Awardee of Inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship

Ruth Ramsden Karelse

In December 2016, TORCH together with Merton College, University of Oxford and The Stuart Hall Foundation put out a call for DPhil candidates for the Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship. The studentship is inspired by the life and work of Professor Stuart Hall and The Stuart Hall Foundation seeks to support new generations of creative thinkers to challenge the status quo and provoke original thinking, debate and research, illuminating connections between politics, culture and society.

We are pleased to announce the studentship has been awarded to Ruth Ramsden-Karelse.

Ruth is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford who has a BA in English and Related Literature and an MA in Culture and Thought After 1945, both from The University of York. She is originally from South Africa and is primarily interested in drag performances as sites at which gender, sexuality, race and class intersect in their full contextual complexity.

The inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship, in association with Merton College, TORCH and the Stuart Hall Foundation, will support Ruth's DPhil project on drag performance in Cape Coloured communities since 1950. By considering the role drag plays in the construction of borders and in the transgression necessary to their constitution, Ruth's research aims to contribute to theories of the intersections of sexuality and gender with nationalisms.