Nineteenth-Century Matters is an initiative jointly run by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies. Now in its ninth year, it is aimed at postdoctoral researchers who have completed their PhD, but who are not currently employed in a full-time academic post. Nineteenth-Century Matters offers unaffiliated early career researchers a platform from which to pursue their research, while also organising an academic event on a theme related to nineteenth-century studies or a workshop focused on an aspect of professionalisation.
BARS and BAVS are thrilled to announce that the Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship 2025-2026 has been awarded to Yasmin Akhter. She will be affiliated with the University of Edinburgh until September 2026.
Yasmin Akhter’s research critiques the idea of a ‘global’ nineteenth century by investigating the ways that life-writing represents travel, migration, and cosmopolitanism. Her PhD thesis, from Royal Holloway, looks at the relationship between postcolonial theories of displacements and global cosmopolitanisms in the long nineteenth century. Articles based on this work have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and CUSP. Yasmin’s new project is on colonial infrastructures and women’s life-writing in Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa.
For more information about this scheme and other funding opportunities, please visit our website: www.bars.ac.uk.