In order to submit your UChicago-USussex IJRA Scholar program application, please identify which research project/mentor you would like to work with from the projects listed below. If you are interested and qualified for more than one, please rank your top choice, followed by your second and third in your application.
Synopses are presented here; please be sure to click through to the full description of any project of interest!
Research Project #1: "Anna Mendelssohn & Feminist Vanguardism": Focused upon the life narrative and archive of British-born writer, artist, and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this project, the recipient of research fellowship funding, aims to challenge the presentation of women within male-defined discourses on avant-garde artistry and leftist militancy. Mendelssohn was affiliated with the British Poetry Revival, a post-Fordist group of New Leftist, experimental poets. Repeatedly anthologised, she authored 15 poetry collections and filled 800 notebooks with life writing, literature, and art. Influenced by international avant-gardes, reflecting often on her Northern, working-class, Jewish roots, Mendelssohn’s focus remained feminism and female artists. Two legal battles parenthesize Mendelssohn’s adulthood. The first was the Stoke Newington Eight criminal trial of 1972, then the lengthiest in British history. A student radical, Mendelssohn appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds (1969) before joining The Angry Brigade, Britain’s contribution to a late-1960s transnational wave of urban guerrilla groups. Still lacking the comprehensive histories devoted to their counterparts – America’s Weatherman, Germany’s Red Army Faction – The Angry Brigade shared their anti-imperialism and less lethal methods, prioritising Irish reunification, social equality, and autonomism. Pleading innocent, Mendelssohn was sentenced to ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions. A literacy tutor in prison, she was paroled in 1976. In the 1980s, she changed her name to Grace Lake, had three children, and began an English degree at Cambridge University. Unwell and parenting alone, she was supported by a family who ultimately initiated proceedings with the Family Division of Britain’s High Court. This second judicial conflict ended in 1988 when, under duress, Mendelssohn’s children were made wards of the state, and went to live with the family who became their permanent guardians. Mendelssohn’s peers, Jewish-American urban guerrillas Susan Stern and Jane Alpert, published confessional, fluid autobiographies that appeal to reader sympathy. By contrast, Mendelssohn’s life narrative is feminist, polemical, fictionalised, epistolary, and poetic. It remains unpublished, excepting a portion that the project leader, Sara Crangle, edited for the PMLA in 2018. The successful applicant will assist in preparing the unpublished portions of this 400+ page text with a book in view. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor: Dr Sara Crangle, English Literature, University of Sussex
Research Project #2: "De-Extinction Futures: Digital Humanities Research and Public Engagement": De-extinction, the process of recreating extinct species through biotechnology, is advancing rapidly and sparking global debate. Proponents argue it can address biodiversity loss, combat climate change, and foster new forms of human-animal relationships. Critics, however, caution that it risks diverting resources from traditional conservation efforts and exploiting the regions that once served as its target species’ natural habitats. Despite growing financial support and public interest, there remains a lack of systematic, multi-disciplinary study of the actors, locations, technologies, and materials driving de-extinction efforts. The Mapping De-Extinction Actors and Networks project addresses this gap by evaluating the woolly mammoth, thylacine, and northern white rhino projects. It focuses on mapping the networks of institutions, stakeholders, and geographies involved in these initiatives, producing a comprehensive understanding of how these efforts operate globally. This IJRA project builds on the larger research by prioritising public engagement and dissemination. The student will contribute to:
- Developing a website that integrates interactive maps, datasets, and public-facing resources, including blog posts and toolkits.
- Organising a public-facing research workshop, potentially tied to the website launch.
- Identifying academic dissemination opportunities, such as conferences and publications, and contributing to grant-writing efforts.
- Collaborating with cultural heritage partners to support public outreach activities, such as museum exhibits and community events.
This project seeks to not only deepen understanding of de-extinction networks but also make the research accessible and relevant to broader audiences. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Dr S. L. Nelson and Professor K. O’Riordan, University of Sussex, UK
Research Project #3: "Digital Holocaust Memory": The Landecker Digital Memory Lab launches a new ‘living database-archive’ in beta in June 2025. This platform allows registered users to explore walkthroughs of a wide range of digital projects engaging in Holocaust memory from across work, complemented by interviews by those involved in developing them (from creative designers, technical teams, curators, educators, and survivors). The platform also has a wider database of projects that are either obsolete or not yet archived by the team, presenting the global reach of digital Holocaust memory from the 1990s to the present day. The Lab is offering the potential for an International Junior Research Associate to develop their own small-scale research project doing one of the following:
- Recording walkthroughs of remote projects that can be accessed from the University of Sussex, and developing a poster or article analysing the specific type of digital project they choose to explore (this might be social media, virtual reality, online exhibitions, computer games, or AI projects for example)
- Exploring a selection of already recorded walkthroughs and interviews related to a specific theme or technology, and providing a poster or article analysing these
The student selected for this project will be invited to come to the University of Sussex approximately one week before the start of the IJRA program to attend the Connective Holocaust Commemoration expo. Lodging and other expenses will be covered. More details will be available later in the selection process.
Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Prof Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, with the support of Dr Ben Pelling and Dr Kate Marrison, School of Media, Arts and Humanities
Research Project #4: "Women who choose, men who do": This project starts from the observation that women and girls seem to have their actions framed as ‘choices’ more than men and boys do. For example, women are often framed as ‘choosing’ to wear certain things, to do certain things, to go certain places, while men just seem to wear things, do things, and go places. Consider:
- Girls who choose to play baseball, she said, must have a thick skin
- There's strict punishment for women who choose to defy them.
Delete choose to and the sentences are arguably more relevant and accurate.
What’s more, some initial corpus exploration seems to indicate that the use of ‘choice’ verbs for mundane activities is more strongly associated with women in English-speaking cultures with more active debates about reproductive choice (US, Ireland) than those where abortion rights are less debated (Britain, Australia).
The questions here are:
- Is ‘women’s choice’ discourse spreading from reproductive choices to other areas of women’s lives?
- Does this matter? Is it read as empowering, or does it distance women and girls from their actions in the world, putting the focus on the actions in their minds?
- Can patterns be observed in the types of activities that are framed as ‘choices’?
Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Prof M Lynne Murphy, Linguistics, School of Media, Arts and Humanities
Research Project #5: "Battle Cries: A History of British Politics in Ten Slogans": Political slogans have shaped Britain’s history, turning ideas into movements and ordinary people into political actors. From the English Civil War to Brexit, short, powerful phrases have been shouted in the streets, in Parliament, and printed on banners or smartphone screens —expressing grievances, demanding rights, and rallying people to causes that changed the nation. This project seeks a researcher to help conduct research for a popular history book that tells Britain’s story through ten defining slogans, placing them in their historical context and exploring the lives of the people who used them. The slogans include: ‘The Good Old Cause’; ‘Old Corruption’, ‘Votes for Women’, ‘Sinn Fein’, ‘Education, Education, Education’, ‘Take Back Control’, ‘Stop the Boats’. Rather than viewing these slogans as ephemeral, empty rhetoric, this project examines the people who spoke them, chanted them, and used them to push for change. It is a public history project that translates academic research into compelling storytelling for a broad audience. The supervisor is Tom F. Wright, a historian of speechmaking and political rhetoric, with a particular focus on the history of democratic communication in Britain and America. He has published extensively on political oratory and public debate, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, Times Educational Supplement, and Times Higher Education. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Tom F. Wright, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Head of the Department of English
Research Project #6: "Hibbledy-dibbledy, that simply won’t do! What fake British English can tell us": “British English” as a concept is newer than American English, and possibly less easy to pin down. Yet we can get some clues about it from parodies of British English speakers, who often use of nonsense words. (The hibbledy-dibbledy of the title comes from an American character mocking a British character on the sitcom The Good Place.) This project collects and analyses such words to ask what these fake words can tell us about the properties that serve as ‘indexes’ for British English and the ideologies that underlie them. Full description downloadable here.
Research Mentor(s): Prof M Lynne Murphy, Linguistics, School of Media, Arts and Humanities