A Fond Farewell

It is that time of year when we bid a fond farewell to some of our LAHRI Postdoctoral Visiting Fellows. These fellowships support recent PhD graduates from the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures in their early postdoctoral careers. Our Postdoctoral Visiting Fellows are a vibrant part of our community. We’re proud of their achievements and look forward to keeping in touch as they move on to the next stage of their careers. 

Amélie Addison, who joined us from the School of Music last September, will be moving to Northumbria University on a 4-year contract as a full-time Lecturer in Music, pioneering a new approach to Foundation Year Music Theory, as well as teaching Music History, Music Education and the Music Profession. This post will also allow her to further her research on William Shield, as well as pursue interdisciplinary research on itinerant musicians, vernacular music and musicians’ labour in the long nineteenth century.  If you’d like to hear Amélie talk about her work, she will be giving a public talk online on 17 October 2024 for Northumberland Archives, focusing on manuscripts in their collections and the value of family history sources. Amélie will also be back in Leeds next spring, drawing on the research she conducted whilst at LAHRI in a lecture for Friends of University Arts and Music on ‘Limelight, Lions and Lodging Houses: the life, and links to Leeds, of an 1890s circus bandsman’. Her recent study ‘Drumming Up a Career: Life as an 1890s Circus Bandsman’ has been longlisted for Journal of Victorian Culture Graduate Essay Prize. This summer, she has also delivered conference papers at the Society for Theatre Research, Bristol, the University of Oviedo, and Uppsala University. Her paper, ‘Performing with a Monster Menagerie – A Circus Bandsman’s Perspective’ has been accepted for publication in the series Speculum Musicae in 2026.  

Meanwhile, Milena Schwab-Graham has published an essay on May Sinclair, ‘“Sharp, Queer, Uncertain Happiness”: Walking as Feminist “Affective Militancy” in May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier (1919) and The Three Sisters (1914)’ in an edited volume which re-examines Sinclair’s role in early twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Milena will also be heading to Estonia this autumn for the ‘Borders, Margins, Cartographies: Transnational Modernist Women’s Writing’ conference at the University of Tartu, delivering a paper entitled ‘“She requires a bit of space at the end of each life”: the transcorporeal and transhistorical in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum (2021), and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933)’. 

Wei Zhou has now taken up a Visiting Fellowship in the School of English, where she also completed her PhD. During her time at LAHRI, Wei completed four academic articles and co-organised multiple seminars and conferences. In the coming year she will be developing her monograph and moving forward with a new research project, The Modernist Descent: Underground Transit and Underworld Myths in Twentieth-Century Poetry, which will explore the ways in which the subterranean mode of transport lends a material form for reimagining the classical trope of underworld descent (katabasis) in various poetic writings and the affects and effects such reimagination creates.