Research

Grants for Kantian Philosophy Research

Dr Sorin Baiasu, Reader in Philosophy and Philosophy Programme Director in SPIRE, has made a successful application, with Christine Lopes, from the University of Southampton, for a grant to fund the United Kingdom Kant Society's (UKKS)Annual Conference.

Dr Baiasu is the Secretary of the UKKS. The grant of £600 was awarded by the Mind Association, the principle association for the support and promotion of research excellence in philosophy in the UK, and the conference will be jointly organised by the UKKS and the Centre for Idealism and Neo-Liberalism based at the University of Hull.

Dr. Baiasu has also recently secured an annual grant of £500 for the European Consortium for Political Research Kantian Standing Group.

The mother of all strikes

Professor Pnina Werbner, School of Sociology and Criminology, has been awarded $18,900 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, for a continuation of her study of the Manual Workers Public Service Union in Botswana. The title of her successful project application is 'The Mother of all Strikes: Politics, Law and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Botswana Public Service Unions' Activism'. The grant allows for travel and fieldwork expenses in Botswana for a period of up to four months.

Prestigious EC Award

Professor Gordon Hamilton and Dr William Kirk, Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology/ Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, have been awarded a European Commission FP7 Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) to support a new research collaboration, the "Europe Australasian Thysanoptera Semiochemical (EATS) Network".

The objective of this prestigious international collaboration, which has a total award value for the European partners of €58,800 (ca. £52,000), is to develop novel semiochemical-based tools for sustainable thrips pest management and border detection. Keele's main role is to use a "mass spectrum library tool" currently being prepared here as part of a European Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship on "Pheromone Identification for Environmentally Responsible Control of Thrips" to carry out an initial identification of the male-produced aggregation pheromone of two Australasian thrips pest species. The four-year award enables travel for meetings and sample collections between Keele and its partners in the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, New Zealand and Australia.

EU Marie Curie Research Fellowship

Dr Richard Stephens and Dr Jim Grange, of Keele's School of Psychology / Centre for Psychological Research, have secured an EU Marie Curie Research Fellowship to allow Dr Lauren Owen from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, to come to Keele for two years to carry out research assessing the cognitive consequences of the alcohol hangover.

Despite being the most prevalent and commonly recognised problem experienced in relation to alcohol, alcohol hangover has been a neglected part of the alcohol research scene until recently.

The funding, worth £148,975, will allow important research to be carried out improving the understanding of the alcohol hangover.

Dr Owen will take up her post in August 2012.

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for Shameless study

Dr Beth Johnson, lecturer in Film and Television Studies from the School of Humanities, has been awarded an 18 month Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for her project entitled 'Shameless: Aesthetics, Style & Putting 'cool' into the TV Classics Canon'.

Through the fellowship, Beth will complete a monograph that will provide a unique study of both the original BAFTA winning British series of Shameless and the recent (2011) American remake.

Devoting chapters to the origins of the series, format, aesthetics, social realism, representations of sexuality, nation, state and love, the study will address the socio-political and thematic issues that punctuate the heart of the show, critically considering what Shameless has to say about contemporary society and analysing the original, edgy and 'cool' cinematographic culture of the show.

British Academy Research Grant

Professor Scott McCracken, Research Institute for the Humanities, has received a British Academy Small Research Grant to fund a Research Assistant to work with him on the Collected Letters of the influential modernist writer Dorothy Richardson.

In the 1920s, Richardson was often compared with James Joyce and Marcel Proust as one of the first writers of 'stream of consciousness'. Recently, there has been renewed interest in her work as a writer, a pioneering feminist, and an early film critic.

The Collected Letters will make available her correspondence with other key figures of the time such as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the poet Hilda Doolittle.

British Academy Research Grant

Dr Helen Oakes, Research Institute for Social Sciences, has received a British Academy Small Grants Award of £5,300 as Principal Investigator, examining the roles of accounting and marketing communications in supporting arts engagement.

The research involves collaboration with a Co-Investigator at the University of Liverpool Management School.

Low Pay Commission Research Tender

Professor Gauthier Lanot and Dr Panos Sounsounis, Keele Management School and Research Institute for Social Sciences, have been awarded a research tender by the Low Pay Commission.

The project, funded at just under £20,000, will enable Professor Lanot and Dr Sousounis to examine the effect of the National Minimum Wage on the allocation of labour between age groups with similar qualifications within sector and/or within firm.

The Traffic In Things

The Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the UK has awarded Dr Deirdre McKay (Geography) £2,500 to conduct field research in the Philippines.  Her project, 'The traffic in things', will explore how the 'stuff' sent home by migrants in the UK is used by its recipients to express their own thoughts on globalization.

The research will track the ways people on the margins of global migration use things like clothes, household goods, souvenirs and decorations to respond to the perceived rise of China as a regional power vis a vis their nation's longstanding ties to the English-speaking world.

Medical Institute Award

Dr Sue Sherman, School of Psychology, pictured above, (together with Mr Charles Redman, UHNS, Prof Michael Murray, School of Psychology, Ms Philippa Pearmain, NHS, and Mrs Paula Hadden, UHNS) has been awarded £9,703 by the North Staffordshire Medical Institute to pilot a project entitled 'Identifying and promoting best practice in communicating to patients the results of cervical screening history reviews following diagnosis of cervical cancer'.