Barbara Stevens Heusel, who founded the Iris Murdoch Society in Manhattan in 1986, passed away peacefully on Friday, May 10, 2024, at her home in Tallahassee, Florida. She had lived there since retiring in 2005 as Professor of English Emerita at Northwest Missouri State University and is survived by her husband, Dennis Moore.
I am very honoured to have been awarded the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars. I currently work as an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Languages, Tongji University, China. I obtained my doctorate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and I spent 2017-18 at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre under the supervision of Dr Miles Leeson. The title of my PhD dissertation is ‘Transcendence and Disunity: A Study of Iris Murdoch’s Void’.
My research is part of the continuity, renewal and improvement of Franco-British studies on Iris Murdoch to date, in a common literary, philosophical, and ethical movement. My thesis intends to propound a new ethics of attention to language as a singular moral project, which Murdoch intuited in her first writings.
Congratulations, Arka Basu, on being the first-ever recipient of a fellowship from the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars!
In this blogpost Arka Basu, the first recipient of the Barbara Stevens Heusel Early-Career Fund, discusses his doctoral work and future research in the UK