Since most of these baby machines – both then and now – didn't really work, I'm interested in the ways in the ways that technological fiction and fantasy are as historically significant as the machines themselves, and in contributing to the ongoing debate about the place of automation in the way we care for children.
Dr Adelene Buckland, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature
07 July 2026
Arts & Humanities academics awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowships
Three academics from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities have received Leverhulme Research Fellowships for 2026.
Dr Adelene Buckland, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, will finish writing her book Baby Machines: Or, How to Hold Your Infant in the Industrial Age. Her research is the first history of self-rocking cradles, ‘artificial mothers’, mechanical maids, and steam- and electric-powered incubators designed to care for babies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Through this history, Dr Buckland explores how fantasies, dreams and fears from 200 years ago continue to shape technological debate – and shows that automated childcare is nothing new or futuristic.
Dr Sara Marzagora, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, will develop the concept of genre pedagogy – the deliberate labour authors undertake to make new textual genres legible and persuasive. With focus on early twentieth-century Ethiopia – whose independence was recognised but precarious – Dr Marzagora’s research shows how Ethiopian authors used meta-textual apparatuses to explain the function of new genres and to persuade audiences of their importance for the nation’s sovereignty.
Drawing on a neglected corpus of Amharic sources, the project intervenes in world literature and global intellectual history by theorising a new materialist model of genre formation grounded in pedagogical labour and historically situated responses to global inequality.
Questions often treated as purely literary, such as how textual genres arise and how they gain authority, cannot be separated from the historically specific organisation of social life. Ethiopian authors theorised textual genres as ways of organising both knowledge and material relations. The project reconstructs how the new forms of textuality they introduced were a response to geopolitical precarity, not merely aesthetic innovations.
Dr Sara Marzagora, Reader in Comparative Literature
Dr Erika Balsom, Reader in Film and Media Studies in the Department of Film Studies, will pursue a project that proposes to reassess the historical role of observation in experimental documentary – a matter urgent to consider at a time when the computer has usurped the lens as a means of image generation.
In particular, she will be focusing on the film A.A.A. Offresi (1981), for which a feminist collective in Rome used hidden camera to observe a sex worker with her clients, without the knowledge of the men involved. After a censorship scandal and criminal trial against the filmmakers, this landmark work was widely considered to be lost. However, in the course of her research, Balsom unearthed a bootleg copy that will now form the basis of her study.
Feminist film historiography means changing not just what we write about, but how we write about it. By looking closely at the disappearance of A.A.A. Offresi, I hope to open a series of questions concerning feminist documentary practice, the sale of sex, observation, realism, and the politics of the gaze.
Dr Erika Balsom, Reader in Film and Media Studies
In this story
Reader in Film and Media Studies
Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature