Dr Laura King receives Rising Star Engagement Award
The British Academy has awarded some of the most promising and talented academics in the UK.
British Academy Rising Star Engagement Awards (BARSEAs) are held for a 12-month period and provide funding of up to £15,000. They are designed to encourage wider engagement with the humanities and social sciences within and beyond academia through events, training, and mentoring activities.
Dr Laura King, School of History, has received her award for Remembering the dead: artist-academic collaborations.
The project seeks to bring together academics working on remembrance practices with a group of Mexican artists producing creative work on the same theme. Through a residency with Theatre In The Mill in Bradford and the Corn Exchange shopping centre in Leeds, and a day-long workshop, this funding will allow new collaborative work to be produced, and new relationships forged.
Collaboration between academics and creative professionals is really stimulating and hugely beneficial.
The visiting artists will use materials provided by the academics, along with a process of community engagement, to build a series of ofrenda, or shrines of remembrance, often created around Day of the Dead. It ultimately explores the questions of how different cultures remember their dead; which practices of remembrance are most effective and important for different groups of people; and how collaborations between artists and academics, alongside community groups, can offer new ways of investigating and communicating our research questions.
Dr King said: "I'm delighted to have been awarded this funding, mostly because it allows me to keep working with the wonderful Grief Series. The award sees us broadening out this collaboration to involve other historians and artists from Mexico, which is exciting. This kind of collaboration between academics and creative professionals is really stimulating and hugely beneficial."
