In this issue (BAR 21)

In October 2012, the Academy was delighted to announce a new round of British Academy Wolfson Research Professorships; at the moment of writing, a healthy crop of applications is being assessed. These awards are designed primarily for established scholars who already have a significant track record of publication of works of distinction in their field, and who have a major programme of research which would benefit from three years of uninterrupted concentration on what may be the ‘career-defining’ research of their academic lives. The first three articles in this issue are by scholars – David Perrett, Robert Frost, and Roy Foster – who have recently completed their own British Academy Wolfson Research Professorships.

At the other end of the academic ladder, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships constitute the Academy’s flagship early-career development opportunity for scholars who have recently been awarded a PhD and who have not yet obtained a permanent academic post to have three years to work on a major piece of research in a university environment. The next three articles – by Erika Mansnerus, Kirsty McDougall, and Jessie Hohmann – all derive from work undertaken during their British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the first awards made from a British Academy ‘Research Fund’, there is an article to celebrate the continuing importance of the British Academy Small Research Grants scheme.

The British Academy Research Projects programme offers a kitemark of recognition, as well as access to regular small-scale funding, to a portfolio of long-term collaborative, infrastructural projects or research facilities, intended to produce fundamental works of scholarship. This issue contains three articles by scholars working on Academy Research Projects [Jackie Marsh; Bentham Project team; David R. Sorensen].

This article published in British Academy Review, Issue 21 (January 2013).