I am delighted to have been awarded a 2023 British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. The fellowship will support the completion of a monograph entitled Tragedy and Revolución: Refashioning Greek Drama in the Hispanic Caribbean. The book not only addresses the innovative reception of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy in Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, but it also presents a new account of Caribbean cultural and political history structured around theatre. This project expands my extensive and prize-winning research on the complex and rich afterlife of Greek drama in the Americas. It furthermore builds both on archival research undertaken in the region over a period of two years thanks to a 2015 British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant and on my research-led undergraduate module ‘The Repeating Island: Conceptualising the Caribbean’, which I have been offering at King’s since 2018 as an ‘opportunity module’ (open to all students in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities).
Dr Rosa Andújar, Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts
15 May 2023
Dr Rosa Andújar awarded British Academy Fellowship
Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts awarded Mid-Career Fellowship.
Dr Rosa Andújar from the Department of Liberal Arts and Co-Director of the Global Cultures Institute has been chosen as The British Academy awards 43 new Mid-Career Fellowships to support outstanding SHAPE researchers. Professor Katherine Brickell and Dr David Morgan-Owen at King's have also been awarded.
Dr Andújar has received funding for her project, Dionysus in Havana: Refashioning Ancient Greek Theatre in the Hispanic Caribbean.
This project offers a ground-breaking study of the political and cultural afterlife of ancient Greek drama in the Hispanic Caribbean. Across the twentieth century, playwrights in Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico appropriated Greek drama to comment upon their politically volatile contexts: the Cuban Revolution, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship, and struggles for independence in Puerto Rico. Though the three countries are united by language and geography, the adaptations produced in each nation reveal contrasting aims and priorities. Analysing the afterlives of ancient drama in the distinctive climate of the Hispanic Caribbean enables the development of a new framework for the reception of classical literature, by engaging with theoretical accounts of insularity and repetition that are distinctive to Caribbean Studies. The project, which encompasses the writing of a monograph and targeted public engagement activities involving performance, enhances our understanding of the complexities both of classical reception, and of postcolonial Caribbean cultures.
The British Academy has awarded over £6.5 million in Mid-Career Fellowships to 43 mid-career academics whose research will promote public engagement with, and understanding of, the SHAPE disciplines.
The Mid-Career Fellowships, worth a maximum of £160,000 each, will free researchers from normal teaching and administrative commitments, enabling them to pursue a major piece of research that advances understanding in their subject area.
These awards recognise researchers who have achieved distinction as excellent communicators and ‘champions’ in their fields. In previous years, the work undertaken by British Academy Mid-Career Fellows has led to critically-acclaimed documentaries, collaborations with art galleries, and BBC radio shows.
Previously, Dr Christina Scharff, Reader in Gender, Media and Culture was awarded this fellowship in 2020.
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Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts