Fellows Award

Clarissa Ford (Colchester Sixth Form College) is the winner of the 2026 Fellows Award. She was nominated and selected as the winner in recognition of her exceptional and sustained contribution to English Studies, which exemplifies advocacy, access, compassion, and educational integrity:

… One of Clarissa’s most significant contributions is her organisation of a local Heads of English network, which meets three to four times each year and brings together secondary Heads of Department, sixth‑form leaders, university academics and local writers. Clarissa curates and organises all aspects of these events, including securing expert guest speakers across literature, language, creative writing and pedagogy. This network has become a vital professional forum, strengthening collaboration across sectors and raising aspiration and intellectual ambition within English.

This year, the Fellowship Committee also awarded several honourable mentions:

Dr Esme Miskimmin and Dr Katie Knowles (University of Liverpool), for their work with school-children and in particular with a junior drama group based in Prescott, one of the more deprived areas of Merseyside:

… Together they devised the Act Your Age project, part of the 2022 Being Human Festival… Building on this success, and arising from a proposed workshop with Imaginarium, a youth theatre group in Prescott, Esme Miskimmin went on to write the play, Act Your Age. This drew both on Katie Knowles’s research on the lives of professional child actors from the Renaissance to Victorian periods and on Esme Miskimmin’s own expertise in Renaissance Drama and Children’s Literature…. The result is an imaginative and informative work that offers instructors and learners a way to explore and understand the lives, times and working experiences of children, past and present, and thus brings both history and literature to life in a thoroughly engaging, accessible way.

Dr Dinah Roe (Oxford Brookes University), for her exceptional contribution to the field of English Studies:

… Dinah’s work combines traditional academic scholarship of the highest order with excellence in both teaching and impact. Dinah has found an authentic, purposeful and highly engaging way to bridge the gap between the two, often working with communities who have had little previous access to university education. Her project ‘Poetry By Carers’ delivers poetry writing workshops specifically designed for caregivers and has featured on ‘Woman’s Hour’ (BBC Radio 4), BBC Radio Oxford, a Tate Britain event, and in the Carers Oxfordshire magazine. Dinah has also written articles about Christina Rossetti and care for the TLS and Victorian Literature and Culture.

Dr Harvey Wiltshire (Royal Holloway, University of London) for his work within RHUL and beyond:

… Harvey currently holds the position of Lecturer in Inclusive Pedagogies, Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London where he has established himself as a strong advocate of the discipline, particularly through his outreach work. He has made excellent contributions to networks of English practitioners, beyond that of the academy (such as through the Teenage Reading Network; advocacy presence at examination board consultation meetings; contributions to English Association events).

Kathy Halliday (Barnsley College) is the winner of the 2025 Fellows Award. Her Award will be formally presented at our Conference on 14 June 2025.

“I currently teach GCSE English in the Digital & Creative Industries department of Barnsley College. Having retrained to teach in FE in 2021, I joined the college in 2022 on completion of my studies, where I have been able to grow and develop my practice in the delivery of re-sits to 16-18 year olds studying Game Design, Media & Computing courses.

Since starting my career, I’ve prioritised raising the aspirations of learners through memorable experiences, in an attempt to alleviate their fear of English by showing them the value and relevance of the subject.

To do this, I’ve incorporated successful guest speaker visits from industry professionals, providing learners with the opportunity to build connections between English and their chosen vocational pathway. Students have so far benefited immensely from the knowledge and expertise showcased by Red Kite Games and Channel 4, providing insights into the knowledge and skills required for digital careers.

I’m an advocate for bringing the English curriculum to life, driving the real-world application of English beyond the traditional classroom setting. Where possible, I’ve incorporated an array of immersive lessons into my delivery model; whether this be a simple prop to accompany a text, or tasks which require learners to be on their feet, deciphering clues and applying critical thinking, I will always endeavour to provide my learners with the best experiences possible. This has included a letter writing activity on climate change and sustainability, which resulted in students receiving a hand-written response from Sir David Attenborough, thanking them for their enthusiasm and commitment to climate action. I’ve also been able to offer trip opportunities for students, to broaden their contextual knowledge and use of English in the wider world. This has included a recent trip to Whitby Abbey to explore Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, giving many students the opportunity to leave South Yorkshire, some for the very first time.

 

Becoming a GCSE English re-sit teacher has had such an incredibly positive impact on my life and career. Having spent several months on placement, teaching a mix of A-Level and GCSE subjects, I found myself falling in love with re-sits. This has primarily been down to the resilience shown by students, and those genuine ‘eureka!’ moments when it all falls into place. I consider it a privilege to be able to teach such wonderful, witty and inspiring students, and to help them on their journey through education. It’s not always been easy, but I will always advocate for my learners and celebrate all of their achievements.

I feel incredibly grateful to be the recipient of this year’s EA Fellows Award. To receive recognition and acknowledgement from colleagues in this way has been one of the highlights of my career to date.”

 

 

This year we’re also delighted to announce two honourable mentions:

Dr Harvey Wiltshire, Royal Holloway University of London

Dr Wiltshire has provided crucial advice and support to Dr Fisher, CEO of the EA, in developing and implementing the EA Hubs. He has generously shared his experience of schools liaison work at RHUL, enabling the EA to offer the Hubs to schools and universities that have reported tangible benefits from taking part:

“[taking part in the Hub” will inform my discussions with teachers in CPD or in coaching conversations. It will also inform my thinking when resourcing the curriculum in terms of the types of texts to include to broaden the experience for students. Similarly, with some of the ideas discussed for potential learning activities. It will also inform how I think about providing supporting material to develop teachers own subject knowledge in conjunction with the teaching materials”
Teacher participant

“The EA DRET / Birkbeck Hub has been a wonderful experience and we are looking forward to developing the collaboration further as it offers our subject community an invaluable opportunity to build subject knowledge. It has been a privilege to work with the EA to find ways to connect teachers with academics; the input from colleagues at Birbeck has been fascinating and has encouraged our subject community to reflect on the joy of the subject of English and to develop teachers’ own learning for the benefit of both themselves and the students they teach.”
Academic participant

Dr Wiltshire has also worked closely with Dr Fisher and Matt Carnaby, Chair of the SFEC, to evolve the EA Hubs into the new EA Hub, which will offer a unique opportunity for subject leads to work towards a shared understanding of what it means to lead subject English, thinking through how this key role operates and how that work shapes the discipline. 25 subject leads and academics from HEIs have already signed up to participate in the Hub, with interest indicated from a further 55 subject leads across the UK.

Alex McCormick

Alex was nominated for her role in responding to the destruction of the Spellow Library in Liverpool.

This year we’re delighted to recognise the contributions of two outstanding individuals. The Fellows Award was officially given at the Awards Ceremony on 25 May 2023.

Dr Pauline Mackay, Senior Lecturer in Robert Burns Studies & Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow

Pauline is Senior Lecturer in Robert Burns Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies (CRBS) at the University of Glasgow. She is the Chair of Burns Scotland: The National Burns Collections held in partnership (recognised by Museums Galleries Scotland). Pauline is CI and Co-Editor on the major AHRC-funded project, ‘Editing Robert Burns’s Poetry and Correspondence’. She is currently writing a monograph about Burns’s bawdy song and verse, and her most recent book publication is Burns for Every Day of the Year (Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing, 2021). Her research interests extend to Burns’s legacy and cultural commemoration, particularly through material culture, location and digital resources.

Pauline is awarded the Fellows Award 2023 for her use of XR technology to explore and illuminate Robert Burns’s (1759-1796) literary and cultural legacy. She has shared this work with a global audience of >3000 learners through innovative launch events, wide-reaching presentations, and in her teaching at the University of Glasgow.

Burns Beyond Reality, created in collaboration with industry partner Edify, is a cross-disciplinary immersive learning experience designed to elucidate the relationship between literature, location, material culture and the composition of ‘sites of memory’. It uses ‘VR superpowers’ to transport learners ‘back in time’ to experience Alloway Auld Kirk – a famous scene from Burns’s iconic narrative poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ – through an ‘eighteenth-century’ environment developed with close reference to the poem’s early appearance alongside a sketch in Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland (1791). Learners are also able to immerse themselves in a parallel fictionalised environment, recreated with close attention to Burns’s imagery and onomatopoeia, while ‘handling’ carefully curated 3D models of related artefacts and memorabilia.

The experience was initially launched to a worldwide audience using the Edify’s ‘VR-by-proxy’ function to stream online. Following the success of this mode of delivery, Pauline led a multi-sector external collaboration between CRBS, Edify, Scottish Government International Marketing and the Burns Scotland Partnership to launch an original output from ‘The Burns Supper in History & Today’ project in VR. CRBS engaged with the wider, international community of Burns Supper hosts and guests by inviting Burnsians, Scotophiles, and the University’s alumni to share at least one picture of their supper on social media with the hashtag #VirtualBurnsNight. The crowd-sourced images were then used by award-winning artist and Royal Academician David Mach to create a specially commissioned collage, ‘The Flying Haggis’. Through Pauline’s work with Edify the artwork was launched online in 2022, in a bespoke VR gallery, to the global audience who helped make it possible.

Students participating in Pauline’s fully immersive lessons have reported that this method of teaching/learning resulted in a more comprehensive understanding of objects’ literary and historical context/origins, an enhanced knowledge of rare objects, and deeper thought regarding the motivations of literary tourists and relic hunters/collectors.

Pauline now collaborates with colleagues from the University of Glasgow’s recently established ARC-XR project board, together with industry and Culture and Heritage partners, on a Levelling Up Innovation Accelerator project to develop a ‘Museums in the Metaverse’ platform. Her ambition for the coming years is to research and create an XR ‘Land of Burns’, using cutting-edge technology to promote access to Burns’s literature and legacy in the twenty-first century.

Dr Tiago Sousa Garcia, Frontend web developer and digital humanist, University of Newcastle

Tiago is an early modernist and digital humanist, currently working as a research software engineer. His doctoral research focused on the seventeenth-century translation of Os Lusiadas into English by Sir Richard Fanshawe. Between 2017 and 2021, he was the Research Associate for the ATNU project, based at Newcastle University’s School of English, where he also taught literary and digital humanities’ focused modules. In 2020-2021, he convened and ran the Coding for Humanists study group, and from 2022 he has been one of the co-convenors of the Code Community at Newcastle University. Until 2022 he was a co-managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative and an editorial assistant for The Programming Historian. He is one of the creators and the main developer behind the Creativity Engine, a collaboration between the English Association, Newcastle University, Seven Stories and the Alan Turing Institute, to help young writers kickstart their creative writing. He is currently part of the Bee-ing Human team, a Leverhulm-funded interdisciplinary project about a seventeenth-century bee-keeping book, the sounds and music of bees, and the relationship between bees and humans.

Dr Niall Munroe, Director of the Poetry Centre, Oxford Brookes University

“I am delighted and honoured to have won this year’s English Association Fellows Award. I’m full of admiration for the Association’s role as an essential advocate for English Studies, partly because I see my job as Director of the Poetry Centre at Oxford Brookes University as being an advocacy one too – for the necessity of poetry today. I’m grateful for the chance to share with the Association some of the work that we have been doing at Brookes.

Set up by Professor Steven Matthews in 1998, the Centre has always thrived on bringing cutting-edge research and outreach schemes together and to advance the argument that poetry really can make (good) things happen. These initiatives have ranged from a writing programme run by Dr Rachel Buxton pairing refugees or asylum seekers with poets in Oxford, to a more recent project sparked by my own research and that of colleague Dr Jane Potter about the memory of war, when we ran workshops for US and UK military veterans, co-led by one of our current PhD students, poet Susie Campbell.

Poetry should be a deeply democratic and inclusive art form – anyone can read, write, and appreciate a poem – and at the Centre we’re always keen to explore how we can facilitate opportunities for people to, as Muriel Rukeyser wrote, ‘Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry’. My colleagues and I are also passionate about using the Centre’s resources to lift up the voices of established and emerging poets, and we try to do this on local, national, and international levels.

We run an annual international poetry competition with an open category and a category for poets writing in English as an Additional Language. It is always thrilling for my colleague Claire Cox and I to see the 1,500 or so entries we receive each year coming in from all over the world – and there is such a tremendous range of content and style!

Then in 2017, Claire, editor Les Robinson, poet Alan Buckley, and I, established ignitionpress, a poetry pamphlet press with an international outlook which publishes original, arresting poetry from emerging poets. We have since published nineteen pamphlets, four of which have been Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choices, one came second in the Michael Marks Award for Poetry in 2020, and then in 2021 the press won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award, with the judges acclaiming the press’s pamphlets for ‘a unity that belies their rich diversity’.

In addition to sharing the work of new voices, we aim to celebrate the pamphlet as a form. Too often overlooked in favour of book-length collections or treated as lesser works, a finely-wrought, well-edited pamphlet can pack just as much of a punch as a ‘full-length’ collection. Pamphlets are also wonderful objects to study, and several ignitionpress pamphlets have been set texts at various universities – indeed, I run a session on our MA in English Literature all about our pamphlets, choosing a new one to discuss every year.
I look forward to continuing to celebrate poetry’s unique capacity to inspire, comfort, and provoke, and encourage people to join us on the journey. You can learn more about the Centre on our website (poetry.brookes.ac.uk), and follow us on social media: @brookespoetry.”

Dr Jess Cotton, Lecturer in American Literature in the school of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University

Jess receives the Fellows Award for establishing the Loneliness and Technology special interest group, which thinks about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It is designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation. It thinks about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.

Two of the key criteria for the new Fellows Award are organising impactful event and establishing an English-related network. Projects for the Loneliness and Technology network include the six-event seminar series currently running this spring (nearly all of which have been sold out) and a special issue of Issues in English in autumn 2021.
rD Jess Cotton is currently Lecturer in English at Cardiff University. She specializes in twentieth-century literature, with a focus on the history of the emotions, feminism, poetic and narrative form. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Memory in a Cold Climate: American Literature and Postwar Thought which reads a literary archive against the dominant historiography of the Cold War to show how literature can be understood as a kind of memory work. In mapping an alternative canon of Cold War literature, the study opens up new questions about how we think of the postwar period in America. This study ranges from the work of Elizabeth Bishop to Joan Didion and includes essays on the role of the New Yorker and the New York Times as protagonists in this memory work, as well as how memory projects are increasingly targeted at children. Alongside this study, she recently completed an autobiographical study of the poet John Ashbery which is forthcoming with Reaktion Books.

In September she will be a Leverhulme Early Career fellow at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral project, Lonely Subjects: Literature and Psychoanalysis: 1945-1975 is a postwar account of loneliness. It will be the first post-war history of loneliness that brings to light its intensification in this period, how literary, feminist, postcolonial and psychoanalytic archives are best placed to illuminate this history of emotion and its bearing on contemporary life and literature. The study makes an argument about the value of literature and psychoanalysis as forms that do not so much alleviate loneliness as create it, transforming isolated states into more creative ones. In spring 2021 she set up a special interest group with The English Association to provide a platform for these works and to draw together scholars working in this research area. Further interdisciplinary collaborative publications and events are planned around this research strand.

Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in the journals ELH, Journal of American Studies, Modern Fiction Studies and Textual Practice. She is a member of the Wellcome Centre network Pathologies of Solitude. In 2021-2022 she will be a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.