ECF Fellows

Mathilde Alain

Mathilde is a historian based at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. My PhD thesis in cotutelle between Warwick and Tours (France) has focused on the travel account of the Portuguese Francisco Álvares, who accompanied an embassy to Ethiopia between 1520-1526.

Mathilde is interested in the history of travels and travel accounts to and from Africa, the history of Ethiopian-Portuguese relations and of Ethiopia, and the perception and knowledge of Africa in Renaissance Europe and beyond.

Hande Cayir

Hande Çayır is a practice-based researcher whose work explores mental health activism and documentary filmmaking. She draws on Mad Studies, critical disability theory, and visual anthropology.
Hande's recent project examines survivor-authored films through institutional, co-created, and DIY methods, using autoethnography, participatory action research, and creative-relational inquiry.

Hande's films have been screened internationally, and she received the 2024 Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a peer reviewer for Disability & Society. Her work has been published in Media Practice and Education and Sociology of Health and Illness.

Charlotte Gannon

Charlotte is a PhD candidate in Psychology and an Early Careers Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. She has recently submitted her thesis investigating the evolution and development of conscious imagination, with a particular focus on the role of language. To explore this, she worked with human infants and great apes to compare imaginative abilities in the context of language development (infants) and language absence (great apes). She also explored the role of mental visualisation by studying human adults with and without aphantasia, a condition in which individuals lack voluntary mental imagery.

Outside of academia, she is also heavily involved in wildlife conservation and is currently a trustee of the Red Squirrel South West charity.

Gozde Nur Gunesli

Gozde's doctoral research is in the inter-disciplinary field of computational pathology (CPath) where methods from computer science, statistics and mathematics are applied to problems related to histology, pathology and oncology.

Their thesis is specifically focussed on developing machine learning methods to improve histology image analysis, critical for cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

Nicola Hamer

Nicola Hamer has just submitted an AHRC-funded PhD in comparative literary studies. Her doctoral research asked how communities across North America and the Caribbean use poetry to process and protest ecological grief, the grief of ruptured ecosystemic relationality.

Molly Harrabin

Molly Harrabin recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Cinema (1918-1933)’, in the German Studies department of the School of Modern Languages & Cultures.

Molly is currently an Early Career Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study at Warwick and Network Coordinator and Postdoctoral Researcher for the German Screen Studies Network.

Molly’s work has been published in Studies in European Cinema, and she has forthcoming publications on Pandora’s Box (1929) and the Netflix adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. She is also the founder and co-convenor of the Weimar Film Network, and she assists with the Weimar 100 project based here at Warwick.

Julian Harruch

Julián is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at the University of Warwick. He recently completed his PhD in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Warwick, funded by Warwick Chancellor’s International Scholarship.

His research critically engages with contemporary Latin American decolonial theory, exploring the intersections of cultural difference, socio-political conflict, and popular struggles within Colombia’s multiculturalism.

Julián’s work has been published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. His research interests include Latin American intellectual history, political philosophy, and critical theory.

Grace Kamanga

Grace Kamanga is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. She began her academic career in 2012 and continued until she commenced her PhD in 2021. Grace has published her research in various journals, including Development Southern Africa (Taylor and Francis), Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management (Wiley), Tourism Review International (Ingenta Connect), and Routledge. She earned her Master of Tourism from the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 2016. Her research interests include sustainability, ecotourism, women's empowerment, higher education, and tourism security.

Yanyan Li

Dr Yanyan Li completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick and is currently an Early-Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her PhD research explored the multimodal interactional processes through which peers conduct relationship work during group interactions. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose research interests and expertise extend beyond applied linguistics to include behaviour change theories, health interventions, digital and mental health, and research culture. Yanyan has contributed to research projects in Centre for Applied Linguistics and Medical School and consistently strives to use research to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Nursyaheedah Muhammad Isa

My PhD focused on the Discursive Construction and Negotiation of Identity in Secular Spaces, drawing on applied linguistics, sociocultural linguistics, fan and fandom studies, media studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

Jessica Eastland-Underwood

Jess’s research agenda is focused on the intersection of everyday political thinking, economic ideas and racism. Her published work has looked at the use of ‘the market’ as a rhetorical device that reproduces white supremacy and on popular imaginations of the economic preferences of the American Founding Fathers to mask racial animus.

Jess's PhD investigated how the concept of ‘the economy’ intuitively implies a hierarchy of human beings, drawing from a rhetorical political analysis of everyday expressions of the term from activists in both anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Miriam Gordon

Miriam Gordon is a PhD candidate in Caribbean Studies and an IAS Early Career Fellow funded by the PATHWAY Early Career Fellowship Scheme. Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Of Routes and Ruptures: Modes of Displacement in French Caribbean Literature" and examines displacement under the two interpretations of rupture and of movement and how this influences the narratives surrounding race, identity and memory in contemporary literature by authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporas.

Miriam has given papers at several conferences including at the Society for Caribbean Studies and Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and has an upcoming article to be published in the journal Modern and Contemporary France (Summer 2025).