Dr Tania Shew appointed as Wolfson’s first Isaiah Berlin JRF

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Tania Shew as the inaugural holder of the Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellowship. Dr Shew, a historian of ideas with a particular interest in women’s suffrage, will join Wolfson College at the beginning of the 2023/24 academic year.

Arriving at the College following a Early Career Teaching and Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, at Wolfson Dr Shew will continue her research into the women’s suffrage movement, analysing the struggle for women’s voting rights from the perspectives of intellectual and transnational history. She works to uncover forgotten aspects of suffragettes’ political thought and to trace instances in which British and American suffragettes were informed by global feminist influences. Her doctoral thesis concentrated on suffragettes who theorised how sex strikes or birth strikes could play a role in the struggle for women’s votes. She was recently interviewed about her research into sex strikes and suffrage for Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3. 

“I am absolutely delighted to be appointed as the Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson”, said Dr Shew. “It is a particular honour to hold a fellowship named after Isaiah Berlin. As a historian of ideas especially interested in marginalised thinkers, I am greatly indebted to Berlin’s scholarship. I am grateful to everyone at Wolfson who has made this fellowship possible and am greatly looking forward to becoming an active member of the Wolfson community over the next three years.”

The Isaiah Berlin Junior Research Fellowship is a new, permanently endowed College fellowship created from the amalgamation of small donations received for this purpose over many years. The college is grateful to the many alumni and friends whose generosity has endowed the post.