Fellowship awarded for research on: 'Most dangerous man in England'
Professor Paul Pickering, Deputy Director at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts has been awarded a prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship to study at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Professor Pickering will take up the Fellowship early in 2014.
While at the Huntington he will study the papers of British journalist Richard Carlile. For more than two decades after 1815 Carlile was widely regarded by the British establishment as the 'most dangerous man in England' and he was imprisoned several times for selling radical, republican and blasphemous literature. Remarkably, he managed to continue to run his publishing business from his cell.
Most of the Carlile papers in the Huntington were written while he was incarcerated. Professor Pickering will explore Carlile's prison experience as a prelude to a broader study of the life of this largely neglected figure. Mellon Fellowships are highly competitive and Professor Pickering was congratulated by the selection panel on the excellence of his proposal.
Professor Pickering's research and teaching interests are very broad. He has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history as well as biography, public memory and commemoration and the study of reenactment as an historical method.