Professor Mark Cornwall of History has been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to investigate the subject of ‘Treason and Disloyalty in the Late Habsburg Monarchy’.

These fellowships enable well-established and distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to devote themselves to a single research project of outstanding originality and significance for a duration of two to three years.

Only one in six applications is successful, a figure which underlines the highly competitive nature of the awards and Professor Cornwall’s major achievement. This year, only 10% of applicants secured a 3-year Leverhulme Major Research Award.

Professor Cornwall commented:

Treason regularly surfaces in human history, yet historians have rarely analysed its significance in legal or political discourse. This research project will use the crime of treason as a prism through which to reassess the evolution and stability of the Habsburg empire between 1848 and 1918.

With its multilingual case studies in Czech, Croatian, Hungarian and German, the project offers a radically new interpretation of why the empire collapsed, as well as opening up the field of ‘treason’ as an area for scholarly investigation

The research project will begin in September 2017.