The British Academy has announced the grantees of its 2022 Newton International Fellowships (NIF), the UK’s most prestigious annual postdoc fellowship for international early career researchers. The NIF-scheme is run jointly by The British Academy and The Royal Society, for social sciences and humanities (SSH) and natural sciences respectively. The coveted Newton Fellowships support the most promising young researchers to work with full funding for two years in the UK. For British Academy grantees the 2022 call will collectively fund over £1.3 million of research in SSH. Among twelve winners from across the world, there is one Belgian: historian and scholar in Syro-Armenian studies Dr. Andy Hilkens (Ghent University, Department of History). The Royal Society did not yet formally announce its winners in natural sciences.

Dr. Hilkens (PhD 2014) is a specialist of late ancient and medieval Eastern Christian historiography in Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Armenian, in particular from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A polyglot of ancient languages and trained in historical, linguistic and literary historical methodologies, he is interested in how knowledge was transmitted in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and beyond, and especially in transmission through translation. Andy has published widely on the subject, his full bibliography can be found on the Ghent University academic platform. He is currently a senior postdoc funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

Dr. Hilkens will spend his two-year Newton International Fellowship (2022-2024) at the University of Oxford, working on a project entitled ‘Community, communication, cooperation and conflict: John bar Andreas (d. 1155/56) and Syro-Armenian polemics in the 11th and 12th centuries’.