In 2024, we offered ten societies a bursary towards conference attendance for an Early Career Researcher as part of our 125th anniversary celebrations. When planning how to celebrate LUP’s 125th year, we wanted to make sure we were giving back to the academic community, and supporting ECRs has always been an area of importance for LUP. With the year now drawing to a close, all ten of our Early Career Researchers have been selected and the majority have now attended their chosen conferences.
Below is a list of our LUP125 Early Career Researcher bursary recipients, along with some thoughts from each of them on the conference they attended.
Dr Victoria Adams, Research Associate in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Bristol, attended the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland annual conference at the University of Birmingham in March. After the conference, Victoria told us: “As one of the first in-person conferences I’ve attended post-COVID, it was great to be able to see old acquaintances and meet new colleagues at the 2024 AHGBI Conference. In particular, it was really invigorating to see how my doctoral research, which explores how and why a selection of cultural-historical initiative use digital media to explore the memory and heritage of Rio de Janeiro, resonated with colleagues who works focuses on cultural practices in other part of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula as I prepare it for publication.”
The Science Fiction Research Association selected Megan Stephens, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield’s School of English, to receive the LUP125 bursary to attend the SFRA’s annual conference at the University of Tartu, Estonia in May. Megan shared: “The SFRA conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet and hear from fantastic SF scholars from all over the world. I heard lots of fascinating papers and was also able to attend a variety of cultural programming at the Tartu International Literary Festival. It was an amazing experience and I’m very grateful to Liverpool University Press for helping me to attend!”
The American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) selected Dr Elizabeth DeYoung as the recipient of their bursary to attend the ACIS annual conference in June 2024 at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Elizabeth is a Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research, and recently published her first book with Liverpool University Press, Power, Politics and Territory in the ‘New Northern Ireland’. After the conference, Elizabeth told us: “The conference was a fantastic opportunity to share findings from my first book, a critical ethnography of contemporary politics and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. At the conference’s end, I was delighted to receive the ACIS’s Murphy Prize for the book – and to accept the award in person, surrounded by esteemed colleagues from a multitude of disciplines and places. I felt proud to represent a new generation in Irish Studies, one rooted in interdisciplinary research and informed by ongoing social justice work; one that is responsive to pressing current events and social issues. The ACIS conference allowed me to connect with other scholars who are reshaping and reinvigorating the field, an experience which was tremendously inspiring.”
At the start of July, Dr Julia Ribeiro S C Thomaz who is a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study’s Digital Humanities Research Hub attended the Society for French Studies’ 2024 annual conference in Stirling using our anniversary bursary. After attending, Julia said: “Thank you LUP for the bursary that allowed me to attend SFS2024 in the beautiful Stirling campus! It was an amazing conference: plenary sessions marked by discussions of royalty, death, storytelling and imagined pasts and futures; some wonderful panels (including mine on surrealism!), and even Scottish ceilidh. Roll on SFS2025 in Bristol and another 125 years for LUP!”
The same week, the International Medieval Congress in Leeds was taking place and we partnered with the IMC to offer Alexandra Forsyth, PhD student in History at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland, a bursary towards attendance. LUP have attended the IMC for years and it was brilliant to work with them in a different way to support Alexandra’s travel costs for the event. Alexandra shared: “Thank you, LUP, for enabling me to attend my first Leeds IMC! It was such a fun and friendly place to share my research, meet new people, and learn all about the exciting research being conducted within medieval studies!”
As well as working with some of the many academic societies we regularly partner with, we also wanted to support the librarian community who play such a huge role in the academic community. We partnered with LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) to offer Jordan Cohen, Data Librarian in the Research Services Department at Toulouse Capitole Libraries, a bursary towards attending their 2024 annual conference. Jordan attended the conference at the Cyprus University of Technology library in Limassol, Cyprus in July and told us: “I am honored to receive the Liverpool University Press bursary for young librarians this early in my career. This bursary represents not only a recognition of my work in open science and research data management advocacy, but also an investment in my future as a librarian. The LIBER conference is an important event for me because it brings together professionals from across Europe who are dedicated to advancing research libraries and as a young librarian, I am eager to learn from the experiences and insights of my colleagues as well as share my own perspectives on the challenger and opportunities facing our profession.”
Our Director of Journals Publishing Clare Hooper worked with the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) Young Academics to select PhD student in Urban Studies at University of Quebec in Montreal Maude Cournoyer-Gendron to receive the LUP125 bursary. Maude used the bursary to attend AESOP’s 2024 congress in Paris the same month and afterwards said: “The AESOP conference was an opportunity to meet and exchange with a variety of researchers from all around the world that work on the same specific topic than me, which is contentious governance and agonistic urban planning. Discussions were highly stimulating and hopefully this experience will lead to further collaboration with researchers in my field.”
As well as being 125 years since the founding of LUP, 2024 was also the year many commemorated the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death so it felt fitting to partner with our colleagues at the Byron Society to offer a grant towards attending this special International Byron Conference in Athens and Messolonghi, Greece. Marc Gotthardt, PhD student at St Catharine’s College Cambridge, received the bursary and shared: “The time after finishing the PhD is a liminal experience, but I was fortunate to submit my thesis on Byron’s poetics just as the bicentenary year of his death in 1824 began. A host of conferences, commemorative events, and celebrations brought a sense of continuity, and I was particularly grateful for the chance to attend the International Byron Conference in Athens and Missolonghi, where Byron died while being involved in the Greek Revolution, thanks to the Liverpool University Press ECR grant. A wide range of excellent papers went to show how much Byron still provokes our thoughts today, and it has been immensely rewarding to be part of that conversation.”
LUP partners with the Society for the Study of Labour History on both a book series and a journal, so this year they were top of our list when thinking of societies to work with. Our colleagues at the SSLH selected Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidade Federal Fluminense Lucas Santos Souza who chose to attend the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) with the conference attendance grant. After the conference in September, Lucas told us: “The LUP 125th anniversary bursary enabled me to participate in an important international conference on a topic that has been gaining increasing relevance across various fields. Being able to engage with and contribute alongside other scholars who have been working with Digital Studies through the lens of Social Labour History was highly significant, and the exchange of experiences will yield excellent results.”
Our final LUP125 ECR bursary was given to Anastasia Kuryanova from the European University at Saint Petersburg by the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies to attend their International Symposium in Kuwait which takes place in a few weeks’ time. Ahead of the event, Anastasia shared her thoughts: “The SGNCS Symposium in Kuwait is an outstanding opportunity to receive precious feedback from an international community of scholars specialising in a wide range of fields, all the more so since my own research is multidisciplinary and deals with visual studies, colonialism studies, history of art, diplomacy, and science. I can’t wait to present it at the Symposium and enjoy other presentations, which I have no doubt will be extremely exciting.”
We are so thrilled to have been able to take the opportunity of our 125th anniversary to partner with these societies and support some brilliant Early Career Researchers in getting their work out there and networking with others in each of their fields. Thank you to all of our partnered societies for helping us select such worthy recipients, and to our ten recipients for sharing their conference experiences with us.
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