Dr Nat Cutter awarded 2026 Humanities Travelling Fellowship
Faculty of Arts historian, Dr Nat Cutter, is one of eight early-career researchers awarded a 2026 Humanities Travelling Fellowship by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
The Humanities Travelling Fellowships provide up to $4,000 to support humanities researchers undertake overseas projects that can generate new insights and develop international connections.
Dr Cutter's project will examine the handwritten notes, ownership marks and annotations in Maghreb (Morrocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) related books in Scottish libraries to reconstruct how readers received ideas about the Islamicate world.
“Eighteenth-century readers loved to write in books,” Dr Cutter said.
“By searching out the marks they left – signatures, notes, underlinings, even scribbles and doodles – we can get a sense of how they received the information books contained.
“This fellowship allows me to travel through Scotland – Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, Aberdeen and Perth – to study rare book collections whose readers shaped Scotland's intellectual, economic and imperial history. It will help me understand how their encounters with the Maghreb influenced the way they saw themselves and the wider world.”
President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Professor Stephen Garton, said the Fellowship recipients reflected the strength of Australia's emerging humanities researchers.
“Each recipient exemplifies the kind of rigorous, curious and outward-looking scholarship that keeps Australia connected to the world, while addressing some of our most pressing national issues: from how we understand our own history to how we navigate an increasingly complex future,” Professor Garton said.