See our Arts Matters blog for the latest updates on Arts Research and Events
Dr Leon Wainwright (Art History) 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.
At the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam from 5-6 February, Dr Leon Wainwright (Art History) 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.
Dr Aaron Alzola-Romero (Classical Studies) is to be 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, Classical Studies), 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.
Professor Helen King (Classical Studies) 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.
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 (both English Department) 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).
Dr Amanda Goodrich, (History) 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.
The first colloquium of the Atlantic Sounds project (PI: Catherine Tackley, Music) entitled ‘Historical Perspectives on Music and Seafaring’ took place at The Open University in London, Camden, on Friday 8th February. See the project website for abstracts and details of the papers presented.
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.
Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource (REDO): With funding from the Norwegian Research Council, Dr Graham Harvey and Dr Paul-François Tremlett (Religious Studies Department) 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.