South Asia (Pakistan to Indonesia)
project: Experience and meaning in north Indian classical music
Grant Holder: Prof Martin Clayton
The major research project Experience and meaning in music performance investigates how musical performance is experienced by musicians and listeners, and how this experience relates to the meaning people ascribe to it. The core of the project focuses on north Indian raga performance, with other strands concentrating on jazz, rock, Cuban popular music and Afro-Brazilian Congado. This interdisciplinary project is pursued by a team of researchers working in close collaboration, employing a combination of ethnographic and empirical methods. [read more]
project: Mutiny at the Margins: New perspective on the Indian Uprising of 1857
Grant Holder: Dr Crispin Bates
The year 2007 saw the 150th Anniversary of the Indian Uprising (also known as the ‘Mutiny') of 1857-58. One of the best-known episodes of both British imperial and South Asian history and a seminal event for Anglo-Indian relations, 1857 has yet to be the subject of a substantial revisionist history. In particular, the continued dominance of elitist historiography and nationalist bias in relation to 1857 has caused many important and fascinating elements to be ignored or otherwise overlooked. [read more]
project: Beyond Legalism: Amnesties, Transition and Conflict Transformation
Grant Holder: Professor K McEvoy
Amnesty laws are an important but often contentious way for states to quell dissent, end conflict or shield state agents from prosecution. This project aims to move beyond legalistic debates to produce an analysis of the consequences of enacting amnesty laws during transitional periods, based on fieldwork in five jurisdictions worldwide. The website contains the Amnesty Law Database comprising materials relating to over 500 amnesty laws enacted since the end of World War Two. [read more]
project: Connecting Cornwall: Telecommunications, Locality and Work in West Britain 1870-1918
Grant Holder: Dr Richard Noakes
Cornwall has a number of significant historical communications sites starting with Porthcurno and ranging over early radio sites at Poldhu and the Lizard to Land’s End and Bodmin Radio and the Satellite station at Goonhilly. The ‘Connecting Cornwall’ project will be using the Cable and Wireless historic archive to develop new research into the communications industry in Cornwall with an emphasis on the Eastern Telegraph Company in the first instance. [read more]
project: The Indian Temple: Production, Place and Patronage
Grant Holder: Dr Adam Hardy
Temples dominated the landscape of India between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. Protected by kings and widely supported by endowments and other gifts, temples enjoyed ascendancy as centres of religious life, socio-economic power and artistic production. Although much research has been carried out on temple architecture since the late nineteenth century, important questions remain about how temples were patronised and constructed and the place they occupied in a medieval Indian polity. [read more]
project: The Cairo Genizah manuscripts: Taylor-Schechter Old Series and the Mosseri Collection
Grant Holder: Dr Ben Outhwaite
The project aims to complete the cataloguing and detailed description of the Old Series of the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection and a substantial proportion of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection. The T-S Collection consists of approx. 193,000 medieval (and early modern) Jewish manuscripts recovered from a storeroom (Genizah) in Old Cairo one hundred years ago, and is an unparalleled resource for the study of medieval Judaism, Islam and the history of the Mediterranean and Near East in the Middle Ages. The Old Series is the historical core of the Collection, and approx. [read more]
project: Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad (1870-1950)
Grant Holder: Professor Susheila Nasta; F S Stadler; Dr Sumita Muhkerjee;
The Making Britain Database launched in September 2010. It houses an annotated bibliography of selected materials relating to South Asian artists, writers, activists and organizations in Britain during the period 1870 to 1950. Britain has had a migrant South Asian population for over 350 years, since its early trading encounters with India. But the perception that a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War persists, and research into the South Asian diaspora in Britain has focused predominantly on this later, post-independence period. [read more]
project: In an arena including digital and traditional artists' publishing formats - what will be the canon for the artist's book in the 21st Century?
Grant Holder: Miss Sarah Bodman
This project investigated and discussed issues concerning the history and future of the artist’s book. Our aim was to extend and sustain critical debate of what constitutes an artist’s book in the 21st Century - in order to propose an inclusive structure for the academic study, artistic practice and historical appreciation of the artist’s book. All of the research outcomes, including the publication A Manifesto for the Book, audio and video files,interviews and case studies are downloadable from the project website.
http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/canon.htm [read more]
project: Hidden Histories of Exploration: Exhibiting Geographical Collections
Grant Holder: Professor Felix Driver
This project considers the role played by indigenous peoples and intermediaries in the history of exploration, as revealed by research in the collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). The project is particularly concerned with the roles of guides, porters, pilots, cooks, carriers, interpreters, go-betweens and informants in the creation of geographical knowledge. In wider terms, it seeks to provide a model for new ways of working with well-established geographical collections. [read more]
project: Digital Himalaya Project
Grant Holder:
The Digital Himalaya project was designed by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. The Digital Himalaya project had three primary objectives:
1. to preserve in a digital medium archival anthropological materials from the Himalayan region that were quickly degenerating in their current forms, including films in various formats, still photographs, sound recordings, field notes, maps and rare journals
2. [read more]