Fellowship success leads to research placement in Europe
Fri Mar 11 2016 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Fellowship success leads to research placement in Europe
11 March 2016
Dr Jemma Field
When University of Auckland academic Dr Jemma Field attended a conference in the United Kingdom in 2014 she had no idea it would lead to a great academic opportunity more than a year later.
The Art History lecturer was presenting a paper at the University of Kent in April 2014 on the political value of Queen Anna (1574 –1619), a Danish princess who was Queen consort of Scotland, England, and Ireland as the wife of King James I. During the event she was fortunate to meet Professor James Knowles from London’s Brunel University.
In July 2015 Professor Knowles emailed her and suggested she apply for a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship.
The Fellowships are named after the double Nobel Prize winning Polish-French scientist famed for her work on radioactivity.
Jemma spent six solid weeks working on a 25 page proposal of her planned research before sending it to the European Commission for consideration.
She then had to wait five months for the results, but she was successful and was granted €196,000 in funding from the European Commission. She never thought she would be picked as a recipient, so the news was a great surprise.
“It was completely surreal, the Fellowships are extremely competitive and I knew from the outset that there was only a slim chance I would be successful. There was an amazing sense of validation - it's often difficult, as an early modernist, to find a receptive audience in New Zealand.”
Jemma will continue her studies into Queen Anna during her Fellowship. Called “The Politics of Cultural Exchange: Anna of Denmark and the Uses of European Identity,” the project will examine the distinctive patterns in Anna’s patronage, and how she created cross-cultural exchange as the first European queen consort to move to Britain in almost 50 years.
“By investigating Anna’s key role as an agent of cultural interchange, the project produces an interdisciplinary account of Anglo-Danish transcultural exchange. It also looks to illuminate the complex uses of national identities as cultural and political symbols in early modern Europe.”
Jemma completed her PhD in 2015 on Queen Anna as a cultural agent and political figure at the Jacobean court. Her PhD challenged the dominant historiography that has cast the Queen as a vain and vacuous woman by examining her role in foreign policy and domestic affairs.
The 33-year-old from Avondale will head to London where she will be based at her host institution, Brunel University, for the next two years.
She will also undertake several research trips, mainly to Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, where she will research little-used archival, printed, and visual primary sources.
Jemma says that the Fellowship will help her professional development and equip her with the necessary skills to secure an academic appointment. She also hopes to extend her skills in Paleography - the study of ancient and historical handwriting - and Latin in order to complete the additional archival research required to transform her PhD into a book.
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