Resource sharing
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: The first farmers of Central Europe - diversity in LBK lifeways
Grant Holder: Professor Alasdair Whittle
The Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK), was the first Neolithic culture in many parts of central Europe. Dating to roughly 5600-4900 cal BC, it stretched from Hungary to the Paris Basin and from southern Germany into the northern Polish and German plains and Holland. Apart from introducing a farming way of life, the LBK is most notable for the construction of monumental wooden houses, which form the first permanent villages in the area. [read more]
project: Records of Early English Drama, Middlesex/Westminster: Eight Theatres north of the Thames
Grant Holder: Prof. John McGavin; John Bradley
This project focuses on two fundamental research problems: the need for a systematic and complete edition of all pre-1642 manuscript and printed records relating to the eight early Middlesex/Westminster theatres north of the Thames (1642 being the date of the closure of the London theatres by the authorities); the complementary need for a widely-available aggregated bibliography which locates, assesses, and digests all later printed transcriptions of pre-1642 documents relating to these theatres. [read more]
project: Anglo-Saxon landscape and economy: using portable antiquities to study Anglo-Saxon and Viking England
Grant Holder: Professor Julian Richards
More is known of the location and density of English settlements AD 700-1000 from the activities of “treasure hunters” than from archaeological fieldwork. The VASLE project used the rich database of coins and metalwork to illuminate Anglo-Saxon and Viking Age landscape and economy. [read more]
project: Medieval Warfare on the Grid: The Case of Manzikert
Grant Holder: Professor Vince Gaffney
The Medieval Warfare on the Grid project (MWGrid) employs e-science methods and tools to support historical research into logistics of medieval war. The battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt, Turkey) in 1071, between the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Turks, is the subject of this investigation. This key event, which paved the way for Turkish settlement in eastern Anatolia, has been previously studied through comparative historical analysis. However, due to limited sources and the lack of comprehensive analytical methods, its logistics remain a subject of speculation. [read more]
project: Glasgow Emblem Digitisation Project
Grant Holder: Professor Alison Adams
The site has been developed, with generous funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Resource Enhancement Scheme, by a team led by Post-Doctoral Research Assistant Jonathan Spangler, and Project Director Alison Adams. All but two of the emblem books digitised are from the Stirling Maxwell Collection in Glasgow University Library. The Bodleian Library and the Bibliothèque Mazarine have generously made material available to enable us to present the complete corpus. The Project is undertaken within the OpenEmblem initiative. [read more]
project: Moving Manchester / Mediating Marginalities: How the experience of migration has informed the work of writers in Greater Manchester
Grant Holder: Professor Lynne Pearce
Moving Manchester (formerly 'Mediating Marginalities') has spent the past four years (2006-2010) investigating the ways in which the experience of migration has impacted upon contemporary writing in the city and, by extension, the ways in which these multicultural publications and performances have impacted upon the urban population's view of itself as well as the wider perception of Manchester as a British city. [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: What is Black British Jazz? Routes, Ownership, Performance
Grant Holder: Mark Doffman
The ‘Black British jazz’ project (BBJ) explores the emergence of a distinct tradition within British music. BBJ melds reggae, hiphop, African music and US jazz into a rich, and constantly developing set of sounds. In documenting this musical hybrid, the project touches on important issues for the study of music – the transmission of cultural values, the social context of musical forms, and frameworks of ownership that impact on musical communities. [read more]
project: Virtual Kemet: an African-centred Egyptian gallery for prisons
Grant Holder: Dr Sally-ann Ashton
Since 2003 Dr Sally-Ann Ashton, an Egyptologist and Senior Assistant Keeper in the Department of Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge has worked with prison education departments as part of an outreach programme. In order to expand her work and to explore the potential for using museum collections as an integral part of prison education, she was granted leave of absence from her post from September 2007 to September 2009. The project focused on Dr Ashton’s fieldwork and research, and the Egyptian and Nubian collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum. [read more]