Arts

09 Nov 09

Dr Philip Bullock and Dr Laura Ashe have received Philip Leverhulme Prizes in the Modern European Languages and Literature category.

Three young academics from Oxford University’s Humanities Division have been awarded prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prizes worth £70,000.

The awards were given out to just 24 academics under the age of 36 who have ‘made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, are recognised at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to be of correspondingly high promise’.

This year there were five broad fields of research. Dr Laura Ashe of the English Faculty and Dr Philip Bullock of the Sub-Faculty of Russian and Slavonic Languages received two of the six awards in the Modern European Languages and Literature category. Daria Martin of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art received one of four awards in the Performing and Visual Arts category.

Dr Laura Ashe’s research is focused on the literatures and culture of England, c.1000–1400. The long twelfth century, from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta, was a time of development and change in political, legal and cultural spheres – but because its literature was in Latin and French, Dr Ashe says it has been excluded from English literary history.

Her research is devoted to restoring this period to our understanding of English medieval literature, tracing the continuities, which bind Old English to post-Conquest literature, and Latin and French to later Middle English.

Dr Ashe will be taking her prize over two years, beginning in October next year. She said: ‘The prize is fantastic, I’m going to use most of it to buy out my college teaching for two years in order to work on a large book. I’ve been commissioned to write Oxford English Literary History volume I: 1000–1350, which I hope will contribute to this multilingual period’s being brought properly into the mainstream of English literary studies.’

Dr Philip Bullock’s research seeks to establish innovative cross-disciplinary links between his original training in Russian literature and a number of related areas, asserting the close connections between Russia and modern Western culture.

He tries to integrate scholarly disciplines such as literature, music and cultural history ‘within a methodological context informed by gender studies, reception theory, comparative literature, musical analysis and the practice of close-reading’.

He said: ‘The Philip Leverhulme Prize will allow me to concentrate on my next big project, a book-length study of the relationship between words and music in the Russian song tradition. Surprisingly, there has been no English-language survey of this crucial genre, and the last Russian book on the subject was published in 1956.

'As someone whose entire early ambition was to be a musician, but who then switched to the study of modern languages and literatures, this project is the fulfilment of two long-standing academic passions and areas of expertise.’

Finally, Daria Martin, of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art received an award in the Performing and Visual Arts Category for her research on film art. Ms Martin is an active, internationally exhibiting filmmaker and considered one of the best and most original young artists working today.

Her work has been exhibited at the 2005 British Art Show, the 2006 Tate Triennial and the 2008 Manifesta, and she has recently completed a very prestigious commission Minotaur, part of a collaboration by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The Leverhulme Trust calls her ‘an artist of marvellous intelligence and creativity, whose substantial body of work has been built on a beautiful and refreshingly unfamiliar blending of the worlds of film, dance, sculpture and performance, illuminating embodied fantasies.’

Her forthcoming project, Empathy, examines the concept of synaesthesia through the coming of age story of a sixteen-year old boy, and is the culmination of her research into film’s capacity to translate senses.