Junior Research Fellows | Queens' College

Junior Research Fellowships (JRFs) are designed for people who are beginning their research career, having just finished their PhD. Appointments are fixed at three years. The College generally appoints two JRFs a year starting from the 1st of October. Please see the vacancies page for more information about applying.

Current Queens' Junior Research Fellows are:

Name	Primary discipline	Research interests
Dr Elsa Noterman	Geography	My research primarily focuses on collective struggles over access to land and housing. I am interested in how these contestations highlight forms of everyday commoning, and reveal entanglements of settler colonial and racial capitalist logics in the reproduction of U.S. city spaces. My recent work examines how everyday use of "vacant" land and buildings in the city of Philadelphia both reinforces and destabilizes normative notions of urban development and property. This project serves as the basis for several articles as well as a monograph on contested vacant geographies, which is currently under development. I also write about working and organizing within educational spaces, and am involved in several collaborative critical cartography projects.
Eamonn O Keeffe	History	I am the inaugural National Army Museum Junior Research Fellow in the History of the British Army. My research interests include military music, duelling, and honour among army officers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. More broadly, I am interested in the connections between war, society, and geopolitics in the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). A trustee of the Society for Army Historical Research, I have published several peer-reviewed articles and a new edition of the memoirs of Thomas Jackson, a Napoleonic-era soldier of the Coldstream Guards. I have discussed my research widely in the media, including on the BBC’s hit family history show 'Who Do You Think You Are?' During my first year as a junior research fellow at Queens', I will pursue plans to publish my DPhil thesis on military music as a book and submit several articles for publication. I am also organizing events and seminars in Cambridge in coordination with the Centre for Geopolitics. I additionally look forward to working closely with the National Army Museum to promote greater public understanding of their collections.
Dr Hamish Symington		I am a postdoctoral scientist looking at pollination and the relevance of floral traits (what bees like about flowers), trying to find out what might make our crops better at being pollinated. My PhD was in Professor Beverley Glover’s lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, looking at pollination and plant-pollinator interactions and investigating these using the garden strawberry as a model system. This involved characterising the floral variation between cultivars of strawberry and testing bumblebee responses to extremes of that variation to determine their preferences and inform future plant breeding strategies.

Photo

Name

Primary discipline

Research interests

Dr Elsa Noterman

Geography

My research primarily focuses on collective struggles over access to land and housing. I am interested in how these contestations highlight forms of everyday commoning, and reveal entanglements of settler colonial and racial capitalist logics in the reproduction of U.S. city spaces. My recent work examines how everyday use of "vacant" land and buildings in the city of Philadelphia both reinforces and destabilizes normative notions of urban development and property. This project serves as the basis for several articles as well as a monograph on contested vacant geographies, which is currently under development. I also write about working and organizing within educational spaces, and am involved in several collaborative critical cartography projects.

Eamonn O Keeffe

History

I am the inaugural National Army Museum Junior Research Fellow in the History of the British Army. My research interests include military music, duelling, and honour among army officers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. More broadly, I am interested in the connections between war, society, and geopolitics in the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). A trustee of the Society for Army Historical Research, I have published several peer-reviewed articles and a new edition of the memoirs of Thomas Jackson, a Napoleonic-era soldier of the Coldstream Guards. I have discussed my research widely in the media, including on the BBC’s hit family history show 'Who Do You Think You Are?'

During my first year as a junior research fellow at Queens', I will pursue plans to publish my DPhil thesis on military music as a book and submit several articles for publication. I am also organizing events and seminars in Cambridge in coordination with the Centre for Geopolitics. I additionally look forward to working closely with the National Army Museum to promote greater public understanding of their collections.

Dr Hamish Symington

I am a postdoctoral scientist looking at pollination and the relevance of floral traits (what bees like about flowers), trying to find out what might make our crops better at being pollinated. My PhD was in Professor Beverley Glover’s lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, looking at pollination and plant-pollinator interactions and investigating these using the garden strawberry as a model system. This involved characterising the floral variation between cultivars of strawberry and testing bumblebee responses to extremes of that variation to determine their preferences and inform future plant breeding strategies.