Graduate student Adele Curness awarded Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellowship

Date 6 August 2020

In a virtual ceremony on 22 July 2020, the Royal Historical Society announced its Publication, Teaching and Fellowship awards for 2020.

The Royal Historical Society, jointly with the Institute of Historical Research, awarded an RHS Centenary Fellowship to Adele Curness, for research on ‘Imagined Calabria: Narratives of Power and Community in Italo-Greek Hagiography’. The RHS’s Centenary Fellowship, alongside the Marshall Fellowship, is awarded to early career historians, providing funding for one-year Fellowships tenable at the Institute of Historical Research in London.

Adele is studying for a DPhil in Byzantine History at St John’s, where she also completed an MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies in 2017. She previously studied for a BA in History at Brasenose College, Oxford.

She says, ‘my thesis is, at its core, about stories and how they shape communities. It is a study of a corpus of hagiographical texts which were produced in southern Italy between the tenth and twelfth centuries about Greek-speaking holy men who lived in the Byzantine province of Calabria between the ninth and twelfth centuries.’ You can find out more about Adele and her research on the History Faculty website.

Congratulations also to St John’s alumnus Robert Thompson, who was runner-up for the Rees Davies Prize, awarded to the best dissertation submitted as part of a postgraduate Master’s degree. While studying at the University of Southampton, Robert wrote a dissertation entitled ‘”The true physicians here are the padres”: British Christian Army Chaplains and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen’.

You can find out more about all of the awards here