The Faculty of Arts is internationally recognized for innovative research across the range of its subject areas, including the study of literary, philosophical and visual texts and their reception; the historical investigation of policing, science and religion; and the exploration of performance in music and drama. Much work is focused on the United Kingdom (with strong interests in the national histories and cultures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales) but there is also considerable expertise relating to continental Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Several major AHRC-funded projects are based in the Faculty. There is a strong vision for developing successful interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research, and a commitment to ensuring that our research effectively informs not only our own teaching but a wider process of knowledge exchange with cultural and heritage partners.
Faculty staff can follow this link to access the Arts Research intranet.
This AHRC-funded follow-on project expands and builds on the success of the 3-year research project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad’ (2007-10). Profiling visual and archival sources in international collections, Beyond the Frame highlights some of the numerous ways in which South Asians positioned themselves within British society and culture and explores the significance of their impact on British life. It showcases key historical links and cultural exchanges that took place between India and Britain, whilst also exploring some of the tensions that arose from such encounters. The primary objective of Beyond the Frame is to heighten public awareness of the depth of South Asian contributions to contemporary British life. It is led by Principal Investigator and Director, Professor Susheila Nasta of the Open University, with Penny Brook, Lead Curator of India Office Records, British Library, Dr Florian Stadtler, Research Associate (OU) and pioneering historian of Asians in Britain, Dr Rozina Visram. See Beyond the Frame's website for more information about this project.
In June 2011 the Open University Senate recognized Digital Humanities as one of two new University Thematic Research Networks. This was launched at an excellent and well-attended one-day colloquium on 8 July. Further seminars and other activities are being planned for 2011/12. A Digital Humanities research fellow is to be appointed to assist with these and other activities. Further information is available from the Digtial Humanities website. OU staff are also invited to join a group to debate and discuss issues on the new Digital Humanities blog.
PELAGIOS stands for 'Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems' - its aim is to help introduce Linked Open Data goodness into online resources that refer to places in the Ancient World. Why do we want to do that? Well, we think it will make all sorts of other things possible, including new modes of discovery and visualization for scholars and the general public. Pelagios also means 'of the sea', the superhighway of the ancient world - a metaphor we consider appropriate for a digital resource that will connect references to ancient places
We are an international consortium of projects and research groups:
Pelagios is funded by JISC as part of their #jiscGEO programme.
Google Ancient Places (GAP) is a Google Digital Humanities Award recipient that is mining the Google Books corpus for classical material that has a strong geographic and historical basis. We intend to overcome the traditional difficulties of identification of place names by using a combination of URI-based gazetteers and an identification algorithm that associates the linear clustering of places within narrative texts with the geographic clustering of locations in the real world. As a result GAP will allow scholars, students, and enthusiasts world-wide to query the Google Books corpus to ask for books related to a geographic location or to ask for the locations referred to in a classical text.
See our website for more information, including regular quarterly updates.
Protestant-Catholic Conflict: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities is part of the Global Uncertainties initiative and is funded by the AHRC and ESRC. The title of the project conveys the important, and unusual, fusion of historical and contemporary research central to our venture. Our task will be to examine the long term historical perspective of Protestant-Catholic conflict to help put into context the current relevance of religion in international security concerns. This specific area of tension provides ample scope for research as it not only has a rich and varied history but examples of local and regional discord still persist, notably in Ireland and the United States. Find out more from the project's website.
The Reading Experience Database (RED) was launched in 1996 at The Open University and has been available as a open access resource since June 2007. The project is directed by Prof Bob Owens (English), working with Dr Shafquat Towheed (English) and Dr Rosalind Crone (History), and has had two rounds of AHRC funding (2006-2009, 2010 to date). Its mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945. There are currently over 30,000 individual records of reading in the database. The RED team would like you to contribute information to the database by completing a RED form. Follow the link for more information about members of the team, what we mean by a ‘reading experience’, what sorts of data we’re looking for, how you can contribute, and to view the latest news on how RED is progressing. You can also browse and search the Reading Experience Database. We are also currently working with selected international partners to investigate transnational reading. Go to the RED website.
Elton Barker (Classical Studies) is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-supported HESTIA project. HESTIA provides a new approach towards conceptions of space in the ancient world. The project examines the ways in which space is represented in Herodotus' History, in terms of places mentioned and geographic features described. It develops visual tools to capture the ‘deep' topological structures of the text, extending beyond the usual two-dimensional Cartesian maps of the ancient world. Find out more by visiting the project's website.
Building on History is an AHRC-funded Knowledge Transfer project involving The Open University, King's College London, the Diocese of London and Lambeth Palace Library. The Principal Investigators are John Wolffe, Professor of Religious History at the OU and Professor Arthur Burns of King's College London. The project aims to make the religious history of the Diocese accessible to its representatives and the wider public by providing engaging academic speakers to give seminars and consultative workshops, developing and maintaining a project website for transferring research and an online community for encouraging further dialogue and interaction between participant members of the Diocese and facilitating and encouraging new research within the diocese by providing guides to the historical archives within the Diocese, especially the extensive resources available at Lambeth Palace Library. See the project's website for more information.
This project is investigating and documenting how Kenyans engage with the issues mentioned in the title through multi-sited fieldwork and other means. It is concerned both with state-led national heritage management and community-driven heritage initiatives, which include community peace museums, community ecological governance of sacred forests, and other activities around sites of memory. This three-year collaborative project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The Principal Investigator is Dr Lotte Hughes (OU); the Co-Investigator is Prof. Annie Coombes, Birkbeck, University of London. Other core team members are Prof. Karega Munene, United States International University, Nairobi; and Dr Anna Bohlin, Göteborg University, Sweden. Visit the project website.
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
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
