Helen Watt
Research Fellow
Profile
Biography
Helen Watt is a Research Fellow in the Department of History, working on ‘The Northern Way’, a project to examine the fourteenth-century registers of the Archbishops of York, having been involved in a pilot carried out in 2012, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for the ‘Archbishops’ Registers Revealed’ project to digitise the registers held in the University of York Borthwick Institute for Archives and make them available online. She also helped to prepare materials for the project’s International Summer Institute held at the University of York in 2015, and carried out a project to index the registers, 1576-1650, made possible by a grant from the Marc Fitch Fund.
Research
Overview
Although Helen’s degree is in Modern Languages, she qualified as an archivist from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1992, and since then, has worked on several research and cataloguing projects aiming to make records more widely available and more easily accessible.
These projects include:
- The ‘Welsh Manorial Records Database Project’ (National Library of Wales with the then Historical Manuscripts Commission, database searchable at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/manor-search)
- The ‘Completing the Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth Project’ (University of Reading)
- The ‘E 179 Records of Lay and Clerical Taxation Project’ (Universities of Cambridge, Bangor and York, database searchable at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/)
- The ‘Edward Lhwyd Correspondence Project’ (University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies (CAWCS), as part of the wider ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ Project of the University of Oxford, http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/blog/?catalogue=edward-lhwyd), catalogue searchable at http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/)
- The 'Place-names of Shropshire Project’ (University of Nottingham with CAWCS, see https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/projects/the-place-names-of-shropshire.aspx)
- The 'Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project’ (generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, managed by the Charles Darwin Trust).
In her spare time, Helen worked on an edition of letters of seamen below the rank of commissioned officer written during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815, with help from her friend and relative, Anne Hawkins, which was published in 2016, and is hoping to continue to write on naval history themes.
