Research funding success for colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Comparative Literature has resulted in grants of approximately £361,000 for academic research.

Professor Jon Williamson, Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant for his project ‘Evidential pluralism in the social sciences’, which will receive £244,000 for work in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for Self-Improvement: A History. Her award of £48,000 will support the writing of a book charting the long history of the idea of the improvable self from antiquity to the present. The book is contracted for publication with Yale University Press.

Dr Katja Haustein, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship totalling £46,247 for her project, Alone With Others: A Literary History of Tact in the Twentieth Century.

Dr Graeme A Forbes, Lecturer in Philosophy, has been awarded a Mind Association Research Fellowship, securing £23,000 for work on his monograph, The times they are a-changin’.

This announcement follows news that Professor Amalia Arvaniti in the Department of English Language and Linguistics has been awarded a grant of almost €2.5m to investigate the role of the tone of voice in communication and ways it might influence conversations.