their work has been shown, performed, read at TACO!, Kaunas Artists’ House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project and Kingsgate Project Space. 

Digital technology is changing the world. In response to global challenges, diverse grassroots faith-based organisations, indigenous or otherwise, are using digital technologies to activate for justice. These activists draw on contextual wisdom and religious resources and express their activist commitments publicly in social media forums. Some of these organisations describe themselves as indigenous. Others find terms like grassroots more helpful. Academic analysis of these local digital activisms provides ways to learn with and from online theologies that are immediate, provisional and contextual.

How have creative practices been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century? This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which have been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex.

A webinar was offered on Monday 9 December for postdoctoral scholars interested in applying for IASH Fellowships for academic year 2025-26. The deadline for most applications is 25 April 2025, so this session allowed time to ask questions and prepare an application. Representatives from some of our partners spoke about the programmes, and IASH staff gave insights into the facilities and funding available, as well as hints and tips for crafting a successful application.

This will be a year-long exploration of independence and nation-making, culminating in the 250^th anniversary of the ratification of the US Declaration of Independence on 4 July 2026.

The Institute is delighted to announce the launch of a new Fellowship aimed at artists and creative practitioners of Palestinian heritage. Thanks to the generous support of a private donor, the Artist at Risk Fellowship 2025 will support an artist to spend a period of two months as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in 2025.

Applications are now open for the 2025 IASH / Traverse Creative Fellowship. This opportunity includes a £12,000 commission for a new play in collaboration with the Traverse, Scotland's new writing theatre. 

The Institute presents our annual report for academic year 2023-24. Features include an update on the final year of the Institute Project on Decoloniality, reports from RACE.ED and GENDER.ED, a calendar of our events over the past year, a full list of Fellows and Affiliates, and much more. 

Shatha Altowai and Saber Bamatraf, former Artist Protection Fund Fellows at IASH, share their experience of coming to Edinburgh, becoming part of the city’s artistic community, and exploring through art what it means to be in a place and belong to a place.

On 21 May 2024, a group of five women and non-binary folx gathered in IASH to explore the question of writing. Building on the success of the recent publication Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms, this workshop addressed specifically gendered anxieties about writing for researchers from postgraduate through to professors. 

With the tercentenary of the Edinburgh Medical School approaching in 2026, the goal of the conference was to better understand the School’s links to the structures of empire and transatlantic slavery. This included the role that Edinburgh professors, students, and alumni played in developing theories of race in imperial context and in situ at Edinburgh.

The two-day hybrid conference ‘Rethinking the Ecological Imaginary’, supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund, took place at IASH and online from 8am-6pm on 30-31 May 2024. Organised and convened by IASH RACE.ED Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Marika Ceschia, it featured a creative, thought provoking, multi-sensory workshop, ‘Food Journey’, by Mama D. Ujuaje, and a powerful artistic keynote by Professor Mojisola Adebayo, based on her award-winning play Family Tree.

The symposium Palestinian Performing Arts and the Creation of Post-memory, supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund, successfully took place from 10am-5pm on 13 May 2024. Forty members of the public attended the event throughout the day, including students, staff and performing arts industry professionals.

Dr Kanwal Hameed is a RACE.ED Stuart Hall Foundation Fellow, visiting from the University of Exeter.

She is an inter-disciplinary historian with a background in Middle East Studies, and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Mapping Connections: China and Contemporary Development in the Middle East project. After receiving her PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) at the University of Exeter in 2022, she was a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut. 

The Institute proudly announces the launch of a new Fellowship for 2025 in partnership with the British Council, to mark their 90th anniversary.

Two 12-month postdoctoral fellowships for international early-career researchers are on offer, beginning in January 2025.

The Institute proudly announces the 28th in our Occasional Papers series. Essays on Decoloniality: Volume 1 is the first collection of essays to emerge from the Institute Project on Decoloniality. The volume includes essays by former Fellows Dr Ali Kassem, Dr Sandeep Bakshi, Dr Rachael Scally, Professor Ted Trost, Dr Bharti Arora and Dr Jayita Sarkar. The book also features a foreword by previous IASH Director Professor Steve Yearley, and an introduction by IASH alumna and series editor Dr Désha Osborne.

A vast body of scholarship into medieval religious cultures has been built over the past century, yet the field as a whole tends to remain—with some notable exceptions—curiously fragmented. This workshop will bring together new work on medieval religions, highlight undiscovered materials, concepts, and ideas, and provide a space to discuss ways forward for medieval religious studies.

The Institute proudly announces the launch of a new Fellowship for 2024 in partnership with National Museums Scotland. The IASH-National Museums Scotland Fellowship offers postdoctoral scholars the opportunity to carry out research based on specific collections held at the National Museum of Scotland for up to 10 months.

We are saddened to hear of the death of Oliver Emanuel. He was an internationally award-winning playwright who wrote over thirty plays for both stage and radio. Olly was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute in summer 2022, working on a new project titled Authorship, exploring questions around creativity and what it means to be human when faced with the impending singularity.