Member Bios: Research fellows
Research fellows
Dr Simon Buck will be looking at the links between the University and African enslavement
Dr Simon Buck is an historian and medical humanities scholar with interests in the US South, histories of medicine and music, and the impacts of slavery-derived wealth on British charities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Dr Buck is an Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Research Fellow investigating the UoE’s historical links to slavery. He will be documenting the UoE’s vast and varied connections to African enslavement in Britain’s colonies. He is particularly interested in investigating how different schools within UoE – from medicine to music – were entangled in the Atlantic slavery economy. He is looking forward to working with other Fellows and community organisers towards radically altering how we view the UoE’s own history, and confront the legacies of British slavery and colonialism today, particularly educational and health inequalities.
As well as this current role, Buck is currently employed as a researcher at Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA), based at the UoE’s Centre for Research Collections, on a collaborative project with NHS Lothian and NHS Lothian Charity on the origins of hospital philanthropy in Edinburgh, looking primarily at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’s historical connections to slavery-associated wealth. This project builds on his recent work at the University of Northumbria on possible ties between slavery, colonialism, and educational philanthropy in the North East of England in the eighteenth century.’
Dr Yarong Xie will be investigating contemporary legacies of institutional racism
Yarong Xie is a discursive psychologist and conversation analyst, with a broad interest in social interaction at the point of its production (i.e., what is going on right here and right now). Yarong specialises in examining naturally occurring interactions (those that would take place had the researcher not been born). Her PhD (2018-2022, University of Edinburgh) investigates how people report their or their family’s experiences of racism in broadcast interviews and online forums. Her recent work (in collaboration with sociologist, human geographer, and social psychologist) has (re)examined misrecognition, specifically, how it is described and worked up as racist.
Yarong currently works as a research fellow in the project that investigates the University of Edinburgh’s historical links to African enslavement and colonialism and their racial legacies. She will be examining university students’ and staff members’ attitudes and feelings toward Black and Minority ethnic (BAME) community and people of colour, and understanding BAME students’ and staff members’ experiences of racism.
Racism has been a problem that concerns Yarong ever since she came to the UK to pursue higher education in 2011. This fellowship and becoming involved in the Research Engagement Working Group offer Yarong further opportunities to learn about racism in the context of higher education, as well as working with scholars and practitioners of diverse fields in finding solutions to help people whose lives are affected by racial inequality on daily basis.
Dr Ian Stewart will be looking at the links between the University and colonialism
