See our Arts Matters blog for the latest updates on Arts Research and Events
Art History
Dr Leon Wainwright has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize. These Prizes, with a value of £70,000 each, are awarded to outstanding scholars who have made a substantial and recognised contribution to their particular field of study, recognised at an international level, and where the expectation is that their greatest achievement is yet to come. The Prize will enable Dr Wainwright to further develop his transatlantic work on art of the modern and contemporary Caribbean and its diaspora, with attention to Dutch, Spanish and English-speaking contexts.
Leon Wainwright was invited speaker at ‘Art Across the Black Diaspora: Visualizing Slavery in America’, an International Symposium funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and co-organized by the Rothermere American Institute and the Art History Department, University of Oxford and the Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK.
At the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam from 5-6 February, Dr Wainwright led a major international conference as Principal Investigator of the two-year project ‘Sustainable Art Communities: Creativity and Policy in the Transnational Caribbean’, a collaboration between The Open University and the University of Leiden, in partnership with the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam and Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, London. The project is funded by AHRC and the Netherlands Scientific Organisation. For full details visit the project website.
Classical Studies
Dr Aaron Alzola-Romero was awarded the 2012 Journal of Distance Education (JDE) Editor's Award. The award is for his article "One Laptop per College Student? Exploring the Links between Access to IT Hardware and Academic Performance in Higher Education e-Learning Programs". The JDE Editor’s Award is presented by the editor of the journal to the author(s) of the most outstanding publication or contribution in the Journal each year and it recognises and encourages excellence in scholarship in the field of open and distance education.
Under the auspices of the JISC-funded Pelagios project (PI: Elton Barker), Johan Åhlfeldt (Regnum Francorum Online) has produced a free online digital map of the ancient world that can be used as a background layer for use in a fashion similar to modern mapping applications like Google Maps. A fully interactive implementation of the digital map, which shows one of the many ways it might be used, has also been made available. Elton Barker has recently been awarded £64k by the AHRC for the project 'Hestia2: reading texts spatially (HESTIA 2.0). Dr Barker has recently received £25k from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation for the 'Pelagios 3' project.
Professor Helen King has been appointed as the Kaethe Leichter Visiting Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Vienna. She will take up this post in Spring 2014. Prof King was recently awarded a prize by the Women’s Classical Caucus for the best article published in the last three years relating to their mission of 'fostering the study of gender, sexuality, feminist theory, or women’s history'. The winning article, ‘Galen and the widow’, questions existing orthodoxy on the history of masturbation as something practised by doctors on women in the ancient world and beyond.
English
Dr M A Katritzky was in New York in June to deliver an invited presentation on a new research project on 'Satyrs and Wild Men' to international colleagues at an early modern theatre studies workshop at New York University, 3 – 6 June 2013. The talk was titled ‘Satyrs, wild men, hairy humans: a new approach to assessing their influence on early modern theatrical and print culture’.
The Reading Experience Database was prominently featured in an article in the US Chronicle of Higher Education (21 December 2012), “The Secret Lives of Readers”. Team members Dr Shafquat Towheed and Dr Edmund King were interviewed, along with former RED team members Simon Eliot (now of the University of London) and Katie Halsey (now at the University of Stirling).
History
Dr Sandip Hazareesingh's paper 'Cotton, climate and colonialism in Dharwar, western India, 1840-1880' was shortlisted for the best paper prize of the last twelve months by the Journal of Historical Geography.
Dr Amanda Goodrich (is assisting the British Library with its forthcoming Georgians exhibition and writing material for inclusion in the book to accompany the exhibition due to open in November 2013.
Dr Annika Mombauer has edited and translated documents on the origins of the First World War, and her collection has just been published by Manchester University Press. It includes over 400 documents, many published for the first time, or not previously available in English, which help explain why war broke out in 1914. She also edited a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History which has just been published (48, 2, 2013). Entitled ‘The Fischer Controversy 50 Years on’, it explores the heated debate on the origins of the First World War that began with Fritz Fischer’s controversial publications in the 1960s. It includes her own article on historical documents and ‘the truth’ in history.
Music
Dr Elaine Moohan hosted the annual Musica Scotica conference at The Open University in Scotland on 27 April. Delegates from across the UK gathered to present papers and discuss topics relating to 'music from Scotland' and 'music in Scotland', ranging from medieval harp tablature, to manuscript studies, to contemporary composers who work within Scotland, as well as exploring the country's rich tradition of folk singing and instrumental music. See Musica Scotica's website for details of the programme and information about their activities and publications.
OUPblog recently featured a post on the US publication of a new book by Prof Trevor Herbert and Dr Helen Barlow released by Oxford University Press. The book, Music and the British military in the long nineteenth century, is the outcome of a major AHRC-funded research project and is the first to explain the importance of the military to British music in the long nineteenth century. It also reveals new information about the effect of music on soldiers in fields of conflict. It will be published in the UK in August.
Dr Catherine Tackley’s book ‘Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert’ (Oxford University Press) won the All Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group’s Publication of the Year. This was presented at a ceremony at the Houses of Parliament.
The second colloquium of the Atlantic Sounds project (PI: Catherine Tackley) took place at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth on 14 June 2013. Entitled 'Music, Heritage, Regeneration, Tourism', you can find further details of the programme and abstracts on the project website. The first colloquium, ‘Historical Perspectives on Music and Seafaring’, took place at The Open University in London, Camden, on Friday 8th February and abstracts and details of the papers presented are available online.
Philosophy
Professor Rosalind Hursthouse, of the University of Auckland and previously a member of the OU Philosophy Department, recently joined the Philosophy Department as a Visiting Fellow.
Religious Studies
On 26 April Dr Marion Bowman was one of 15 researchers selected to participate in an AHRC/BBC workshop on Scottish identity. The researchers represented a broad range of subjects, including Scottish history from early to modern, Scottish literature, religion, language and linguistics, the visual arts, music, architecture and drama.
Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource (REDO): With funding from the Norwegian Research Council, Dr Graham Harvey and Dr Paul-François Tremlett will be members of an international research team examining 'ritual as cultural resource'. The full project is one of 11 that have been awarded a total of 100 million NOK. Between March 2013 and February 2017 Dr Harvey and Dr Tremlett will contribute subprojects (funded at nearly £33,000) and collaborate with colleagues from Norway, France, Canada, USA, South Africa, Ghana and Poland. See the project website for further information.
See our Arts Matters blog for the latest information about research seminars and other events.