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.
2026-27 Postdoctoral Fellows
Sarah Clayton
University of York
Profile
I am a researcher and teacher with a particular interest in climate change education, science education and the relationship between scientific knowledge and the school curriculum. I recently completed a PhD at the University of York, funded by the British Educational Research Association (BERA). My doctoral research explored what knowledge young people should learn about climate change, drawing on the perspectives of climate scientists, expert science teachers and youth climate activists. I am particularly interested in how complex scientific knowledge is selected, interpreted and translated for educational settings.
I am now continuing this work through a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of York, investigating how climate change is taught in secondary science in England. The research examines how climate science is adapted for classroom teaching, how this can shape young people’s understanding of climate change and risk, and how educational research can inform curriculum design and classroom discussion of controversial issues. The fellowship also explores the potential of Q-methodology as a way of supporting dialogue, empathy and critical thinking around contested topics. Outside my Doctoral Research I have worked as a Research Associate on a number of research projects including one looking at school climate action through the University of York, funded by Lets Go Zero.
Alongside my research, I contribute to teacher professional development and public engagement around climate and environmental education, with a particular focus on connecting research with classroom practice and policy. My teaching career began in 2012 through the Teach First Leadership Development Programme, and I have since held a number of middle leadership roles in education.
Research interests: climate change education, uncertainty, communicating risk, education for environmental sustainability, curriculum making, researching consensus.
Email: sarah.clayton@york.ac.uk
LinkedIn: profile
Emma Hyde
University of Leeds
Profile
Emma Hyde is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. Her PhD explored young adults’ prolonged co-residence in the parental home in a landscape of growing economic constraint and inequality in the UK. Through a novel two-generation interview approach, Emma’s study examined young adult–parent co-residence and familial housing support across diverse social class, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts.
During her fellowship, Emma will strengthen the reach and impact of her doctoral research through a range of publications and dissemination activities. The outputs will enhance academic and policy understandings of inequality in youth housing opportunities and transitions to adulthood, offering new insights into class (dis)advantage embedded and transmitted within intergenerational norms and practices of support.
Emma has also held a number of varied and interdisciplinary research posts. At the University of Leeds, Emma previously worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the 2026 ESRC IAA-funded report, ‘Making Places Better, Together: The Civic Impact of Community Municipal Investments’, and was a Research Associate on the 2023 British Academy and Wolfson Foundation-funded project, ‘Determinants, Dynamics, and Policy
Implications of Deep Poverty’. Before embarking on her PhD, Emma was also the 2018/19 Ann McPherson Fellow at the Medical Sociology and Health Experiences Research Group, University of Oxford.
Research interests: youth transitions; intergenerational relationships; housing; life course; social inequalities; qualitative research methods.
Email: E.Hyde@leeds.ac.uk
LinkedIn: profile
Cindy Leung
University of York
Profile
Cindy Leung is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the York Law School, University of York. Her WRDTP-funded PhD explored how local actors interpreted and engaged with the right to food in cities. Using a mix of doctrinal and qualitative methods, this research developed and applied a novel conceptual framework for understanding the social construction of the right to food as law-in-action, governance practices, and discourse in cities. During her fellowship, Cindy will work with policymakers and practitioners to translate her research findings into actionable policy recommendations to address food insecurity. Through further publications, she will contribute to an interdisciplinary and socio-legal understanding of the implementation of international human rights law in cities in the absence of relevant national legal and policy frameworks.
Cindy has worked in various research roles at The University of York and The University of Nottingham, researching the implementation of human rights in cities and the intersection of decent work and climate change in the agri-food sector. She also worked as a Policy Associate at The York Policy Engine to support policy research and engagement projects.
Research interests: socio-economic rights; right to food; human rights in cities; sociology of human rights; urban food governance.
Email: cindy.leung@york.ac.uk
LinkedIn: profile
Eve Pennington
University of Leeds
Profile
I am a social and cultural historian of modern Britain with particular interests in gender history, urban history, and oral history. My PhD was based at the University of Manchester and was funded by an ESRC studentship and a Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. My doctoral research explored the relationship between gender and urban development through the lens of three new towns that were established in the north-west of England in the 1960s and 1970s. Through a combined analysis of plans and policy documents alongside new oral history interviews, this research shed light on the gender roles prescribed by the new town planners and the experiences and memories of women who lived and/or worked in the towns during the late twentieth century.
I will build on and develop my doctoral research during my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of History at the University of Leeds. As well as producing academic publications, I plan to engage with national and local government policymakers in order to help them better understand the history of the post-war new towns and draw lessons for the future. I also plan to engage local communities through running public workshops on the histories of the new towns in Skelmersdale and Runcorn, working in collaboration with local heritage groups.
Research interests: gender/women’s history; urban history; oral history; public history; collaborative methodologies.
Email: E.M.Pennington@leeds.ac.uk
Matt Varco
University of Sheffield
Profile
I am a political and environmental geographer with an interest in the relationships between nationalist and ecological thought. My PhD traced the development of the German right from the 1890s to the present through its engagements with ecological ideas and practices. Focusing on a range of political movements, it used archival and ethnographic research to show how the nationalist imagination has repeatedly turned to ideas of land, roots, and the earth to shore up the notion of a Volksgemeinschaft, a national community united by racial and organic bonds.
My ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship is dedicated to publishing from this research, including a historically-focused article exploring the intersections of eugenicist thought with back-to-the-land movements in Wilhelmine Germany, and a pair of articles looking at the contemporary affinities between ecological concepts and movements and the German New Right. These articles are concerned with the imaginaries, practices, and connections that ‘nature’ enables in contemporary authoritarian politics. In other words, what work does ‘nature’ do for the right?
Besides these topics, I have a broad interest in geographical and critical theory, radical democratic politics, environmental history, intellectual history, political theology, political ecology, and the geographies of critical knowledge production under neoliberalism, and welcome conversations around these themes.
Research interests: environmentalism, authoritarianism, German history, populism, fascism, critical theory
Email: m.varco@sheffield.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Fellows from previous years
Ruth Churchill Dower – Sheffield Hallam University
Monika Frątczak – Manchester Metropolitan University
Lauren Harrington – University of York
Lucy Potter – University of York
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
