The British Academy is inviting proposals from early career researchers in the humanities and social sciences wishing to pursue an independent research project, towards the completion of a significant piece of publishable research.

Applicants must be researchers from the humanities and social sciences and be based at an eligible university or research organisation for the duration of the Fellowship.

Applicants must be of Early Career Status, meaning they must apply within three years from the date of their successful viva voce examination. For this round of competition, applicants are expected to have completed their viva voce between 1 April 2022 and 1 April 2025.

For more information and how to apply click hereLink opens in a new window

Warwick Philosophy has been ranked 5th in the UK by The Complete University Guide 2024.

The league table is made up of several main indicators including entry standards, student satisfaction, research quality, continuation and graduate prospect outcomes.

We are thrilled with the result, which reflects consistent high rankings in the National Student Survey (NSS) and strong graduate prospects.

With increased use of front-facing cameras, mirrors and Zoom calls, we’re being faced with our own reflections more than ever before.

Is it heightening our preoccupation with the way we look?

Warwick’s Professor Heather Widdows (Philosophy) spoke to Dazed Digital about how our sense of self has changed in recent years

Dr Andrew Cooper has been named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker for 2023. Each year a select group of ten early career researchers from across the UK are chosen by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and BBC Radio 3 to become a New Generation Thinker. This prestigious NGT status will provide Dr Cooper with a unique opportunity to make radio broadcasts for the BBC, and disseminate his research on German philosopher Amalia Holst to a wider audience. Dr Cooper will also benefit from training and development provided by the AHRC. For further details about the scheme see here: https://www.ukri.org/news/career-changing-opportunity-for-researchers-with-big-ideas/

Professor Diarmuid Costello has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-4) to work on his next book project, a collection of essays provisionally titled Spurs to Thought: Philosophical Engagements with Contemporary Art.

Professor Costello says: "The goal of this research is two-fold: to demonstrate the remarkable capacity of selected works of contemporary art to function as spurs to philosophical reflection, if approached in the right spirit; and, in so doing, to establish the value of what I call “philosophical criticism” as an alternative to currently dominant methodologies in the philosophy of art, whether analytic or continental. The project brings this method to bear on the kind of contemporary works that often elicit hostility or confusion, so as to make clear the challenge that such works may implicitly pose to our unreflective understanding of normative concepts we make use of every day".

Professor Costello's previous, recently completed monograph, Aesthetics after Modernism will appear in 2024 with Oxford University Press (NYC) in Noël Carroll and Jesse Prinz’s ‘Thinking Art’ series.

"Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to appreciating art after modernism. It aims to show that even the hardest of “hard cases” remain amenable to aesthetic analysis on an adequate conception of the latter. The book traces the contrary view of much recent art criticism and theory to Clement Greenberg’s success in recruiting Kant’s aesthetics to underwrite a formalist conception of aesthetic value. This has led later theorists to miss the resources in the third Critique for understanding our cognitive relation to the kinds of art in which they are interested. It is widely assumed that Kant’s aesthetics cannot speak to the semantic dimension of art; I provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of art, taking Conceptual Art as my test case, that suggests otherwise. If it can be shown that Kant’s aesthetics can accommodate the appreciation of art with no sensible features, then it should in principle be able to accommodate any kind of art".