The Literary Encyclopedia Travel Award 2024 - Results Round Two

We are pleased to report that we had a very strong crop of contenders, with stimulating, timely, and well-structured proposals. The projects we have decided to reward are original, historically informed and potentially conducive to scholarship of significant impact; we are pleased to be able to extend our support to such valuable and inspiring work.

First place - £750

Pauline McGonagle, Postdoctoral Fellow/Lecturer, University of Groningen – Finding the Craft in Drafts: a narratology of short fiction in women’s literary archives
This project adopts a creative and archival approach to evaluate the importance of the short story, comparing the drafts and related correspondence of two major diasporic writers of short fiction, Mary Lavin (1912-1996) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013). It is part of a larger postdodoctoral study which compares both writers’ contributions to The New Yorker magazine and looks at how their relationship with it shaped their practice; it examines the connection between the form and its figurations of diasporic and marginal identity where these writers form case studies. The larger project expects to result in a monograph, and, with Fellowship support, republication of unpublished or less-known stories with analytical commentaries.

Second place - £500

Ilaria Cariddi, Research Fellow, University of Florence - Reconstructing an ancient Egyptian temple library: papyri from Tebtynis in Florence and Copenhagen
One of the most original comparative projects that were submitted to our attention, it has close connections to the area of Digital Humanities and seeks to bring together the papyri housed at the Carlsberg Collection in Copenhagen with the Florentine ones. The texts, written in Egyptian scripts (Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, Demotic) and partly in Greek, include religious, narrative, wisdom and scientific literature, as well as medicine, astronomy and astrology. It will also support the Florence-based project “JoinPap,” using AI for fragment placement, looking at texts written on the backs of Greek fiscal rolls which can be scanned in Copenhagen. This visit is expected to yield significant findings for Egyptology, Papyrology, and digital humanities, resulting in at least one scholarly paper, and expanding those in progress.

We are also pleased to shortlist the following projects, and we encourage the candidates to reapply:

• Ethan Hemmati, PhD student, Glasgow University - Adultery and Postwar American Fiction
• Francesco Marchionni, Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant, Durham University - Poetic Thinking in European Romanticism: Plato’s ‘Recollection’, Nietzsche’s ‘Forgetfulness’