Grant winners – 20 October 2016

Economic and Social Research Council

Research grants

• Award winner: Gill Main
• Institution: University of Leeds
• Value: £155,298

Fair shares and families: children’s perceptions of material resource distributions and decision-making within families

• Award winner: Kristen Hopewell
• Institution: University of Edinburgh
• Value: £147,977

Global power shifts and the changing dynamics of export finance

• Award winner: Andrew Jones
• Institution: University of Liverpool
• Value: £134,827

Taking back control: fractioning the homunculus to improve our understanding of the role of “inhibitory control” in heavy drinking

National Institute for Health Research

Health Services and Delivery Research programme

• Award winner: Barbara Hanratty
• Institution: Newcastle University
• Value: £230,566

Innovation to enhance health in care homes: rapid evidence synthesis

• Award winner: Bruce Guthrie
• Institution: University of Dundee
• Value: £689,784

Accounting for multimorbidity, competing risk and direct treatment disutility in risk prediction tools and model-based cost-effectiveness analysis for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease and osteoporotic fracture

• Award winner: Ruth McDonald
• Institution: University of Manchester
• Value: £287,807

Learning about and learning from GP federations in the English NHS: a qualitative investigation

Arts and Humanities Research Council

Research grants

• Award winner: Juliane Furst
• Institution: University of Bristol
• Value: £80,114

Showcasing socialist flower power: the world of Soviet hippies

• Award winner: Robin Coningham
• Institution: Durham University
• Value: £74,716

Can we rebuild the Kasthamandap? Promoting post-disaster rescue excavations, salvage and subsurface heritage protection protocols in Kathmandu

• Award winner: Steven Hooper
• Institution: University of East Anglia
• Value: £77,176

Fiji’s artistic heritage: impact and engagement in Fiji

In detail

Award winner: Sara Lyons
Institution: University of Kent
Value: £194,863

This project will explore how UK and US novelists understood, represented and problematised the concept of human intelligence between 1880 and 1920. This period saw intense discussions about the mechanisms of biological heredity and also the beginning of mass compulsory education. These developments inspired campaigns to establish the innate and measurable nature of mental ability. Intelligence testing and the concept of IQ gained significant support, encouraging a tendency to conceptualise intelligence in statistical terms, as a phenomenon distributed predictably around a norm in a population. The study will compare how the Bildungsroman form – novels that deal with a protagonist’s personal development and education – was used to consider the implications of the drive to render intelligence objectively knowable: what it meant, how it felt to be ranked as of high or low intelligence. The project will also consider the extent to which novelists endorsed the IQ model and, perhaps, explored alternatives. Other aspects to be looked at include how shifting ideas about the nature of mental ability affected literary criticism and the IQ concept’s impact on modern ideas of talent, creativity and aesthetic value.