Former IMS postgraduate researcher and Teaching Fellow awarded Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

Dr Kirsty Day, former IMS postgraduate researcher and Teaching Fellow in Medieval History at Leeds, has been awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctral Fellowship at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships are designed for experienced researchers seeking to boost their careers by working abroad. This offers exciting new learning opportunities, as well as a chance to improve a CV. Applicants from all research areas can be funded, and experienced researchers from across the world with a doctoral degree or at least four years' full-time research experience are welcome to apply. The grant provides an allowance to cover living, travel, and family costs. In addition, the EU contributes to the training, networking and research costs of the fellow. 

Applicants must submit a research proposal and a CV, written jointly with the chosen host organisation(s). 

Project: Emotions, Gender, and Authority

Dr Kirsty Day, currently a Teaching Fellow in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh, was a postgraduate researcher in the IMS who completed her PhD viva in early 2016, as well as a Teaching Fellowing in Medieval History at the University of Leeds from September 2015 - June 2016. Dr Day has worked at the University of Edinburgh ever since. 

Dr Day was awarded a two-year Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Aalborg University (Denmark) beginning in September 2019 for the project, 'Emotions, Gender, and Authority at the Curia of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216)'. This project will consider how using a history of emotions approach could improve access to gendered discourses. Overall the project will 'examine how Innocent III and his curia used emotions to communicate papal authority, and how this was shaped by contemporary ideas about gender'. 

The fellowship will allow Dr Day to expand her research focus: 'I'm excited to be able to combine existing interests with new ones and to explore these interests in an area that few people have worked on'. 

I'm excited to be able to combine existing interests with new ones and to explore these interests in an area that few people have worked on. 

During the fellowship, Dr Day will research for her project, and also plans to organise a conference and workshop on the topic, in addition to public engagement projects. 

Ultimately Dr Day is looking forward to the fellowship, 'in part because it will be quite a different project for me'. As a historian of late-medieval religion and specifically of women and the religious orders, Dr Day 'love[s] teaching gender history'. Still she is interested to explore papal masculinity and the history of emotions, both topics outside of her usual research. 

Congratulations to Dr Kirsty Day from the IMS!