Exeter Fellow Dr Imogen Choi awarded Leverhulme International Fellowship

Exeter College’s Queen Sofia Official Fellow Dr Imogen Choi has recently been awarded an International Fellowship by the prestigious Leverhulme Trust. International Fellowships are meant for established researchers to develop new knowledge, skills, and ideas in research centres outside of the UK. Dr Choi has been with Exeter College since 2017 and released the book The Epic Mirror: Poetry, Conflict Ethics and Political Community in Colonial Peru this year. 

With the generous funding of the Leverhulme Trust, Dr Choi will undertake a project entitled ‘Sacred epic and diasporic communities in the early modern Hispanic world’. She will conduct archival research in Madrid over the next academic year, investigating  Sephardic literary networks and particularly the figure of Miguel de Silveira, an important converso poet who worked between Spain and Italy in the seventeenth century. She will hold visiting fellowships at both Universidad Eclesiástica San Dámaso and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Dr Choi said of her award: ‘I am thrilled to have been awarded a LIF to spend the next academic year based in Madrid. Building connections with Spanish researchers and working closely with materials in Spanish collections presents a unique opportunity to take my research in a new direction and benefit from a different academic perspective. Exeter will also play host next year to a conference organised by myself and Sir John Elliott Fellow in Early Modern Spanish Studies Dr Erica Feild-Marchello on the cultures of the Sephardic and Morisco diasporas, so we are looking forward to furthering the conversation on religious minorities here at Oxford as well.’