English and Related Literature
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Archive of previous projects
German Post-Terrorist Autobiography
Clare Bielby (Centre for Women’s Studies) has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-2024) for her monograph project on the post-terrorist autobiographies of German left-wing militants who were active in the Red Army Faction and Movement 2. June and have, since the 1970s, been publishing accounts of their lives. With a particular focus on issues of gender, as it intersects with race and class, Clare conducts a feminist literary-critical analysis of these texts, mobilising autobiographical theoretical and area studies approaches, as well as sociological and narrative criminological perspectives on violence, identity and meaning-making. Questions the project asks include: What did it mean to be a left-wing militant and to function as part of a terrorist organisation in 1970s West Germany?; What are the attractions of joining a militant organisation and ‘doing’ terrorism in this particular time and place?; What gendered cultural modules/narrative resources do these authors mobilise to render intelligible their use of violence and political and historical agency?; How, if at all, do they distance themselves from constructions of ‘the terrorist’ and the (Nazi) perpetrator?; How do we account for the apparent will to write leftist post-terrorist autobiography and what does the writing of these texts ‘do’ for the post-terrorist author?; Finally, what are the generic features of German post-terrorist autobiography and what, if at all, are its gendered particularities?
Digital Index of Middle English Verse
Linne Mooney, Emerita Professor in the Department, has been awarded an Emeritus Grant by the Leverhulme Trust to pay for travel and subsistence so that she can complete entries relating to Middle English verse in manuscripts in the British Library for the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (www.DIMEV.net) of which she is the principal editor.
The DIMEV (compiled with Daniel Mosser with the help of research assistants Elizabeth Solopova and Deborah Thorpe) records the first and last lines of all English poetry written between 1250 and 1525, giving information about the manuscripts in which each work survives. Since Middle English poetry was written before the advent of print, the manuscript witnesses each differ slightly from one another. Textual scholars of Middle English literature need to know where these manuscript witnesses are now kept so that they can study all of the surviving evidence for each text.
An original Index of Middle English Verse was published in 1940 with a Supplement in 1965, and a revised New Index of Middle English Verse was published in 2005; but the DIMEV, freely accessible at www.DIMEV.net, corrects and enlarges upon all of these and is now the standard reference work in the field.
Professor Mooney told us: ‘I’m very pleased to have been awarded this Emeritus Grant by the Leverhulme Trust. It will be a great help to my editorship of the Digital Index of Middle English Verse.’
With this support from the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Mooney will make monthly three-day trips to London to conduct research in the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room over the next two years to complete the entries for the DIMEV.
Erasmus and the Invention of Literature
Brian Cummings, Anniversary Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature, has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust worth £209,009. The title of the project is “Erasmus and the Invention of Literature”. Before the 1980s, a consensus existed that Renaissance humanism formed the foundation of the modern liberal arts education system. Literary studies were central to the humanities, the argument went, and Erasmus’ idea of litterae humaniores paved the way to modernity. In recent years, scholars of the Renaissance have abandoned this idea, however, narrowing their interest to the technical disciplines of philology, grammar and rhetoric. Erasmus himself, while still a name of considerable power (the EU uses him to promote freedom of academic movement) is little read outside his epochal Praise of Folly. Meanwhile the concept of “literature” has been declared an anachronism or even the creation of imperial and colonial pressures. The principle aim of this new project is to demonstrate how a concept of “literature” is alive and well in Erasmus, indeed that he develops the Latin word litteratura to accommodate it. This rare classical and medieval word is used by him nearly 200 times in order to promote a distinctive and original idea of the “literary”. The literary is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, Erasmus claims, which structures any attempt to create a philosophy of language or of mind. A literary understanding (understood both as a theory of writing and of reading) also affects the art of interpretation in a whole range of disciplines from politics to religion. A surprising Erasmus emerges: one who despite a reputation for incredible learning constantly seeks out the playful, the emotional, or heretical, or what we now call the queer.
The project reconstructs Erasmus’ concept of literature fully for the first time. It is based on a reading of all the various items – dialogues, poems, letters, adages, treatises, satires, commentaries – in the hundred volumes of his Collected Works. This has entailed also an archaeological delve into the Erasmian archive, the plethora of manuscripts that survive strewn across the libraries of most of the countries in Europe. At the same time, the project engages with twentieth and twenty-first century polemics concerning both the idea of liberal education and the principles of humanism. The effects of anti-humanism have led to a misunderstanding of Erasmus, whose radical literary theory is sometimes (incorrectly) reduced to a defence of the western canon; in addition, by attending to the imaginative power of humanist thought, it is possible to make insightful expositions of the significance of literature today. The idea of literature in Erasmus is more diverse, more creative, and more challenging than hitherto thought, and still has the capacity to surprise us today.
Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India
The other project team members are Jayeeta Sharma, Saumya Gupta, Krishnendu Ray, Tarana Khan, and Razak Khan. Forgotten Food seeks to bridge the gap between culinary memory, local heritage, and lost agricultural varieties. Bringing food historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars into dialogue with heritage practitioners, authors, and plant scientists, it addresses challenges linked to local communities and food sustainability in India.Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for this Cultures, Behaviours and Histories of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition (AHRC-GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator is Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield. There, Siobhan works on the project with another Co-I Duncan Cameron from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.
Chambers’ role in this project will be to commission a new anthology of creative writing on South Asian food and foodways to capture memories and ideas relating to such themes as family, domesticity, feasting, and lack of food.
Street Life: Using York's Historic High Streets as Heritage Catalysts for Community Renewal
In collaboration with Professor Rachel Cowgill (Music) and Dr Kate Giles (Archaeology), Professor Helen Smith is leading a major project, funded by the Department for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities.
One of the UK’s most ancient cities, York has an extraordinary heritage and resilient communities. But key parts of York’s civic history are being forgotten, and its city centre faces a crisis rooted in changing technology, community needs and consumer trends, made more urgent by Covid-19.
‘Street Life: Using York's Historic High Streets as Heritage Catalysts for Community Renewal’ is an ambitious partnership bringing together multiple stakeholders. It will create innovative, immersive experiences to revitalise Coney Street, combining digital innovation and physical engagement. Pop-up activities and virtual experiences will connect civic spaces to the community, transform the streetscape and its sounds, repurpose empty units, and forge links between retail premises and creative, heritage-led regeneration.
Helen's strand of the project celebrates and seeks to revitalise York’s long history of print, which reaches from the sixteenth century to the present day. The research team will work together to recover York’s printing heritage and engage a wider community in exploring York’s printing history, with an emphasis on oral histories and heritage. Together we will create a temporary printing museum and gallery, planned to run from late March / early April until the end of June 2022, on Coney Street in the historic heart of York. This space will include a printing press and associated equipment, alongside a gallery of contemporary printing and two exhibitions relating to fine press printing. The team will offer workshops to engage members of marginalised and underrepresented communities and produce new creative work.
Decolonial Feminisms in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Natasha Tanna holds a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project ‘Decolonial Feminisms in Contemporary Latin American Literature’. The project asks how literature connects with social movements and activism in areas suffering extreme structural and economic inequalities. Natasha’s research considers how individual and collaborative literary creation may be a tool for collective healing from experiences of violence, such as femicide, disappearance, and ecological destruction. She considers how the community-based nature of decolonial feminist activism (vs the emphasis on the individual in liberal feminisms) shapes creative forms in the region through collaborative processes, including co-authorship, plagiarism, translation, intertextuality, and anonymity. She also asks what is at stake in the often utopian celebration of the dissolution of a single individual author in contexts of literal disappearance. In the project texts created in the context of grassroots organising and writing workshops are analysed alongside works by more established writers such as Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres, and Dominican Rita Indiana. The project also explores the limits of conventional scholarly form, drawing on the work of writers such as Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa, who blurs distinctions between poetic, theoretical, and historical writing in her analysis of the US-Mexico border.
Storying Relationships
Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for Storying Relationships, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project. Storying Relationships examines how young men and women in British Pakistani Muslim communities understand and explore relationships in terms of both attitudes and practices, through the stories they consume and produce. The Principal Investigator is Professor Richard Phillips of the University of Sheffield, from where the project is run. The project team also comprises Dr Nafhesa Ali, Professor Peter Hopkins, and Dr Raksha Pande. The project asks how young British Muslims (aged 16-30), particularly those with Pakistani heritage, talk and think about their personal relationships. It additionally explores the role of stories and storytelling in this, focusing on relationship stories that are told in everyday life (with friends, for example) and also media such as fiction, films, and radio. At the moment the project team is conducting individual interviews with young people and organisations across Tyne and Wear, Glasgow, and Yorkshire. They will be starting creative workshops in Stage 2 (commencing May 2017) where young people involved in the project will work alongside published authors to create and share stories.
Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers
Sophie Coulombeau is a Co-Investigator for this three-year project, funded by a Standard Research Grant from the AHRC. The project is based at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester, and the Principal Investigator is Hannah Barker of the University of Manchester. The other project team members are David Denison, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Cassandra Ulph, Tino Oudesluijs and Christine Wallis.
Coulombeau's role in this project is to direct a strand of research addressing evidence of reading practices within Hamilton's archive and social networks. She is also responsible, more generally, for the project's Impact agenda - see, for example, recent press coverage in the Times and the Telegraph. Subject to availability, she co-supervises internships and volunteer placements that give interested students first-hand experience of digitally transcribing eighteenth-century manuscripts.
Radio Literature and the Radiophonic Imagination in Europe, 1924-1939
Emilie Morin is PI for this Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which will span from September 2021 to May 2022. The project revolves around the completion of Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations, which Morin is editing for Edinburgh University Press. Radio has always crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries; in Europe especially, radio was thoroughly European from the beginning, and its public was defined by wave frequencies rather than national borders. Yet this transnational history is largely uncharted, as radio studies has mostly focused on national contexts and monolingual perspectives. The aim of this project is to shed a different light on radio’s transnational and multilingual history, by bringing together neglected materials (primarily from early British, Italian, French and German radio cultures) that take readers beyond the limits of their own culture and language. The project offers a new account of radio’s transnational history and draws attention to the role played by those who have been called, in another context, the ‘nobodies of radio art’: writers, journalists, sound engineers, producers, actors and radio enthusiasts from various walks of life who were seized by a passion for radio during the interwar period. The project considers how these men and women thought about the world’s new interconnectedness, how they related their attempts to explore radio’s artistic potential, and how they promoted radio as a culturally revolutionary medium.
Centre for Medieval Literature
Our research is interdisciplinary and multilingual, combining literary study with history, history of art, history of science, and other disciplines.The Centre for Medieval Literature (CML) works to establish theoretical models for the study of medieval literature on a European scale, set within wider Eurasian and Mediterranean contexts, from c. 500 CE to c. 1500 CE.
CML is a Centre of Excellence founded in 2012 and funded for ten years by the Danish National Research Foundation. It is based at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and the University of York. At York, it is directed by Prof Elizabeth Tyler working with Dr George Younge.
Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Network of Improvement, 1780-1840
The early period of the British ‘industrial revolution’ usually figures in literary studies, if at all, as the negative pole against which the creativity of romanticism is defined. Provincial cities such as Manchester are rarely mentioned in the literary-geography of the romantic-period, if anything they are just a black hole of dark satanic mills. But the physician-poet John Aikin’s Description of the country for Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester (1795) saw in the region the ‘beating heart’ of a new kind of body politic. For Aikin and his peers, many of the literary physicians, ‘genius’ was an attribute equally applicable to the inventions of engineers and poets: the product of environmental conditions in society and in the body. This project looks at the region in this period as a ‘transpennine enlightenment,’ a space where the appetite for improvement aimed at both literary and scientific innovation. This broadly materialist idea of enlightenment, invested in reforming character through environment, produced a complex dialectic in a new industrial society where the contradictions of liberalism supported as their twin progeny a machine society but also critics like the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.Jon Mee’s project, ‘Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Networks of Improvement, 1780-1840’, is funded by a British Academy-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from January 2020 to January 2021.
Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment in Pakistan and India through Life Writing
The project team also comprises Nukhbah Langah and Rukhsana Zia (both Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan), and Radha Kapuria (University of Sheffield). The non-academic partners come from the following Non-Governmental Organizations in Pakistan and India: Bunyad Foundation, Abdul Aleem Khan Foundation, Pakistan’s Children, and Mahashakti Seva Kendra. Malala Yousafzai has become a global icon for her fearless attempts to defend every child’s right to education.Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for this Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator is Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield, from where the project is run.
Her autobiography, I Am Malala (2014) – detailing the life story of ‘the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban’ – inspired readers around the world. Taking a cue from Yousafzai’s work, the Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment project uses historical research linked to women’s life writing to improve female literacy and empowerment in Pakistan and India.
Cultures of Care
The project explores the cultural history of care in the UK since 1965, through an analysis of archival materials, novels, poetry, film, theatre, media and policy documents. 'Cultures of Care' is developing an interdisciplinary literary-historical approach to care, drawing on feminist care ethics, disability studies, medical humanities scholarship, and theories of democratic citizenship. The project focuses particularly on so-called informal, non-institutional care (care in the home), and changing structures and concepts of care in contemporary society. Dr Alice Hall's project, 'Changing Cultures of Care', is funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences/Wellcome Trust, via the Springboard - Health of the Public 2040 scheme.
Dr Hannah Tweed is the postdoctoral research associate for the project.
Radio Pioneers and Forgotten Voices
It focuses on the work of professional and occasional writers, journalists, sound engineers, producers, actors and radio enthusiasts who reflected on radio’s cultural and aesthetic potential, from the beginnings of public radio until the eve of the Second World War. Public-facing activities include two workshops and a conference, which will be publicised on the departmental events list.The team for ‘Radio Pioneers and Forgotten Voices, 1924-1939,’ a project funded by a British Academy Small Grant in 2019-2020, includes , as Co-Investigator, freelance translator Dr Marielle Sutherland, and Sana Riaz as Research Assistant. The project has a transnational dimension and considers early writings on radio from across Europe.
Women and Entangled Things
Her interdisciplinary book will look at how eighteenth-century novels set in early America, West Africa and the West Indies reimagined the relations among women, property and colonialism. The study examines portable, handmade goods to illuminate how women joined forces via the items they touched, made, consumed and exchanged in life and literature. Tuned to the interconnectedness of objects and print culture, their fissures and tensions, the book investigates women and their things in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A portion of the book appeared in the March 2017 issue of the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies. Dr Chloe Wigston Smith has been awarded Mid-Career Fellowships from both the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the British Academy for 2018-2019.
The British Academy fellowship will also support a conference on Small Things to be held in June 2019 at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.
Remembering the Reformation
Storying Relationships
Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for Storying Relationships, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project. Storying Relationships examines how young men and women in British Pakistani Muslim communities understand and explore relationships in terms of both attitudes and practices, through the stories they consume and produce. The Principal Investigator is Professor Richard Phillips of the University of Sheffield, from where the project is run. The project team also comprises Dr Nafhesa Ali, Professor Peter Hopkins, and Dr Raksha Pande. The project asks how young British Muslims (aged 16-30), particularly those with Pakistani heritage, talk and think about their personal relationships. It additionally explores the role of stories and storytelling in this, focusing on relationship stories that are told in everyday life (with friends, for example) and also media such as fiction, films, and radio. At the moment the project team is conducting individual interviews with young people and organisations across Tyne and Wear, Glasgow, and Yorkshire. They will be starting creative workshops in Stage 2 (commencing May 2017) where young people involved in the project will work alongside published authors to create and share stories.
The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne
Dr Kevin Killeen has been awarded an AHRC grant of £946,000 over 5 years in collaboration with the Universities of Birmingham (Claire Preston, PI) and Cambridge (Andrew Zurcher) in order to bring to completion a new 8 volume Oxford University Press edition of The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. The exceptionally diverse writings of Browne (1605-1682) engage with almost every area of intellectual enquiry in the seventeenth century: natural philosophy, medicine and experiment, natural history, religion, theology and mysticism, biblical exegesis, antiquarianism, scholarship, picture theory and toleration. In addition to this multifaceted subject-matter, Browne is also one of the greatest of prose writers in English, by turns humorous, poetic, hypnotic and symphonic.
The edition, under the general editorship of Claire Preston, will include authoritative editions of all Browne’s published works together with his correspondence and his voluminous notebooks. Critically and textually annotated, the edition will be available in print and in electronic formats. The grant includes provision for two postdoctoral research assistants and two PhD studentships.
This international collaboration involves a team of scholars, working on Thomas Browne. The editors are Reid Barbour (North Carolina), Brooke Conti (SUNY Brockport), Anne Dunan-Page (Aix), Felicity Henderson (Royal Society), Kevin Killeen (York), Antonia Moon (British Library), Kathryn Murphy (Oxford), Claire Preston (Cambridge), William West (Northwestern), Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina), and Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge).
The Complete Works project will be inaugurated with a single-volume Works of Browne, published in the new series, Oxford 21st Century Authors: Sir Thomas Browne (OUP, 2013) edited by Kevin Killeen (York).
News on Browne and the project can be found on the website of the ‘Sir Thomas Browne Seminar’: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne/.
Muslim Representations of Britain, 1988-present
Muslim Representations of Britain: 1988-Present is a Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Fellowship. Muslims currently find themselves in the crosshairs of media scrutiny and political concern. Claire Chambers's book Muslim Representations of Britain: 1988-Present will chart the development over three decades of a fascinating, under-researched body of fiction by Muslim-identified authors. Its main research question is: to what extent and in what ways are Britain and Islam represented in post-Satanic Verses fiction by Muslim-identified writers? The other planned output is a database cataloguing themes, motifs and stylistic devices used in this writing. The project will emphasize religious identity while describing a new trajectory within postcolonial studies’ mapping of colonial legacies in secularist discourses.
Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900
Literature is often defined as a sphere of human activity fundamentally opposed to institutions. Creativity and the imagination have certainly tended to be viewed in that way since at least the romantic period, but is the idea of literature itself as an institution? Certainly literature has always depended upon institutions. If the eighteenth century defined itself as a period of Enlightenment that weaned learning from the Church and, as Joseph Addison put it, 'into the parlour and the coffee shop', was this a move from one kind of institution to another? The eighteenth century also saw the emergence of academies and societies designed to foster knowledge, often in the context of the idea of the nation state and its 'people'. In this context, literature emerged into a new world of bounties, premiums, and prizes designed to support individual creativity in the name of communities for which it was - and often still is - assumed to speak. Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 is a research network studying the rise of literary institutions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and considering their ongoing influence in modern literary culture. It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The network is running a series of workshops and online exchanges, bringing together academics and institutional stakeholders to discuss the histories and circumstances of a range of different institutions in order collaboratively to draw out common themes and practices.
The co-ordinators are Matthew Sangster (University of Glasgow) and Jon Mee (University of York); Jenny Buckley (University of York) is the network administrator.
The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research
The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR) is an interdisciplinary group which acts as a hub for academic researchers in the medical humanities as well as practitioners, artists and others who may wish to collaborate. The Network is led by medical humanities researchers at 8 northern universities. Throughout the funding period, each collaborating university will run an interdisciplinary workshop, bringing together recent research and work in progress within the field of the medical humanities. The project also aims to help establish and develop the research identity of the field, provide a public-facing identity for research-based medical humanities, and to develop new researchers at postgraduate and postdoctoral level. More information about the Network, the workshops and ongoing research being undertaken within the Network can be found on the NNMHR website. The Network is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Shakespeare in the Making of Europe (SIME 14-16)
This international network brings together researchers from six European universities in four countries: a Dutch collaboration between Utrecht, Amsterdam and Nijmegen led by Professor Ton Hoenselaars in partnership with Dr Erica Sheen (York), Professor Isabel Karremann (LMU Munich now Würzburg) and Professor Krystyna Kujawinska (Łódź). It is supported by the Dutch Government funding agency NWO.
Taking its occasion from the Shakespearean anniversaries of 2014 and 2016, SIME 14-16 sets out to define new research questions about Shakespeare's role in a changing Europe. It seeks to challenge bilateral (Anglo-'foreign') approaches to Shakespearean research with multilateral and multi-linguistic forms of cooperation. In three workshops over three years in Munich, York and Utrecht, it aims to produce a manifesto for the European study of Shakespeare in the 21st century.
Cultural Memory and Identity in the Late Middle Ages: the Franciscans of Mount Zion in Jerusalem and the Representation of the Holy Land (1333-1516)
This project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and led by Michele Campopiano (York) and Guy Geltner (Amsterdam), will investigate how the Franciscan order contributed to the construction of a cultural memory of the Holy Land in the Medieval West. By doing so, the project will address the wide issue of the construction of a cultural memory through different media, investigating the three main dimensions of the elaboration of a cultural memory of the Holy Land in the Late Middle Ages: rituals, visual perception and texts.
Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day
The AHRC-funded research network Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day, led by Drs Helen Smith, Michele Campopiano, and Jim Watt (York), and Dr Anna Bernard (King's College London), brings together scholars and institutions from across Europe to uncover the complex global heritage of this city as icon and idea. From the Siege of Jerusalem in the First Crusade, to the conflict over the city today between Israelis and Palestinians, Jerusalem has long been a site of contested heritage and collective memory. As an archetype of the holy or divided city, the idea of Jerusalem has mediated cultural encounters between different communities and stood as a symbol of intractable ethno-religious conflict. It exists as both a real and an imagined space, and has inspired fictional, political, and utopian visions of the future through projects of recreating the ‘new Jerusalem’. Members of the network are investigating how Jerusalem’s past has been appropriated in the social and political imagination, and how we might use this knowledge to imagine new futures, both for Jerusalem itself and for the idea of Jerusalem in public life.
Networks of Improvement: Literary Clubs and Societies c.1760- c.1840
This project challenges the idea of literature as the product of isolated genius read in private. It looks at the sociable life of reading and writing in clubs and societies in a period that saw a rapid expansion in all forms of civil association, especially those committed to the idea of ‘improvement’.
The project is funded by a four-year Leverhulme Research Project Grant (2011-2015), and builds on Jon Mee’s Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was funded by a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2006 to 2009).
Full details of the project can be found on the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies website.
London Governance and Middle English Literature: Pathways to Impact
This is an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project in the category of Follow-On Funding for Impact and Engagement. During the one-year project Professor Linne Mooney and Dr Estelle Stubbs (RA) are collaborating with the London Metropolitan Archives to create teaching materials for all levels, primary to A-level, and for adult learners in London related to the findings of the AHRC Research project, 'Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature' (2007-11). During the year they will consult with teachers in London schools and develop learning units in literature, history, art, drama and creative writing related to medieval London governance and literature that will be tested in classrooms in Spring 2015 and offered for wider use in London schools in 2015-16 and thereafter. During the summer 2015 they will offer workshops and presentations at the London Metropolitan Archives for adult learners, and throughout the year they will offer presentations to school groups visiting the LMA.
England's Immigrants, 1330-1550
England's Immigrants, 1330-1550 is a major new project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which will contribute creatively to the longer-term history of immigration to Britain, and help to provide a deep historical and cultural context to contemporary debates over ethnicity, multiculturalism and national identity. The project is a collaboration between the University of York, the National Archives and the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, and is led by Professor Mark Ormrod and Dr Craig Taylor of the Department of History, and Dr Nicola McDonald from English.
The Matter of Early Modernity: matter, material, objects
Dr Helen Smith has been granted a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for a project exploring the literature and history of matter, materials, and objects in Renaissance England, c. 1570-1670. She is working to uncover both the vibrant continuity between the 'stuff' of writing and the formation of matter and crafted objects, and an eclectic vitalist tradition which responds to and celebrates the active power of substances and inert things. The resulting monograph will be the first to bring together modern and early modern investigations into the lively actions of the material world.
J. M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography
Professor David Attwell has a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to write a critical biography of J. M. Coetzee. His research has taken him to Cape Town, Adelaide, and Austin in Texas, where he has worked on Coetzee’s manuscripts. His work takes up Coetzee’s twin statements, "all writing is autobiography" and "autobiography is storytelling", showing that Coetzee’s novels are both intensely autobiographical and strongly fictionalized. The book will be published in English and in Dutch translation in 2014.
Cold War Shakespeare
Based on archival research, Dr Erica Sheen’s project considers the importance of Shakespeare to our understanding of the complex cultural dynamics of the Cold War in America and Europe. Her work is supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and by grants from the Getty Foundation, the Truman Presidential Library, and the Tamiment Library and Robert F Wagner Labor Archives, NYU.
Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe
Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe is a three-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that seeks to uncover people’s experience of religious change and devotional practice between 1550 and 1700. You can explore the progress and some of the findings of the project, led by Dr Simon Ditchfield from the Department of History and Dr Helen Smith from English, on the project blog. The project has already sponsored one major conference on Conversion Narratives in the Early Modern World, and forthcoming publications include monographs on Conversion Narratives in England and in Italy, a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History, and an edited collection on Conversion and Gender.