Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowships for Valerie Worth and Craig Clunas

Trinity Tutor for Graduates, Valerie Worth, and Trinity Honorary Fellow, Craig Clunas, have both been awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowships to pursue research on women & translation and on the Ming imperial Family respectively.

Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowships are awarded to senior researchers who have retired or partially retired from an academic post to complete a research project and prepare the results for publication. Professor Worth's award will run for two years after she retires from her current role as Tutor for Graduates in October 2024. The award will support her work on a monograph on Women and Translation in Early Modern France, contracted by IMEMS Press, Durham University, and to be published by Boydell and Brewer.

Professor Worth’s project will offer the first full-scale analysis of women writing as translators, and also commissioning, printing, selling and reading translations into French, between 1500-1640. Translations from Latin and Greek into vernaculars, and between vernaculars were crucial to exchanges of knowledge and literatures in the European Renaissance, and especially numerous in early modern France. Her book will interrogate the historical characterisation of translation work as the secondary and ‘feminine’ offspring of ‘masculine’ primary texts. 

Professor Worth says of the award: ‘This award will support my research in British and European libraries, and also facilitate the practicalities of publishing a monograph, from sourcing image rights to employing a professional Indexer. It is wonderful boost to my project at just the point when I shall be able to devote my energies fully to working on the strong links between women and translation!’

Valerie Worth is Professor of French in Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, as well as Fellow and Tutor for Graduates at Trinity. Her research focus on humanist translation produced the foundational monograph The Practice of Translation in Renaissance France, the example of Etienne Dolet. She has studied previously neglected women translators (including co-editing a two-volume edition, of Marie de Gournay, who first translated the Latin and Greek quotations in Montaigne’s Essais), and examined the impact of translation on the circulation of obstetrical medical knowledge. She also contributed to the French compendium, Histoire des traductions en langue française: XVe et XVIe siècles.

Craig Clunas is Honorary Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Art History in Oxford's History of Art Department, part of the History Faculty. His research is focused on the art of the Ming period (1368-1644), and since retiring from the Oxford chair of art history in 2018 he has continued to research and write on the art of China. His Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship will fund an assistant to source the images, and pay for permissions, for a next book on the Ming imperial family, currently called Sons of Heaven: Family and Dynasty in Ming China, 1368-1644, to be published by Reaktion Books. It will be the first narrative account of the full range of women and men who together formed the extended ruling family in one of China’s most significant periods of history.

Professor Clunas says about the award, ‘Central to the book is the argument that images of the imperial family created in Ming dynasty China are essential to understanding the period. Unlike the record preserved in texts, which were often rewritten in successive reigns, the pictures produced at court in an emperor’s reign give a contemporary insight into the aims of the people who made and commissioned them. This award, for which I’m enormously grateful, makes possible the inclusion in the book of extensive visual images, many from museums in China which are otherwise hard to obtain.’