The Faculty comprises seven departments and research is a core activity in all departments. In the Faculty’s submission to RAE 2001, over 70% of the submitted units obtained a 4 or higher.

Last updated 17 December 2008

News | Events | Research features

News

Research grant bids successful

Stephen Edwards has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship worth £35,000 for Papers and Pictures, 1841-1854, Angeliki Lymberopoulou was awarded £40,000 by the Leventis Foundation to fund a 0.5 Research Fellow in Post-Byzantine Art and Suman Gupta has been awarded £19,000 under the Leverhulme International Academic Networks Scheme for English Studies in East European Higher Education: Post-Accession Bulgaria and Romania. Our congratulations to all concerned.

External Funding

Janet Huskinson has been awarded £3,000 for a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship.

John Wolffe and Helen Waterhouse have been awarded a Collaborative Studentship under the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. The non-academic partner is Christian Education and the project title is From Sunday Schools to Christian Education: the Christian Formation of Contemporary Youth in Historical Perspective.

Derek Matravers and Marion Bowman have been awarded £4,866 each by the Higher Education Academy for projects titled “Helping to Bridge the Gap?".

The following British Academy grants have also been awarded: Trevor Herbert, £2,450 for The Place of Brass instruments in the development of jazz idiom and Marion Bowman, £500 travel grant to give a paper at the Media, Spiritualities and Social Change conference in Colorado.

Research Students

Maureen Scollan (History) was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis "Parish Constables Versus Police Constables: Policing Early Nineteenth-Century Essex" on 18 January 2007

Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (HSTM) was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis "The English Model of Chemical Education in Meiji Japan: Transfer and Acculturation" on 24 August 2006.

Janet Brian (History/HSTM) was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis " The Local Implementation of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875" on 10 August 2006.

Peter Waymark (History) was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis "Television and the Cultural Revolution: the BBC under Hugh Carleton Greene" on 7 March 2006.

Lesley Wray (History) was awarded a Ph.D. for the thesis "Women Engineers in Post-War Britain" on 5 May 2006.

Events

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Spring 2009

Making Britain: South Asian Resistances, 1870–1950

This series of seminars co-ordinated by Dr Sumita Mukherjee and Dr Rehana Ahmed will be addressing various forms of resistance by South Asians in Britain during this period. It forms part of the regular series organised by the Open University Postcolonial Research Group in association with the Institute of English Studies). Further information

Research features

Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870–1950

Susheila Nasta (English) is directing this cross-institutional project which was awarded a 3-year collaborative research grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project examines the South Asian contribution to Britain’s literary, cultural and political life during the period 1870–1950. Extensive archival research and an interdisciplinary approach will illuminate the diverse ways in which South Asian writers, artists, activists and professionals in Britain formed affiliations, groupings and solidarities to create a dynamic ‘contact zone’ at the heart of empire. The project’s outputs include an annotated database, as well as publications, workshops and a conference and exhibition.

Project website

Cultures of performance among British brass players 1750-1965

Trevor Herbert (Music) is directing this major project which is being funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This project aims to trace the elements that contribute to a distinctive style of British brass playing. It will look at the relationships between amateur playing and different types of professional music including jazz, orchestral music and military bands.

Project website

The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945 (RED)

Bob Owens (Literature) is one of the directors of The Reading Experience Database (RED). RED was launched in 1996 and aims to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945. In December 2005, the RED was awarded a major grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding will allow the project to concentrate on records from the period 1800-1945 and facilitate plans to to launch RED on the web at the end of 2006.
Project website

Experience and meaning in music performance

Dr Clayton is directing this major research project which is being by the Arts and Humanities Award Council. This project investigates the performance and experience of various musical genres, principally those of north Indian (Hindustani) raga. It focuses on the role of "entrainment". This is the synchronisation of musicians and listeners to musical rhythms. The research addresses gestural communication and movement and the relationships between these psycho-physiological processes together with the processes of meaning construction. The central thread of the project comprises work on north Indian raga performance.
Project website

The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece in Late Twentieth-Century Drama and Poetry in English

This project was established in 1995 and aims to document and analyse the theatrical and literary surge of interest in Greek texts and drama as a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. Its director is Lorna Hardwick (Classical Studies). The project supports a wide range of activities and publication, and a major feature is its online database of modern performance of ancient Greek texts. The project received funding from British Academy in 2006 to support the second phase of the project which will document the use of classical references in modern poetry (from the 1950s to the present).
Project website