Three UofG academics awarded Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships
Published: 1 April 2026
Professor Kathleen Riach, Dr Tanya Wilson and Dr James Rann have been named as the recipients of prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships.
Dr James Rann has been named as one of the three UofG recipients of prestigious 2026 Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships.
Dr Rann is a Senior Lecturer at the College of Artd & Humanities' School of Modern Languages & Cultures will be looking at the role of clothes in the cultural history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1941.
The Fellowships, which are supported by the Leverhulme Trust, allow awardees to focus on full-time research for up to a year by covering the costs of a replacement academic to take over their teaching and administrative duties.
Other UofG recipients are Professor Kathleen Riach and Dr Tanya Wilson from the Adam Smith Business School.
Dr Rann’s Fellowship will focus on ‘Red Threads: A Cultural History of the Early Soviet Union Told through Clothes’.
This project uses an overlooked aspect of Soviet culture – the role of clothes in expressing and exploring identities thrown into turmoil by revolutionary change – to offer a fresh account of the cultural history of the Soviet Union, 1917-41.
By focusing on four significant garments - the embroidered shirt, the top hat, the leather jacket, and the veil - and the meanings ascribed to them in literature, film and art, and by analysing material produced in multiple languages from across the USSR, it presents a nuanced, people-centred, and pluralist counterpoint to traditional top-down, Russocentric accounts of the era.
Dr Rann said: "Like all researchers I know, I particularly value the Leverhulme Trust for its commitment to supporting research for its intrinsic intellectual value rather than its immediate application. I am really thrilled, therefore, at the opportunity that this fellowship affords me to push my longstanding research interests in new directions and, eventually, to share it with others in what I believe will be a helpful new way of thinking through the contours and contradictions of the Soviet experience."
Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships enable experienced researchers, who are, or have been, prevented by routine duties from focusing on research, to complete an original piece of research.
The Leverhulme Trust is an independent charity that seeks to fund ambitious blue skies research and scholarship, which has the potential to generate new ideas and research breakthroughs that benefit society. The Trust also aims to support a diverse range of scholars in their educational endeavours. Focusing efforts mainly in the UK, which has a world-class higher education research sector. Since its foundation in 1925, the Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education, funding research projects, fellowships, studentships, bursaries and prizes across all academic disciplines.
Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £120 million a year.
First published: 1 April 2026