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School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

Faculty welcomes six Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships

03 Oct 2025

The Fellowships are for colleagues at an early stage of their academic careers to undertake significant pieces of publishable work.

Six Faculty colleagues have secured prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships for research in the humanities and social sciences.  

The Fellowships are awarded to early career researchers who have not yet held a full-time permanent academic post. They allow them to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.  

Our Fellows are: 

  • Dr Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio, Research Fellow in SALC, who specialises in Latin American visual culture, literature and art, using queer theory and decolonial feminisms in her work. Her Fellowship is for her work on reframing the bicentenary and contending national imaginaries in Andean comics. 

  • Dr Joshua Rushton, Research Fellow and Lecturer in SALC, who is a social and cultural historian of early modern religious life, focusing on Catholicism and connecting his study to broader cultural and spiritual shifts such as changes in Christian worldviews and environmental change. His Fellowship is for his work on Catholic renewal and environmental change in the early modern world.  

  • Dr Diana Berzina, interdisciplinary researcher in Criminology in SoSS, who focuses on online marketplaces for digital collectibles and cryptocurrencies, as well as the blurred boundaries between legal and illegal activity, the market drivers, and the role of AI. Her Fellowship is for her work on digital objects of desire and crime: human-object interactions in the Metaverse. 

  • Dr Angel Martin Caballero is a Research Fellow at the Work and Equalities Institute in AMBS, whose research interests span employment and industrial relations, the sociology and political economy of work, and human resource management. His Fellowship is for his work on the digital workplace: compliance, enforcement, and institutional change.  

  • Dr Naoise Murphy is a Research Fellow whose research interests are in queer and trans studies, gender and sexuality, modern and contemporary literature and postcolonial studies. Naoise’s Fellowship is for her work on quiet visibility: mapping the lesbian middlebrow.  

  • Dr Elena Racheva is a Research Fellow in Sociology who previously worked as a special correspondent for independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was a Fellow of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2015-2016) in Washington DC. Elena’s main research interests are the legitimisation and justification of violence, its perpetrators, and its place in the popular consciousness. Elena’s Fellowship is for her work War without peace: Russian civil militarisation propaganda in post-Soviet states. 

Associate Vice-President for Research, Professor Melissa Westwood said: “This is wonderful news for our colleagues and the University – great recognition of the exceptional research being led by our early career researchers. I look forward to seeing the work they produce and the impact they will have in the months and years ahead.”