I was awarded a prestigious three-month Fellowship through the highly-competitive Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Placement Scheme (IPS) to conduct research at the John W. Kluge Center at The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. One of only three ESRC-funded Early Career Researchers (ECR) to receive the award that year, my application received highest grading of 6/6 from the AHRC Assessment Board, and was the first time the award had been made to a PhD Student at The University of Dundee.
Whilst resident as a Kluge Fellow, I undertook a package of research related to my PhD using a range of specialist, often restricted government archives, such as the Library's Historical Newspaper and Current Periodicals collection(s). I additionally undertook primary fieldwork at the WWII Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. I was one of only two new scholars from a cohort of 12 to be featured on the Official Kluge Center Blog, and the only PhD Candidate to appear on an eight-member invited roundtable of senior international scholars discussing the subject(s) of War, Trauma, Memory and Art. This discussion was subsequently developed as an Anthology of Kluge Center Research Fellows, past and present; in a publication entitled 'War, Oppression and Disaster Across Time and Place - Creative Responses to Traumatic Experiences' (The University of Manchester Press, in publication 2017).
I concluded my research at the Library by developing a public lecture, entitled, 'Finding Forensic Jewels at The Library of Congress'.