A three-month fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center will give a PhD researcher access to Freya Stark’s private letters and drafts, held in a Texas archive. The project examines how British women travellers wrote about Kurdistan between 1890 and 1940, focusing on figures like Stark, Gertrude Bell, and Isabella Bird. These women documented Kurdish culture while navigating their own positions as women in a male-dominated society. The key gap is that lesser-known writers such as Stark have received far less scholarly attention than Bell or Bird, even though their unpublished materials offer a different perspective on how the Middle East was portrayed by Western women. Access to Stark’s correspondence and manuscripts—materials not available elsewhere—will allow the researcher to analyse how Stark both reinforced and challenged stereotypes of Kurdish people. This is primarily curiosity-driven fundamental research in the humanities. It will produce a thesis, an academic paper, and a conference presentation. There is no immediate practical application, but deeper understanding of how travel writing shaped Western views of the Middle East can inform contemporary debates about representation, cultural exchange, and the legacy of colonial-era narratives.
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I am applying for a three-month fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center to support my PhD research project, ‘Curious Travellers and Ambivalent Performers: British Women Travellers and Orientalism in Kurdistan (1890-1940).’ My project explores the writings of British women who travelled to Kurdistan during this period, including famous figures like Gertrude Bell and Isabella Bird, as well as lesser-known writers such as Freya Stark and M.E. Hume-Griffith. These courageous women embraced the opportunity to travel to Kurdistan, documenting their experiences and observations of Kurdish people and other ethnic groups. They also navigated their identities as women in a male-dominated society. I am particularly interested in how their travel writings provided them with a platform to express themselves while sometimes reinforcing/challenging stereotypes. The Freya Stark collection at the Harry Ransom Center is crucial for my research. It includes her letters, drafts, and publications from 1893 to 1985. Access to this collection will allow me to study materials not available elsewhere, especially for chapters 3 and 4 of my thesis, where I examine Stark's early travels to Persia and Kurdistan and her unique representations of Kurdish culture. This fellowship will enable me to gain new insights into Freya Stark's portrayals of the Kurds, enrich my understanding of how women travellers depicted the Middle East, and hone my research skills. It will also provide valuable experience in a different academic environment and help me collect information for an academic paper and a conference presentation on her later travels.
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