Sasha - Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

What tips do you have for PhD students who might be considering doing an Early Career Fellowship?

"I think it’s helpful to have a really clear idea of what the postdoctoral landscape looks like. There's lots of different kinds of postdocs - there are teaching cover postdocs, postdocs where you're contributing to one aspect of somebody else's bigger grant project, and ones where you're the lead researcher and it's exclusively your project. It's also about keeping an open mind - if academia is really what you want to do, then I think it’s wise not to expect the dream job to fall into your lap immediately, and it’s totally normal for people to go through several shorter-term positions before landing in something more long-term.

Before I came to Nottingham, I had a short postdoc posting for one year, back home in New Zealand, which was amazing and so supportive. Then I had a year where I was unaffiliated, pulling together small stopgap grants and research
assistance gigs, trying to pay the bills while also still applying to various
schemes. It was pretty gruelling, I won't lie, and I know this is a fairly
common experience.

It's good to have a really honest conversation with yourself about what you are and are not prepared to do. I had it easy in some ways - I was making these decisions for myself alone, I didn't have a partner or children to factor in, so I could be pretty flexible.

If you’re in the final stages of a PhD and considering a postdoc, keep in mind that it might take a little bit of time, but persistence is a really good quality to have."

How was the application process?

"The experience of applying for the Leverhulme with Nottingham was really positive. The way the Leverhulme application works is that you first apply for an internal round through your potential host institution, and then that host institution will put a limited number of nominations forward to the Leverhulme Trust.

I had applied to a couple of preliminary rounds with several different host institutions, which you are allowed to do at that initial stage, but then I had to choose which host institution I wanted to proceed with when I was offered the nomination by both Nottingham and another university.

I chose Nottingham because of the support offered at that phase of the application. They had multiple rounds of internal deadlines and feedback leading up to the official scheme deadline, and the staff at FARA (the Faculty of Arts Research Accelerator) have so much experience in overseeing these kinds of applications. 

If somebody were looking at applying through Nottingham, you are going to be well supported throughout the whole process."

Tell us about your research…

"My doctoral research was on women and sensation, looking at how women experienced the city through the senses and thinking about how we might understand femininity as a series of embodied encounters.

Women are still at the centre of my research, and my chronological focus is on the period from the late 19th to the early 20th century. It's a time of rapid transformation and a lot of really interesting things are happening in the fields of gender norms, urbanisation, modernity, and the creative arts. In the past, I’ve worked on both France and Russia. I'm currently taking a turn more towards the Russian Empire, but I do try and bring in links to France whenever I can, as a
comparative or transnational perspective.

My Leverhulme project is currently at a sort of crossroads. I knew from the start that I wanted to look at women without men, to explore the different kinds of intimate relationships that women formed when they were amongst themselves. But I'm a year into this project now and realising that I was maybe a little optimistic, in terms of the source material that I am able to access, especially under the current circumstances.

So, I’m rethinking how I’m going to frame my original research questions, and one promising avenue seems to be looking into histories of medicine. The period I study is also the time when women started to qualify as doctors and to enter the medical professions in greater numbers. I’m curious about whether their newfound authority in these circles changed medical knowledge or popular understandings of women’s bodies, fertility, and sexual health.

I’ve just got back from an extended period of archival research, and so I’ve spent a lot of time with the primary sources: hygiene manuals and sexual education pamphlets which discuss topics like menstruation and managing female puberty; doctoral dissertations by both male and female medical students; the proceedings of the imperial Russian obstetrics and gynaecology society conferences; and even some patient records. It’s really fascinating material, and prompting a variety of new historical questions, so I’m excited to see where it leads me!"

How have you found collaborating with the Department of History?

"It's been great; it's a very friendly department. I'm working with Sarah Badcock as my mentor, who is really the reason I came to Nottingham. She's brilliant, and a big name in the field of Russian history. Her work is so innovative and she's very skilled at finding ways to access these marginalised voices, which are not always preserved in the written records, through an imaginative approach to source materials and what they might tell us.

It’s also a really big, lively department. Lots of people are doing interesting things.

Between research events and shared offices and the staff room, I’ve got to know quite a few of my colleagues, which has been great."

What has the teaching side been like?

"I've been really lucky this year in that the gaps in the department have lined up well with what's been useful for me, as I’m trying to build my teaching experience at this stage in my career.

It’s more thematic than chronological, and organised around the idea of temporality. I was given a carte blanche for one week of the module, which meant leading two seminars on some of my passion subjects - art and technology in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. This was material which was pivotal for me in shaping how I think about history, so it was a privilege to be able to introduce these ideas to students on their own academic journeys.

I've also supervised three undergraduate dissertation students, who have all chosen really fascinating topics, looking at women’s lives and experiences across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which is right in my wheelhouse. It’s been super rewarding watching them develop a topic which interests them, which sparks their curiosity, and helping them to shape that into a project which is manageable but still makes a real contribution to historical knowledge. The dissertation is likely to be the first time that these students have visited an archive, identified a body of primary source material, and sustained a historical argument across ten to twelve thousand words - it’s a sizeable project, and it’s been wonderful to guide them through that process."

What are your ambitions for after your Fellowship?

"Honestly, probably another one! The dream is an open-ended academic job that combines teaching and research. But those are quite rare these days.

There are some fellowships programmes on the horizon which I want to apply to, both in the UK and probably also in Europe. My hope is that my current work on women’s sexual health will turn into a book project, but that is probably still several years away, given the scope of the concept. So, I’ll be looking to find a way to continue that research and to turn it into what I hope will be a major publication."