Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship

Side view of Neil

About the Fellowship:  Neil Davidson was widely recognised as one of the most profoundly original Marxist thinkers of his generation as well as one of the most significant historians of Scotland, of the nation-state more generally and of the uneven processes of capitalist development. Thanks to the generosity of Neil's partner, Cathy Watkins, the Neil Davidson Writing Fellowships have been established in recognition of Neil's enduring work as historian, theorist, teacher and activist. The Fellowships are intended to support early career researchers whose work is informed by, and seeks to extend, progressive and radical traditions of critical investigation broadly conceived, whether through the development of new historical or theoretical scholarship or through the pursuit of original empirical research.

The Fellowship provides six months full-time stipendiary support, as well as an academic mentor, with the intention of allowing the recipient the time and space to publish material deriving from their doctoral thesis and to make the conclusions of their work available to a wider audience, academic and/or non-academic. 

Memories and reflections on Neil's life and work can be found here and Neil's Academia.Edu site remains active, allowing access to many of his existing publications and to new material as it becomes available.  

Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship 2024

Applications are invited for the Neil Davidson Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship, 2024.

The Fellowship is intended to support early career researchers whose work is informed by, and seeks to extend, progressive and radical traditions of critical investigation broadly conceived, whether through the development of new historical or theoretical scholarship or through the pursuit of original empirical research.

The Fellowship provides 6 months full-time stipendiary support, as well as an academic mentor, with the intention of allowing the recipient the time and space to publish material deriving from their doctoral thesis and to make the findings and conclusions of their work available to a wider audience, academic and/or non-academic.

Applications would be particularly welcome from those working on areas in which Neil Davidson made enduring contributions: Marxism and Marxist theory; the concept and histories of bourgeois revolutions; the histories and present forms of class struggle; trade unionism, anti-racism and other liberatory social movements; the causes, consequences and theorisation of uneven and combined development, and/or of neoliberalism; radical political economy; Scottish history and politics; nationalism and ethnicity; cultural and aesthetic analyses in the historical materialist tradition.

Applicants should be within three years of receiving their PhD. Exceptionally, consideration will be given to those whose PhD was awarded outwith this timeframe if significant personal circumstances have affected the candidate’s capacity to work within that period.

 Applications are welcome from those working within any academic discipline but projects should be shown to be relevant to the concerns of the Fellowship as outlined above. Priority will be given to supporting those who do not, currently, hold an open-ended academic position. We would particularly welcome applications from ‘first generation’ entrants to Higher Education.

Details can be found by searching the Glasgow University Vacancies page, using reference 136429 or at jobs.ac.uk: here.

The deadline for applications is February 5th 2024.

Informal inquiries can be made to Professor Andy Smith: Andrew.Smith.2@glasgow.ac.uk.

Neil Davidson Writing Fellows

Past holders: The first two recipients of the Neil Davidson fellowship - Wilson Sherwin and Ashli Mullen - took up their posts at the end of June 2022. 

Wilson Sherwin: Born and raised in New York City, Wilson Sherwin has worked as an electrician, a nanny, a translator, and a documentary film producer. She is currently a sociologist who writes and teaches about social movements, labour, and public policy.  Recent academic publications include: "The Radical Feminist Politics of the Welfare Rights Movement" co-authored with Frances Fox Piven, and "Time for Rabble Rousing: Lessons from the historic fight for reduced working hours" in The Green New Deal and the Future of Work.

During the course of her Fellowship Wilson worked on a project at the intersection of labour studies, social movement scholarship and critical theory. In seeking to uncover the forgotten, radical politics of the US based Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s her work aimsto make central the voices of working class women and people of colour as sophisticated anti-capitalist theorists in their own right, and askes: how do people gain the temerity to demand seemingly impossible things? What curtails people’s sense of possibility, and what expands it?

Ashli Mullen: Ashli Mullen is a sociologist who works on questions of value and racialised capitalism. Her research explores how the links between welfare chauvinism, economic exploitation, and deportability structure the conditions that racialised migrant workers labour under. She is the author of ‘‘Race’, Place and Territorial Stigmatisation: The Construction of Roma Migrants in and through Govanhill, Scotland’ in New Scots: Scotland's immigrant communities since 1945 and ‘From informal to formal economic exploitation’ in Critical Sociology.  

She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral research, Racialised Capitalism at the Margins: an ethnography with Roma migrant workers, which is the project that she focussed on during her time as Writing Fellow. She is also working on a second book, co-authored with Satnam Virdee, which is provisionally titled Marxism and Racialised Capitalism, to be published by Polity Press in 2024. Ashli also works as Creative Director of Romano Lav, an anti-racist Roma migrant organisation based in Govanhill.

Current holders: The current holders of the Neil Davidson writing fellowship are Neil Gray and Panos Theodoropoulos. 

Neil Gray: Neil Gray is an urban researcher, writer and long-term housing activist. His current work primarily focuses on urban political economy, urban crisis, and housing and anti-gentrification movements. Amongst his publications in this area are essays in City, Antipode, Progress in Human Geography and Urban Studies, as well as an edited collection - Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle - with Rowan & Littlefield, 2018. He has written widely for non-academic audiences, co-founded Glasgow Games Monitor 2014 and is active within Living Rent tenants’ union.  

During the course of the Fellowship Neil has been working on a forthcoming monograph entitled Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in 1970s Italy, which is under contract with Common Notions. The study will offer the first sustained account of the spatialities of operaismo and the revolutionary movements which emerged in 1960s and 1970s Italy. Drawing on urban theory and autonomist Marxist theory and practice, it argues that these pioneering struggles in the arena of social reproduction offer vital lessons for the present moment, not least in their prescient recognition of and response to the growing role played by urban political economy and real estate within contemporary capitalism.  

Panos Theodoropoulos: Panos' work is addressed to a key political question: what are the barriers to the organisation of the most precarious and exploited members of society? More specifically, he is interested in understanding the experiences of precarious migrant workers, and he explores how a range of factors - migration status, working conditions, gender and class - intersect in those experiences, as well as the ways in which those involved make sense of, internalise, and navigate the consequences of those experiences. 

During the course of the Fellowship Panos has been working on a forthcoming monograph, entitled The Socialisation of Precarity, which is under contract with Polity Press. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in a series of workplaces dominated by insecure, migrant labour, he aims to foreground the voices and lives of migrant workers, and to draw out practical lessons for movements aimed at mobilising against precarity and exploitation. Panos also publishes widely in non-academic settings, including as a contributor to Bella Caledonia and the Hampton Institute, and is a co-founder of Interregnum.livean autonomous platform dedicated to critical thought and engagement.