Funded Research

ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH BOARD

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Research Leave Scheme, 2008	Dr Helena Grice	Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters . Awarded 2007 with A+ grade. Taken 2008. The last ten years have witnessed an enormous growth in American interest in Asia and Asian history. One manner in which this has been manifested is the proliferation of fictional, historical and auto/biographical books about Asia, published in America. In particular, a set of key Asian historical moments have latterly become the subject of intense Western cultural scrutiny, including China’s Cultural Revolution and its aftermath; the Korean American war and its legacy; the era of Japanese geisha culture and its subsequent decline; and China’s one-child policy and the rise of transracial, international adoption in its wake. Asian/American Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters examined and accounted for this cultural preoccupation with all things Asian, by exploring the corresponding historical-political situations which have both circumscribed and enabled greater cultural and political contact between Asia and America. Through a series of case studies, which deal in turn with China, Japan and Korea, four historical phenomena, and four moments of unique inter-cultural contact, were examined via a series of commercially successful, and often critically acclaimed, fictional, historical and auto/biographical narratives. In each case, the relationship between narrative and history was analysed, in order to demonstrate a two-way interaction, whereby the texts themselves not only provide new and often alternative perspectives on each historical instance, but may also become implicated in each cross-cultural encounter.	Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters, (Routledge 2009)
Workshops and Networks Grant, 2006 to 2007	Professor Sarah Hutton	Franco-British Intellectual Exchange, 1688-1789. Part of a network of British and French scholars working on cultural transfer in the long eighteenth century.	Collection of papers entitled Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, Edited by Ann Thomson et al. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010)
Research Leave Scheme, October 2006 to January 2007	Professor Diane Watt	Women as Authors and Readers in Medieval England (ca.1100-1500). This project examines writing by and for women in England between 1100 and 1500, written in Latin, French and Middle English. It concentrates on selected writers and texts, focusing specifically on construction of authorship in relation to women ‘writers’ (addressing issues of literacy and collaboration) and the nature of the readership/audience (discussing literary spheres and networks, and the emergence of lay readers in the context of increasing vernacularity). It examines questions about women’s literary history in the pre-modern period, the functionality of the texts, and the complex ways in which authors and readers/audience work together to produce meaning.	Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)
Research Leave Scheme, 2005	Dr Helena Grice	Maxine Hong Kingston. Awarded July 2004 with A grade. Taken 2005. This project was an authoritative study of the fiction and life-writing of the contemporary Chinese American woman writer, Maxine Hong Kingston. It located Kingston within two interconnected, specific cultural contexts: Chinese American history and politics and the emergence of ethnic feminism in a post-Civil rights era. It contended that Kingston’s body of work not only raises important questions concerning cultural authenticity, the role of different interpretive communities and canon formation, but that increasingly her oeuvre offers her readers a manifesto of pacifism for a contemporary era.	Maxine Hong Kingston, (Manchester University Press, 2006)
Research Leave Scheme, August 2004 to January 2005	Professor Peter Barry	Poetry in Contexts . The project concerned the paradox that a discipline dominated by historicist and contextualising approaches to literature had never properly theorised the idea of context. It argued that there are many different kinds, using a series of ‘case studies’ (three 19th century and three contemporary), and formulating a classificatory distinction between ‘deep’ and ‘broad’ contexts	Literature in Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2007)
Research Leave Scheme, August 2004 to January 2005	Dr Sarah Prescott	Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons . The research project examined Welsh writing in English in the context of critical debates concerning the ‘invention’ of Great Britain as a nation in the eighteenth century. The resulting book investigates the ways in which Anglo-Welsh writers explore issues of identity and nation by reference to a wide range of literary texts, including poetry, fiction, letters and sermons. The particular aim of the research was to evaluate the extent to which Welsh writers approve, contest, and/or shape emergent models of Britishness in the period.	Eighteenth-century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (University of Wales Press 2008)

BRITISH ACADEMY

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Research Development Award (BARDA) October 2010 – January 2012	Dr Damian Walford Davies	Welsh Writing in English, 1914 – 2009. This will constitute Volume 4 of the Oxford Literary History of Wales of which Damian is General Editor. The most comprehensive history of the two literatures of Wales ever attempted, The Oxford Literary History of Wales will bring the two literatures of Wales, considered in a radically new light, to the attention of an international audience. Co-written with Dr Daniel G. Williams of Swansea University, the 150,000-word volume deploys innovative conceptual categories that inflect traditional literary history and notions of the canon, offering a new post-Devolution map of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary production in its changing social, cultural and political contexts. The OLHW project represents a major collaborative venture between Welsh HE institutions and academic Schools of English and Welsh in Wales.	Forthcoming 2014
Research Development Award (BARDA) September 2009 to September 2010	Dr Sarah Prescott	Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers from Wales.The proposed research covers an area which is not currently represented in recent scholarship: writing in English by women in and from Wales from 1600 to 1800. There is no previous critical study of Anglophone Welsh women writers during this period, and little has been published on individual writers so the project as proposed was unique. The main objectives of the project are threefold. Firstly, the aim is to extend our knowledge of a tradition of Welsh women’s Anglophone writing in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, diaries, letters and journals. Secondly, the project will explore to what extent and in what ways these writers express a sense of local and regional identity and/or a specifically Welsh national allegiance. Thirdly, the project will consider how a study of Anglophone Welsh women’s literary tradition complicates the terms on which women’s literary history has previously been written, specifically in relation to recent scholarship which takes an ‘archipelagic’ approach to British literary culture.	Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers from Wales
Small Research Grant	Professor Peter Barry	This grant financed two separate weeks of research in London (at the V&A and KCL), for what was originally intended to be a chapter in Literature in Contexts called ‘The Battle of Earls Court’. It was to be about the Poetry Society in the 1970s, but it quickly became clear to Peter that this was really a book in itself. The resultant publication (see right) has a Foreword by Andrew Motion (then Poet Laureate), and ‘advance acclaim’ from Marjorie Perloff (then MLA Chair), and it began a vogue for ‘chronicling’ the history of the mid/late 20th century poetic avant-garde which still continues.	Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt, 2006).

Award and Date(s) of Project

Awarded to

Title and Description of Project

Primary Output from Project

Research Development Award (BARDA) October 2010 – January 2012

Dr Damian Walford Davies

Welsh Writing in English, 1914 – 2009. This will constitute Volume 4 of the Oxford Literary History of Wales of which Damian is General Editor. The most comprehensive history of the two literatures of Wales ever attempted, The Oxford Literary History of Wales will bring the two literatures of Wales, considered in a radically new light, to the attention of an international audience. Co-written with Dr Daniel G. Williams of Swansea University, the 150,000-word volume deploys innovative conceptual categories that inflect traditional literary history and notions of the canon, offering a new post-Devolution map of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary production in its changing social, cultural and political contexts. The OLHW project represents a major collaborative venture between Welsh HE institutions and academic Schools of English and Welsh in Wales.

Forthcoming 2014

Research Development Award (BARDA) September 2009 to September 2010

Dr Sarah Prescott

Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers from Wales.The proposed research covers an area which is not currently represented in recent scholarship: writing in English by women in and from Wales from 1600 to 1800. There is no previous critical study of Anglophone Welsh women writers during this period, and little has been published on individual writers so the project as proposed was unique. The main objectives of the project are threefold. Firstly, the aim is to extend our knowledge of a tradition of Welsh women’s Anglophone writing in a range of genres including poetry, fiction, diaries, letters and journals. Secondly, the project will explore to what extent and in what ways these writers express a sense of local and regional identity and/or a specifically Welsh national allegiance. Thirdly, the project will consider how a study of Anglophone Welsh women’s literary tradition complicates the terms on which women’s literary history has previously been written, specifically in relation to recent scholarship which takes an ‘archipelagic’ approach to British literary culture.

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Women Writers from Wales

Small Research Grant

Professor Peter Barry

This grant financed two separate weeks of research in London (at the V&A and KCL), for what was originally intended to be a chapter in Literature in Contexts called ‘The Battle of Earls Court’. It was to be about the Poetry Society in the 1970s, but it quickly became clear to Peter that this was really a book in itself. The resultant publication (see right) has a Foreword by Andrew Motion (then Poet Laureate), and ‘advance acclaim’ from Marjorie Perloff (then MLA Chair), and it began a vogue for ‘chronicling’ the history of the mid/late 20th century poetic avant-garde which still continues.

Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt, 2006).

THE LEVERHULME TRUST

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Research Project Grant September 2012 to August 2015	Professor Peter Barry	Devolved Voices. A project beginning in September 2012 and running for the three years looking into the development of Welsh poetry in English since 1997 and paying particular attention to the work of poets who have achieved prominence and recognition since Wales’s devolution vote.	A full-length scholarly volume;a book of extended interviews with key poets; a book of essays; a video-rich website
Research Project Grant February 2013-2016	Dr Sarah Prescott	Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh. The study will provide a major new literary history of women's poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1400 to 1800, covering poetry in Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic, Ulster Scots and English. As Principal Applicant, Sarah will be working with fellow scholars Dr Sarah Dunnigan at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Marie-Louise Coolahan at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Dr Cathryn Charnell-White at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth and a further Research Assistant on Scots Gaelic to be appointed in 2012. The project will start in February 2013.	A fully edited anthology with translations and accompanying critical study
Research Fellowship September 2011 to August 2012	Dr Martin Padget	A critical biography of Paul Strand, one of the leading photographers and creative intellectuals of the 20th Century	Biography

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, PRINCETON

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study	Professor Sarah Hutton	Research for a history of British 17th-century philosophy	In progress, commissioned by Cambridge University Press

ACADEMI

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Writer's Bursary, 2009-2010	Dr Damian Walford Davies	The award enabled Damian to complete his second solo collection, Alabaster Girls, to be published by Seren in 2012.	Full-length poetry collection
Writer's Bursary, 2007	Dr Matthew Francis	The award allowed Matthew to take extra leave from teaching to work on his novel The Book of the Needle.	Novel completed in September 2010 and submitted for publication

BEACON FOR WALES

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Public Engagement Award, 2010 to 2011	Professor Diane Watt	Consoling Through Women’s Words: Past Loss, Present Consolation. This collaborative project headed by Professor Helen Wilcox at Bangor University aims to work with charities and other voluntary organisations giving support to women who are facing death or loss, or who are recently bereaved. Our research on women, writing and death in the medieval and early modern periods is yielding a harvest of vivid and moving texts about women’s experience of loss, which we wish to use as the starting-point for bibliotherapy workshops to enable modern women to talk about their grief and –eventually—find ways of coming to terms with it. Meanwhile, the responses of women in our own day to these writing by earlier women will also be invaluable to our understanding of the texts and histories that we are researching, ensuring that the project is an exchange which is of mutual benefit to all involved.	Training packs, website and exhibition; a series of pilot meetings with charities and voluntary organisations

JAPAN SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF SCIENCE (JSPS - associated with the Ministry of Education)

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Grants in Aid for Scientific Research C (general), 2010 to 2013	Professor Diane Watt	Religion and Medicine in Late Medieval English Literature and Culture. This project, headed by Professor Naoe Kukita Yoshikawa of Shizuoka University, examines the relationship between religion and medicine in medieval European culture, focusing on the interface between the fields of medieval English devotion and medical discourses, and contexualising them theoretically as part of late medieval culture. The project also examines the impact of the vernacularisation of medical and devotional knowledge of late medieval English Culture and reading practices.	Conference sessions and workshops in the UK and Japan, an international conference in Japan a volume of essays, and ongoing networking and collaboration beyond the duration of the project.

FELLOWSHIPS

Award and Date(s) of Project	Awarded to	Title and Description of Project	Primary Output from Project
Visiting Fellowship, Sept to Dec 2011	Professor Sarah Hutton	Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Researching and writing a history of British 17th century philosophy	Commission from OUP, in progress
Hawthornden Fellowship 2011	Dr Tiffany Atkinson	Award for writers' retreat. Tiffany was working on her latest collection of poetry.	Catulla et al, published November 2011
Gildersleeve Professorship, April 2011	Professor Sarah Hutton	Visiting Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University	Gildersleeve Lecture: Liberty in Mind: Women, freedom and equality, Margaret Cavendish to Mary Wollestonecraft
Hawthornden Fellowship, 2010	Dr Matthew Francis	Award for writers' retreat. Matthew was working on his novel.	The Book of the Needle was completed in September 2010 and submitted for publication