Welcoming the Inaugural Recipients of the CaribOx Visiting Fellowships and Travel Grant
The CaribOx Steering Committee is delighted to announce that Brandon Bethel and Grace Turner will be the programme’s first Visiting Fellows. Nekeisha Spencer is the recipient of our inaugural CaribOx Travel Grant. We look forward to welcoming these three brilliant scholars to the research community at the University of Oxford.
The successful candidates were selected from a pool of impressive applications that ranged diverse disciplines and institutions in the Caribbean. The Visiting Fellows will be affiliated with the University of Oxford for twelve months, starting in January 2025. This will include a ten month-long virtual engagement, and a two month in-person visit to All Souls College, University of Oxford, which will take place between Sunday 27 April to Saturday 21 June 2025 (Trinity Term).
Professor Brandon Bethel (Assistant Professor of Oceanography and Programme Coordinator of Small Island Sustainability, University of the Bahamas). Professor Bethel’s project is titled Wave-Current Interactions in the Caribbean Sea. He will work in collaboration with Professor David Marshall (Department of Physics).
Professor Bethel writes:
‘I am deeply humbled and grateful for the opportunity to engage in joint research at Oxford University that will not only be beneficial for my colleagues and the students of University of The Bahamas, but also for our sister institutions throughout the Caribbean. This is an important first step to deepen collaboration between the UK and small island developing states to study intensifying hurricanes, factors affecting storm surge, ocean connectivity, and the facets of climate change that affect us all.’
Dr Grace Turner (Chief Archaeologist and Research Officer, Antiquities, Monuments & Museum Corporation, Nassau, The Bahamas). Dr Turner will be working on a project titled Settlers who Came to the Bahamas in collaboration with Professor Rick Schulting (School of Archaeology). She writes:
‘I look forward to an exhilarating experience as a Visiting Fellow. The collaboration of this fellowship will enable myself and colleagues at Oxford University to align laboratory research findings with more extensive documentary research on the daily lives of past communities in The Bahamas. The two month stay in Oxford will be particularly special as this would be my first visit to the UK.’
Dr Nekeisha Spencer (Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of the West Indies, Mona) will spend two weeks in Oxford working on her project, Comparative Study of Lunatic Reform: Economic Impact of Diet, Entertainment, and Environmental Factors in English Caribbean and British Asylums in the 19th and 20th Centuries. She will conduct her research in the Bodleian Libraries.
The next application round opens in the spring of 2025. For more information about the CaribOx Visiting Fellowships or Travel Grants, write us at caribox@torch.ox.ac.uk.
