Leverhulme trust awards generous research grants

The University of Warwick received a prestigious funding financial boost this winter from the Leverhulme Trust, as its research faculty performed better than ever.

The Trust designates funds to the value of £50 million every year, funding research projects in all subject areas. This year over ten percent of the awardees for the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships, (awards for outstanding academic achievements at a young age) are currently staff at the University of Warwick.

There was success in an even more competitive category for Dr Georgio Riello, from the Department of History. Currently on leave for the academic year 2010-2011, Dr Riello is celebrated as a “scholar of great distinction and breadth, whose key contributions have been in the field of the history of fashion and global history.” He has received one of the coveted Philip Leverhulme Prizes, worth £70,000.

Dr Riello told the _Boar_ that “This is money to fund research, that hopefully should benefit not just my own career, but also the University and, through innovative teaching, the student community.” The Philip Leverhulme Prize was awarded to only 25 academics this year.

In addition to these awards, four Warwick researchers received prestigious Major Research Fellowships totalling £509,219, funding which will be used to pay for them to be relieved of their duties at the University in order to concentrate on their personal research projects. The awardees were Professor Stella Bruzzi, Chair of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Stephen Houlgate of the Philosophy Department, Professor Steve Hindle, Head of the History Department, and Dr Ingrid de Smet, a researcher in French Studies.

Although the researchers will have to suspend their teaching duties for the two or three year research period, the University is confident that the education of students will benefit from the involvement of the academics in the program.

The University told the _Boar_ that “Great researchers make great teachers of their field… and having active funded research programmes also allows our undergraduates to have opportunities to engage in real research.”

Professor Steve Hindle, recipient of one of the Major Research Fellowships, plans to spend the two year fellowship researching the seventeenth-century history of a small but exceptionally well-documented rural community in Warwickshire called Chilvers Coton, in an exercise he calls “The social topography of a rural community.”

Hindle told the _Boar _that the Leverhulme Grants are rare among research funding sources for allowing the freedom to work on any content in any location, “completely ‘buying’ the academic from the University for the period, allowing them time to think, research and write.”

Dr Hindle also spoke in his capacity as the Director of Economic History about the national situation concerning research funding. With the Government’s ongoing attempt to reduce the structural deficit, higher education will next year suffer from a fiscal nightmare, with spending cuts being implemented before the 2012 tuition fee rises give universities a chance to recoup that lost funding.

Hindle argued that the funding cuts meant that “The voluntary sector is going to have to take up the slack for the cutbacks in Government funding, which will be devastating for the provision of research in all universities… The Leverhulme Trust is a commendable organisation, but it can’t compete with the reliability of funding provided by the state.” The next academic year will be difficult for the Arts department and the Humanities department at the University of Warwick, as the Government implement funding cuts of at least 80 percent to the two subject areas.

The Trust had an especially positive effect on these subjects, deemed not economically valuable enough to be ‘ring-fenced’ from funding cuts, and it seems that both the Arts and Humanities at Warwick will have to continue to impress such educational charities as the Leverhulme Trust if a high level of research and education is to be maintained.

The overwhelming consensus, however, is that these announcements prove that this has been an excellent academic year for the University of Warwick, with Professor Hindle arguing that the success was due to “high quality staff and credible, realistic research projects.” Dr Riello commented that “Results confirm that the University is as good as the more traditional UK universities that are known around the world.”