Congratulations to Professor Patricia Owens, our Fellow and Tutor in International Relations, who has been awarded a three-year Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.
The Leverhulme Trust’s Major Research Fellowships are awarded to well-established, distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research. Professor Owens’ fellowship will last three years, and her project is titled ‘Margery Perham’s empire: an intellectual biography’.
Professor Patricia Owens
Professor Owens will spend the three years of the Fellowship researching and writing the biography of Dame Margery Perham (1895-1982), the most famous woman public intellectual of her generation that most people today had never heard of.
Perham, who Professor Owens calls ‘the most important white thinker on the British Empire in its final decades’ was a major force behind Britain’s shifting approach to decolonization, profoundly shaping both colonial policy and public opinion. She was Britain’s most listened to voice on the most consequential transformation of world politics in two centuries. She advised Ministers of State, anticolonial activists, and Presidents of newly sovereign states. As Professor Owens writes, ‘Clearly Margery Perham was interested in power – and power was interested in her.’
‘I can’t wait to tell this story in much greater detail, including engaging with newly available archival sources from two unfinished “official” biographies, as well as her extensive personal papers. I’m deeply grateful to the Trust for supporting this work.’
Professor Patricia Owens
The Leverhulme Trust is an independent charity that seeks to fund blue skies research and scholarship which has the potential to generate new ideas and research breakthroughs that benefit society. The Trust has been funding research for almost 100 years, and supports talented individuals in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences to realise their personal vision in research and professional training. They look for work of outstanding merit that is original, important and has significance beyond a single field.