Featured Alumni

Emily Bartlett is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Wellcome Trust funded project, ‘Living Assessments: Measurement, Thresholds and the Health of Disabled and at-risk Children in England, 1989-present’ at the University of Kent. Prior to this, she was a Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Emily is a historian of disability, with interests in the histories of charity, objects, and the everyday. Her research has been published in the Journal of Social History.

Emily completed her PhD at the University of Kent in 2018. Her thesis explored charitable activities for disabled ex-servicemen after the First World War, and drew particular attention to the ways that charity objects - such as artificial Haig Poppies - contributed to shifting understandings of disability during the period c.1900-1930.

During her CHASE funded studentship, Emily co-founded the CHASE journal, Brief Encounters, and undertook a four month placement at Bloomsbury Publishing. More recently, she also helped to develop the Knowledge Exchange Hub website!

Emily would be delighted to supervise or mentor students interested in the histories of disability, medicine and the body, and would welcome discussion and collaboration with anyone interested in these topics, or in her experiences as a CHASE scholar.

Eleanor Careless is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex for the Leverhulme-funded project The Business of Women’s Words (BOWW) which explores the feminist publishing revolution that unfolded during the UK Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1970s and 80s, with a special focus on Spare Rib magazine. The BOWW project has included creating the first digital map of the UK WLM in partnership with the British Library where it is now displayed for public use.

Eleanor completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in 2018. Her thesis examined representations of incarceration in the poetry of the late modernist poet Anna Mendelssohn, and explored her contribution to a powerful Western tradition of women writing imprisonment. Her research is published or forthcoming in College Literature, Modernist Cultures, Women: A Cultural Review and Palgrave, and she is the co-editor of a special issue on Anna Mendelssohn for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Eleanor would be delighted to supervise or mentor students in the fields of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, prison literature, feminist periodicals and digital mapping.  

Simon is a poet and poet-translator. His latest collection of poetry, Tamám (Litmus Press, 2020), is an experimental reimagining of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. His translations of Chinese T’ang dynasty poetry have been published in magazines such as STAND, and his translations of contemporary Chinese poet Zhang Yangyang appeared in Chinese Arts and Letters journal.

He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Essex, funded by CHASE. Simon was also the Layout Editor of the  Brief Encounters CHASE journal from 2017-2019.

Simon is happy to supervise or mentor students in the fields of publishing and creative writing, or a combination of the two.

Dr Sophie Kelly

Curator, British Museum

skelly@britishmusum.org

Sophie Kelly is the Project Curator on the British Museum exhibition Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint. She is a specialist on the art of the Middle Ages, and has wide-ranging research interests, encompassing medieval visual culture, book history, and the legacy of medieval art in the modern day.

Sophie completed her PhD at the University of Kent in 2018. Her thesis examined the representation of the Trinity in England and France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, exploring how artists’ attempts to visualise the three-in-one God, to literally ‘imagine the unimaginable’, resulted in some of the most inventive and extraordinary images of the Middle Ages. Following her PhD, Sophie worked on curatorial projects at Canterbury Cathedral and the Royal Collection Trust.   

Sophie would be delighted to supervise or mentor students in the fields of medieval art history and visual culture, museum studies, book history, or any other topics relating to her research. She would also welcome discussions and collaboration with anyone interested in her field.

Dr Emma Milne is Associate Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at Durham University. Her CHASE funded PhD in sociology from the University of Essex focused on criminal law and criminal justice responses to maternal infanticide. Emma is a socio-legal scholar, with research interests in the fields of feminist legal studies and feminist criminology.  

Emma’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the social controls and regulations of all women, notably in relation to pregnancy, sex and reproduction. Emma is the author of Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother (Emerald Publishing, 2021). She co-authored Sex and Crime (SAGE, 2020), and co-edited Women and the Criminal Justice System: Failing Victims and Offenders? (Palgrave, 2018).

Marie holds a PhD in feminist media studies from the University of East Anglia (UEA). Her doctoral research charted the ways in which contemporary popular culture imagines authoriality as an ideal form of labour for the single woman subject. During her doctoral studies, Marie became interested in how questions of agency, labour and affect, and the contexts of precarity and neoliberalism, loomed large not just in the diegetic world of her thesis case studies, but also in the 'real world' of UK Higher Education.

During her CHASE-funded studentship, Marie pursued work on doctoral education, researcher development, postdoctoral career paths, and academic precarity. In particular, Marie undertook a 6-month placement with Vitae, where she led a research project investigating the experiences of Arts and Humanities doctoral and early career researchers.

After completing her PhD, Marie joined the Goldsmiths Graduate School where she focusses on supporting current doctoral students and enhancing their experience of the PhD. In 2022 she joined Goldsmiths' Planning team as Senior Strategic Planning Officer.

Marie would welcome discussion and collaboration with anyone interested in UK doctoral education, postdoctoral career paths, 'altac' careers, parental leave in Higher Education, as well as her experiences as a CHASE Scholar and HE professional.

Nicole Mennell is the Engagement Lead for King’s College London’s strategic Vision 2029, which encapsulates the university’s mission to ‘make the world a better place’. Nicole is primarily responsible for supporting the delivering of the Service and Internationalisation strategies across a broad portfolio of projects, which includes raising awareness of transformative social impact initiatives through news stories, features and social media content, as well as leading engagement activities that aim to empower students, staff and alumni to become change-makers.

Nicole completed her doctorate at the University of Sussex in 2019. Her thesis, ‘Shakespeare’s Sovereign Beasts: Human-Animal Relations and Political Discourse in Early Modern Drama’ explores the connections made between figures of sovereignty and animals in early modern drama. Nicole has written on the wider representation of animals in early modern culture – her study on early modern lions was recently published in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (2021) and her chapter ‘“The Dignity of Mankind”: Edward Tyson's Anatomie of a Pygmy and the Ape-Man Boundary’ was published in the edited collection Seeing Animals After Derrida (2018).

Before embarking on her PhD, Nicole undertook an internship at the National Portrait Gallery, where she conducted research for a proposed exhibition on ‘man and beast’ in portraiture. During her doctoral studies, she co-organised several academic events, including the London Renaissance Seminar on Animal Lives in Early Modern Culture, and was a research assistant for the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Hidden Persuaders’ at Birkbeck, University of London, which explores the impact of ‘brainwashing’ on conceptions of the human.

Nicole is passionate about the transformative power of higher education and supported several projects during her CHASE funded studentship that aimed to widen access to university and scholarly research. She co-founded the open access CHASE journal Brief Encounters, which supports the dissemination of knowledge to a global readership. She also worked as a PhD tutor with The Brilliant Club, was a Research Mentor for the Sussex Learning Network (SLN:COP) and organised widening participation initiatives, such as the CHASE-funded doctoral training event Addressing Access.

Nicole would welcome discussion and collaboration with anyone interested in early modern studies, animal studies or, indeed, early modern animal studies! She would also be delighted to mentor doctoral students interested in pursuing ‘altac’ careers or in sharing her experiences as a CHASE scholar.