BARS/BAVS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellowship 2025-2026 Awardee Announced

We are delighted to announce that Dr Yasmin Akhter is the 2025/26 BARS/BAVS Nineteenth-Century Matters Fellow, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh with mentorship from Dr Gerard McKeever. Yasmin’s research critiques the idea of a ‘global’ nineteenth century by investigating the ways that life-writing represents travel, migration, and cosmopolitanism. Her PhD thesis, from Royal Holloway, looks at the relationship between postcolonial theories of displacements and global cosmopolitanisms in the long nineteenth century. Articles based on this work have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and CUSP. Yasmin’s new project is on colonial infrastructures and women’s life-writing in Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa.