Dr Heather Ferguson has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Trust Research Grant for a project entitled “Learning from Fiction: A Philosophical and Psychological Study”.
The project represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between Heather and the philosophers Gregory Currie (University of York) and Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), and will explore the effect that reading fiction has on imagination, attitudes, moral sensitivity, and psychological insight. The project will employ neuropsychological and cognitive-experimental methods within a philosophical framework to understand this important issue from multiple perspectives.
The grant is worth £342,223 in total, with £176,157 coming directly to Kent, and is part of an emerging body of interdisciplinary research in the School, especially funded by Leverhulme.