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.
Professor Kathleen Riach and Dr Tanya Wilson (Adam Smith Business School) and Dr James Rann (School of Modern Languages & Culture) have been named as the recipients of prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships.
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.
Professor Riach will use her Research Fellowship to examine whether organizational equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) can be reimagined and practiced through generative subterfuge - stealth tactics driven by political necessity - to sustain equality at work amid rising populism and ideological backlash.
As ED&I faces diminishing resources and existential questions of relevance, it develops theoretical and empirical insights through bringing together sociological, linguistic, and organizational insights with original interview data with practitioners and organizational stakeholders.
The project will consider how covert strategies and new structural arrangements might preserve, adapt or advance ED&I’s aims, exploring the ways subtle, indirect, or obscured practices can sustain equality agendas in challenging contexts where open advocacy risks marginalization or resistance.
Professor Riach said: "I’m delighted to receive this Fellowship to explore how current practices and future ambitions are shaping diversity, equality, and inclusion in the workplace. The Leverhulme Trust has a long and distinguished history of giving academics the freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research, enabling new ways of thinking about contemporary challenges. I look forward to contributing both to this legacy and to University of Glasgow’s strong reputation in inequalities research."
Dr Tanya Wilson’s Research Fellowship will support an 18-month research project exploring whether minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol in Scotland and Wales has reduced domestic abuse.
By analysing large national surveys, the project will look at whether making cheap, strong alcohol less affordable has had wider social benefits, and whether these effects differ across groups. The findings will help inform future policies aimed at improving public health and tackling domestic abuse.
Dr Wilson said: "I’m delighted to have been awarded the Leverhulme Research Fellowship. It provides a valuable opportunity to focus on a project that addresses an important social issue, and I’m looking forward to developing the research further over the coming months.”
Dr James 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