Photography
project: ROYAL: Illuminated Manuscripts of the Kings and Queens of England
Grant Holder: Dr Scot McKendrick
The research project focuses on the Library's collection of medieval and Renaissance Royal illuminated manuscripts. The project, a collaboration with The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, will culminate in a major exhibition at the British Library in 2011-2012; the research will become part of the British Library's free illustrated online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (CIM); and will also support and deliver a virtual exhibition and online introductory 'tours' of the Royal collection for visitors to the British Library website. [read more]
project: Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition
Grant Holder: Dr Andrew Roberts
This research project uses psychological, critical and creative methods to study how readers respond to the visual aspects of poetry. It involves specialists in English and Comparative Literature, Fine Art and Psychology. These include the shape of visual or concrete poetry (where words are arranged spatially in particular patterns on the page), the combination of poetry with images (in artists' books and prints), and the moving words and images found in digital poetry (a relatively new form of poetry which is usually web-based and often interactive). [read more]
project: Mapping the city in film: a geo-historical analysis
Grant Holder: Dr Julia Hallam
This project will provide the first full and extended research into the relationship between film and urban environments by developing an interactive digital map of Liverpool in film that will draw on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. Utilising already established resources on Liverpool's urban landscape in film, which include a comprehensive database of films made in and of Liverpool from 1897 to the 1980s, the research will enable different urban spatial formations (filmic, architectural, geographic) to be brought into critical spatial dialogue. [read more]
project: Performance as a medium of learning in museums and at heritage sites - an investigation
Grant Holder: Anthony Jackson
The PERFORMANCE, LEARNING AND HERITAGE research project is an investigation into the uses and impact of performance as a medium of learning in museums and at historic sites. The Centre for Applied Theatre Research (CATR) undertook research into the increasing and varied use being made of theatre and other drama-based activity as interpretive tools with visitors to museums and historic sites - an expanding but relatively under-researched field of performance practice. [read more]
project: Magnetic moments in the past: Developing archaeomagnetic dating for application in UK archaeology
Grant Holder: Dr Cathy Batt
This project follows on from a previous collaboration which established a methodology for using measurements of the past magnetic field of the Earth for dating archaeological materials in the last 4000 years in the UK. The primary aim of this project is to realise the potential of this research by developing its practical application in UK archaeology. There is increasing interest in using archaeomagnetic dating as part of the suite of chronological tools available to archaeologists. However, it has yet to be adopted routinely. [read more]
project: Who Were the Nuns?
Grant Holder: Michael Questier
The project is a prosopographical study of the English convents in exile during the period 1600-1800 when it was illegal to be a nun in Britain. Key research questions include a broad response to the question 'Who were the nuns?' This involves locating the members in their family, religious, political and economic context and identifying the support networks sustaining the convents over two centuries. [read more]
project: An investigation into what constitutes a reproduction in the 20th Century, through the 19th Century collotype process
Grant Holder: Joanna Montgomery
This project challenged the notion of what constitutes a reproduction in the light of 21st Century digital technology and print output through an evaluation through visual and practical research into 19th Century photomechanical print processes, in particular the process of collotype. Whilst the contemporary half-tonal system is a commercially economical means of printing, the resulting images do not fully attain the same depth of colour or image clarity as those produced by either chemical photography or the screenless photomechanical printing processes in use at the end of the 19th century. [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]