The ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme is aimed at those in the immediate postdoctoral stage of their career, and provides an opportunity for Fellows to maximise the outputs and impact of their PhD research.
2025-26 Postdoctoral Fellows
Ruth Churchill Dower
Sheffield Hallam University, ECY
Profile
Ruth Churchill Dower is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, mentored by Professor Abigail Hackett. Her fellowship will focus on developing Artful Sensing Practices with nonlingual children, co-producing movement-based communication methods that attune to children’s bodily expressions and synaesthetic languages without any expectations to speak. This fellowship will consolidate and extend the impact of Ruth’s WRDTP-funded PhD, Bodies of Difference, by asking how ASPs can be scaled and applied in multicultural and multilingual contexts, where nonlingualism can be up to three times as prevalent. Prior to this, Ruth was the founder and director of Earlyarts, an award-winning research and training organisation for early childhood and arts educators. Ruth is passionate about fostering sensory environments and creative pedagogies that facilitate young children’s amazing ideas, especially in neurodivergent situations. Her first book, Creativity and The Arts in Early Childhood, explores the origins, impacts and conditions for creative potential to thrive and how different artforms can support early childhood practices. Since then, Ruth has published a number of papers and book chapters on sense-based arts and movement literacies in early childhood, informed by posthuman, postdevelopmental and materialist concepts. These approaches acknowledge the multispecies relationalities shaping little humans as their worlds emerge and invite new ideas about other ways of knowing and communicating in more-than-human ecologies. Ruth loves fell running, mountain biking and wild swimming and is often to be found exploring her local hills and dales or taking lessons from the mini-beasts on re-wilding her garden.
Research interests: speculative methodologies in movement, research-creation, posthuman diffractive methods, visual sensing methods, postdevelopmental early childhood practices, multimodal sensing practices, ethics of care, critical Black feminist studies and critical neurodivergent studies.
Email: R.ChurchillDower@shu.ac.uk
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ruthchurchilldower.bsky.social
LinkedIn: profile
Monika Frątczak
Manchester Metropolitan University, DCA
Profile
Monika is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow based in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her ESRC-funded doctoral research, entitled “Do emotional responses to data visualizations (datavis) mobilise people to act? A case study of climate change visualisations in two national contexts” offers original insights into audiences’ emotional responses to datavis (graphs, charts, and maps) and how these responses shape participation in two national contexts. Through this work, Monika contributes valuable empirical evidence on the social impacts of datavis while advancing critical debates on the role of emotions in democratic life.
The core activities of Monika’s postdoctoral fellowship focus on disseminating key findings from her PhD research, with an emphasis on how audiences engage with and respond to datavis. Fellowship outputs will highlight the social implications of climate change datavis and contribute to interdisciplinary debates on data visualisation in society, climate change communication and engagement, and the sociology of emotions. Monika’s fellowship aligns with the Digital Technologies, Communication, and Artificial Intelligence pathway.
Previously, Monika held a variety of research positions, including roles on two large-scale projects at the University of Sheffield: Patterns in Practice (AHRC-funded) and Living with Data (Nuffield-funded). She also worked as a Teaching Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies. Monika is an Associate Fellow of the HEA and completed the Aurora Women in Higher Education Leadership Programme.
Research interests: Data visualisation; data; AI and machine learning; emotions; mobilisations and political participation.
Email: M.Fratczak@mmu.ac.uk
LinkedIn: profile
Lauren Harrington
University of York, SCJ
Profile
Dr Lauren Harrington is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. Her research is centred around the production of transcripts within the criminal justice system, exploring how they are currently produced and how these methods can be improved to assure the quality of evidential transcripts that are presented in courts. In particular, her research explores the use of AI-based transcription systems within the forensic domain and ensuring the safe, fair and transparent implementation of this technology. Lauren’s research aligns with the Security, Conflict and Justice pathway, and she is actively engaging with government and police stakeholders and policymakers across law enforcement regarding the use of speech technologies for the transcription of police interview recordings.
Most recently, Lauren has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York on the ESRC-funded “Person-specific Automatic Speaker Recognition” project, testing automatic speaker recognition performance on large-scale uncontrolled data and small-scale highly controlled data, and developing a validation of the human auditory-acoustic method of forensic speaker comparison.
In 2024, Lauren completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of York. Her doctoral research investigated the production of evidential transcripts by forensic speech and audio experts, providing the first comprehensive documentation of international expert transcription practices, and explored the effects of variables such as background noise and regional accent on the performance of both human transcribers and automatic transcription systems. Her thesis was titled “Towards improving transcripts of audio recordings in the criminal justice system” and was supervised by Dr Vincent Hughes and Dr Richard Rhodes. During this fellowship, she will continue her research on the production of evidential transcripts, publishing peer-reviewed articles to reach diverse academic and professional audiences, and fostering collaboration between academia and industry through the creation of an international network dedicated to forensic transcription.
Research interests: linguistics, forensic speech science, speech technologies, criminal justice system
Email: lauren.harrington@york.ac.uk
Website: lauren-harrington.com
Lucy Potter
University of York, SCJ
Profile
Dr Lucy Potter is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of York. Her research expertise encompasses studies of forced migration as well as the field of non-religion.
She completed her PhD at the University of Sheffield with a thesis titled, ‘Blasphemy and Apostasy in the UK Asylum System: Policy and Practice in Asylum Cases Submitted Under Grounds of Non-Religiosity’. This research qualitatively explored apostate refugees – individuals who face fear of persecution for leaving their religion – and their asylum claims in the UK. Her PhD was supervised by Dr Lucy Mayblin and Dr Hannah Lewis, and she received funding from the University of Sheffield’s Collaborative PhD fund. Her research findings provide insight into how the asylum bureaucracy (in the UK and beyond) shapes apostate identities and how colonial-era perspectives continue to influence the perception and assessment of non-religiosity. She also holds a BA in philosophy and an MA in sociology (both from the University of Sheffield).
She continues to focus on this topic in her postdoctoral work, exploring themes such as human and refugee rights, non-religious identities, (de)coloniality and lived religion. The Fellowship will consolidate her PhD research through publications and dissemination, to produce one of the first sociological examinations of apostate asylum cases in the UK. The planned articles will contribute to sociological understandings of asylum, migration, and non-religion by challenging dominant narratives that define refugees primarily through religious belonging.
Email: Lucy.potter@york.ac.uk
Bluesky: lucypotter.bsky.social
Institutional website: profile
Postdoctoral Fellows from previous years
Jessica Fagin – University of Sheffield
Michael Livesey – University of Sheffield
Yu-Tung Wu – University of Sheffield
Megan Wright – University of York
Lee Pretlove – University of Sheffield
Selamawit Robi – University of Sheffield
Joseph Ward – University of Sheffield
Simona Manni – University of York
Claire Crawford – University of York
Kelly Lloyd – University of Leeds
Alex Louise Pearl – University of Leeds
- Edward Brookes – University of Hull
- Lucy Eddy – University of Bradford
- Nirali Joshi – University of Sheffield
- Tamsin Mitchell – University of Sheffield
- Cara Molyneux – University of Leeds
- Natalie Richardson – University of York
- Lindsey Collins – University of Bradford
- Adam Ferhani – University of Sheffield
- Natalie James – University of Leeds
- Sarah Knight – University of York
- Andrea Peinhopf – University of York
- Euan Raffle – University of Leeds
- Jamie Redman – University of Sheffield
- Leon Felipe Tellez Contreras – University of Sheffield
- Harriet Thew – University of Leeds
- Nicola Antaki – University of Sheffield
- Amy Atkinson – University of Leeds
- Marketa Dolezalova – University of Leeds
- Gill Francis – University of York
- Charlotte Kitchen – University of York
- Emma Long – University of York
- Laura Towers – University of Sheffield
- Lauren White – University of Sheffield
- Oznur Yardimci – University of York
- Choo Yoon Yi – University of Sheffield
- Dr Madeleine Power – University of York
- Dr Eleanor Bland – University of Leeds
- Dr Chloe McRae Gilgan – University of York
- Dr Ian Shannon – University of Leeds
- Dr Emma James – University of York
- Dr Eric Hoddy – University of Sheffield
- Dr Sarah Joyce – University of Leeds
- Dr Charlotte Hoole – University of Sheffield
- Dr Ellie Gore – University of Sheffield
- Dr Jim Kaufman – University of Sheffield
- Dr Sonja Erikainen – University of Leeds
- Dr Emilee Rauschenberger – Manchester Metropolitan University
- Dr Jingzhi Chen – University of York
- Dr Rosie Campbell OBE – University of York
