Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships 2016

These fellowships are highly prestigious, with only 33 awarded nationally this year. Both fellowships will run for three years, starting in 2017.

Donald Bloxham (Richard Pares Professor of History) has been awarded funding of £144,542 from the Leverhulme Trust for a Major Research Fellowship to work on the project  ‘The world we fought for? Systematic violence in global history since 1945’.

Professor Bloxham will be working on the first global history of extreme violence from the end of the Second World War to the present. He will examine worldwide connections between wars, revolutions, genocides, famines, large-scale terrorism and state terror. As a ‘new international history’ the project will explore the violence-conducive environment created by imperialism’s legacies, decolonisation, self-determination development agendas, the Cold War, and new geopolitical struggles since the Cold War. 

Ulrike Roth (Senior Lecturer in Ancient History) has been awarded funding of £146,288 from the Leverhulme Trust for a Major Research Fellowship to work on the project ‘The child face of Roman slavery’.

Dr Roth will explore the role of child slavery in the Roman world, testing the hypothesis that Roman slavery was largely child slavery. The project will cover a period of half a millennium, c. 200 BC to AD 300, and will examine the full geographical extent of the Roman empire across the Mediterranean. Based on extensive quantitative and qualitative study, combining demographic modelling with close source analysis, it will assess the economic role of child slavery and ask whether child slavery was the most widespread form of slave exploitation in the Roman world. Comparison with more recent slave societies will enable meaningful contextualisation of the Roman example and its historical legacy.

More information

• Professor Bloxham's staff profile
• Dr Roth's staff profile