Tolkien Society Bursary Winners – 2019

Will Sherwood – University of Exeter, UK – MA

Will is a Masters by Research student at the University of Exeter. His current research includes the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, British Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism – specifically the poetical works of John Keats. For his MbyRes, Will has married together his two key interests to explore “The Romantic Faëry: Keats, Tolkien and the Perilous Realm”. The thesis works to investigate the previously overlooked connections that tie Tolkien’s life and fictional work to Keats’s own. He hopes to move forward to further explore the relationship between Tolkien and Romanticism at PhD level.

 

Laura Martin-Gomez – Université d’Artois, France – PhD

Laura has been researching Tolkien fandom since 2015 for her PhD in Comparative Literature under the supervision of Anne Besson (Université d’Artois, France). Her interests lie in the development of fandoms through organizations and fanzine publication in the USA, the UK and France. For her Master’s degree in British History (2009-2011), she studied Tolkien’s childhood in Birmingham and Tolkien’s role in the evolution of Oxford syllabuses. She is also the Vice-President of Tolkiendil, a major French Tolkien society in which she has been an active member for more than ten years. Incidentally, she also tries to be an inspiring English teacher for French high school students.

 

Ebrahim Taghavi – Universitat Potsdam, Germany – MA

Ebrahim, born 1986 in Tehran, moved to Potsdam, Germany to pursue an MA in Germanistics since 2015. His teen years fascination about Norse and Germanic mythology, amplified through Tolkien’s work has been his greatest motivation in learning German as a foreign language and studying German literature of middle ages. He has been an avid contributor to Arda.ir, the largest fandom community of Tolkien among Persian speakers, since its early days and also have co-translated and published the Children of Húrin in Iran.

 

Aslı Bülbül Candaş – University of Glasgow, UK – PhD

Aslı is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow and studies philosophical aspects of perfection in Tolkien’s secondary world by working on the concept of art. She received her BA from İstanbul University and MA from İstanbul Aydın University. Her master’s degree dealt with the influence of history and culture in The Lord of the Rings. She has been a member of The Tolkien Society since 2015. Two of her articles were published in the Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 2016 and 2018. She shared her MA Thesis at ERASMUS Teaching Mobility in Poland in 2016.