Institute Laureates

The Institute is committed to enriching the cultural life of the region.

The appointment, annually, of Institute Laureates, supports this endeavour, by providing access to new work for our members and visitors, by supporting artists, writers, poets, scientists and historians in the region, and by offering workshops and lectures by the laureates.

Our Laureates for 2024-25 are listed below:

Naush Sabah

Poet-in-Residence

Naush Sabah is a writer, editor, critic, and educator based in the West Midlands. In 2019, she co-founded Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal where she is currently Editor and Publishing Director.

The journal is a quarterly periodical of contemporary poetry and poetry criticism, described by the TLS as ‘intellectually lithe and provocative’ with a ‘dynamic and incisive critical section’.
Naush also co-founded Pallina Press where she is Editor-at-Large and she currently serves as a trustee at Poetry London. Her writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, the TLS, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. A limited-edition double micro-pamphlet box set Heredity/ASTYNOME was published by Broken Sleep Books imprint Legitimate Snack in June 2020. She was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Sky Arts Writers Award.
Her debut pamphlet Litanies was published by Guillemot Press in November 2021 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2022. It has been reviewed in The Guardian as having ‘something of Thomas Hardy’s bittersweet dialogue with the divine,’ and in The Irish Times as, ‘an exciting and auspicious set of poems’. Naush also lectures in creative writing at Birmingham City University.

Andrew Reekes

Writer-in-Residence

Andrew was educated at King’s School Worcester & Exeter College, Oxford, and has spent a lifetime in education, leading History departments at Tonbridge, Cranleigh & Cheltenham College.

He was headteacher of Arnold Lodge School & then became Sub-Warden of Radley College.
He was Chief Examiner for ‘O’ Level History, Oxford & Cambridge Board, an inspector with Independent Schools Inspectorate & for 12 years he led training for senior leaders in HMC & GSA schools.
In retirement Andrew has returned to his first love, History, studying for a research degree under Malcolm Dick at the University of Birmingham, & writing for History West Midlands. He has written four books, including Speeches that Changed Britain and a comparative biography on Joseph Chamberlain and George Cadbury.

Dr James Dawson

Scientist-in-Residence

James obtained his BSc (Hons) in biochemistry from the University of Sussex. He subsequently undertook research at University College London into cancer cell growth, studied medicine at the University of Leicester and has worked throughout the East and West Midlands, and has been a consultant anaesthetist in Nottingham for the last 12 years.

He has written a book on pharmacology and a handbook for junior doctors, now in its 5th edition with Oxford University Press, and various articles in the medical field. James is a life-long amateur astronomer, and now observatory director for the Nottingham Astronomical Society’s observatory.

He is Librarian for the Society for the History of Astronomy, based at The Birmingham and Midland Institute, and has published articles in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association and other astronomy publications. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and of the Royal Astronomical Society. James is currently renovating the Nottingham Astronomical Society’s observatory and spends a lot of time tinkering with amateur electronics, and more recently with amateur spectrophotometry. He is a vore member of Nottingham Astronomical Society’s outreach programme, educating and entertaining members of the Society and interested outside parties, including scouts, cubs, and school children.

Jeffrey Skidmore OBE

Musician-in-Residence

Jeffrey Skidmore’s reputation as one of the UK’s leading choral directors and an ardent advocate of the importance of singing in people’s lives today is rooted in his work with Ex Cathedra, the ensemble he founded over 45 years ago.

Jeffrey’s driving passion has been to refresh and reinvigorate the choral repertoire and to make it accessible to as many people as possible. He and Ex Cathedra have long been known for exciting and innovative but always attractive programming, underpinned by thorough research and preparation.
Jeffrey is a pioneer in the field of research and performance of choral works of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, both in the old and new worlds, and has won wide acclaim for his recordings of French and Latin American Baroque music with Ex Cathedra.

Peter Tinkler

Artist-in-Residence

As far back as I can remember I’ve always wanted to create images. I was educated in Ireland, studied illustration and animation in Wolverhampton, and now live and work in Birmingham, running my own art courses for adults.

My work is traditional based, with an emphasis on technique and capturing mood, or a sense of drama. I value the basic principles of drawing and painting, like building up simple shapes, form, layering tone, and adding mass to achieve a look of weight and volume. Although I have worked as a freelance illustrator, and continue to do so occasionally, my main focus these days is tutoring and my more personal work.
I’m influenced by many avenues of art, including literature, film, and history, but if I was forced to give specific examples, I would say the imagery of Goya, the Vienna Secession, and the principles of the Pre-Raphaelites, hold particular meaning.

Historian-in-Residence

As for our ‘Historian-in-Residence’, the Board of Governors has appointed a panel of Aston University Historians to fulfill this role, as follows:

Professor Stefan Manz

Stefan Manz is Professor of German and Global History at Aston University. Areas of expertise include the First World War, Germany’s global entanglements, and Public History. His last two monographs were entitled Enemies in the Empire.

Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford University Press 2020) and Constructing a German Diaspora. The Greater German Empire (Routledge 2014). Research and impact activities have been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Stefan is currently leading an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘South Africa in World War I: Digital and Virtual Experiences.’ He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a visiting Research Associate at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.
Stefan’s public engagement work has included lectures, exhibitions and theatre plays in many countries, including the UK, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Barbados and South Africa. He is currently producing a Virtual Reality Experience, educational materials and a heritage app together with a digital creative company and KwaZulu Natal Museum in South Africa. He will be happy to work with the BMI on related outputs and events, particular those that attract more diverse and younger audiences.

Dr Volker Prott

Dr Volker Prott joined Aston as a Lecturer in Modern History in 2018. Before this, he was Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne (2015–17) and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen (2013–15).

He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2013.
Volker’s main fields of interest include the history of nationalism and borders in Europe, ethnic violence, and humanitarian politics in the twentieth century. His first monograph, The Politics of Self-determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917-1923, was published with Oxford University Press in 2016.
Currently, Volker is working on a project on Foreign Intervention in the Cold War, which focuses on two case studies: the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s and the Indo-Pakistani conflict in 1947-48 and again in 1971. The project seeks to explore the conflicted rise of transnational politics before the ‘boom’ of foreign interventions since the 1990s.

Dr Ilaria Scaglia

Dr Ilaria Scaglia is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She studied at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice and at the State University of New York at Buffalo where she earned her Ph.D. in History.

She joined Aston as Lecturer in Modern History in May 2018. Before this, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Columbus State University, USA (2013–2018) and a Volkswagen-Mellon post-doctoral research fellow in Germany (Free University Berlin) and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre “History of Emotions” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (2016–17).
Scaglia’s main fields of interest include the history of internationalism and the history of emotions. She has recently published a monograph: The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Her previous publications dealt with the interplay of art and performative politics, nation branding and international cooperation, and the moral economy of internationalism.
She is now working on new project, a transnational history of the emotions of historical research, which focuses on how technology—and the practice of reproducing documents—changed the archival experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dr Brian Sudlow

Dr Brian Sudlow holds an MA (Res) in French Studies (2003) from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in French Studies (2007) from the University of Reading. His PhD was a comparative study of two intellectual traditions (French and English Catholic writers) which grappled with the implications of secularisation and irreligiosity in the Belle Epoque.

His monograph Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 (2011) was published by Manchester University Press.
More recently he has turned his attention towards critical reflection on histories of technology and the cultures that surround it. From this perspective, he has written about French government forecasting in the 1960s, about the implications of screen culture as seen through Paul Virilio’s theory of the ‘desert screen’ and about the techno-criticism embedded in the writings of contemporary French intellectual Fabrice Hadjadj.
As a trained linguist, he has a particular fondness for rhetoric and communication and in 2021 these interests have taken him in the new direction of oral history. In 2021 and 2022, he will be building a database of oral histories of recent digital entrepreneurs, seeking to understand the development of innovation in the context of the contemporary history of the digital revolution.
He is a member of the Society for the History of Technology and a former member of the executive committee of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (2015-17). He currently serves as the chair of the academic board of the Quarterdeck Series at the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham, and as external member of the academic board for the Maryvale Institute in Birmingham.

Dr Joseph Yannielli

Dr Joseph Yannielli is a Lecturer in Modern History at Aston University and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Prior to joining Aston, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and a Lecturer in History at Yale University. He also served as a Perkins Fellow at Princeton University.

Affiliated with the Princeton Humanities Council and the Center for Digital Humanities.
Joseph’s main fields of interest are slavery and abolition, with a special focus on America, West Africa, and the wider world during the nineteenth century. Other areas of interest include political and social movements, missionaries and religion, and transnational histories of the United States. He is also interested in digital scholarship and has developed several public projects, most recently Princeton & Slavery and Connecting Digital Histories of Fugitive Slaves.
Joseph is completing a book about the Mendi Mission and the role of Africa in the American abolition of slavery. Established in the wake of the Amistad revolt, the mission was a transatlantic extension of the Underground Railroad and a key site of action and imagination in the global contest over chattel slavery. He is also developing new digital projects using virtual reality to research, communicate, and teach about the past.
In 2022–23, he will be an Eccles Centre visiting fellow at the British Library.