Funded Projects

Project Title: Women's Poetry 1400 - 1800 in English, Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh

Date of Award: 2013 - 2016

Awarding Body: The Leverhulme Trust

Awarded to: Dr Sarah Prescott

Details: 
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 started in February 2013.

Project Title: Devolved Voices

Date of Award: 2012 - 2015

Awarding Body: The Leverhulme Trust

Awarded to: Professor Peter Barry

Details:
A project that began in September 2012, 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.

Project Title: Religion and Medicine in Late Medieval English Literature and Culture

Date of Award: 2010 - 2013

Awarding Body: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS - associated with the Ministry of Education)

Awarded to: Professor Diane Watt

Details:
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.

Project Title: Consoling Through Women's Words: Past Loss, Present Consolodation

Date of Award: 2010 - 2011

Awarding Body: Beacon for Wales

Awarded to: Professor Diane Watt

Details:
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.

Project Title: Paul Strand

Date of Award: 2011

Awarding Body: The Leverhulme Trust

Awarded to: Dr Martin Padget

Details:
A critical biography of Paul Strand, one of the leading photographers and creative intellectuals of the 20th Century

Project Title: Visiting Fellowship

Date of Award: 2011

Awarding Body: Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Awarded to: Professor Sarah Hutton

Details:

Project Title: Hawthornden Writer in Residence

Date of Award: 2011

Awarding Body: NAWE

Awarded to: Dr Tiffany Atkinson

Details:

Project Title: Visiting Professor, Barnard College, Columbia University

Date of Award: 2011

Awarding Body: Barnard College, Columbia University

Awarded to: Professor Sarah Hutton

Details:

Project Title: Welsh Writing in English, 1914 - 2009

Date of Award: 2010

Awarding Body: British Academy

Awarded to: Dr Damian Wlford Davies

Details:
As Volume 4 of the Oxford Literary History of Wales this is the most comprehensive history of the two literatures of Wales ever attempted. The Oxford Literary History of Wales brings 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.

Project Title: Hawthornden Writer in Residence

Date of Award: 2010

Awarding Body: NAWE

Awarded to: Dr Matthew Francis

Details:

Project Title: Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Women Writiers from Wales

Date of Award: 2009

Awarding Body: British Academy

Awarded to: Dr Sarah Prescott

Details:
This research covered an area which is under-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 were threefold. Firstly, 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, exploring 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, 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.

Project Title: Alabaster Girls

Date of Award: 2009

Awarding Body: Academi

Awarded to: Dr Damian Walford Davies

Details:
The award enabled Damian to complete his second solo collection, Alabaster Girls, to be published by Seren in 2012.

Project Title: Asian american Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters

Date of Award: 2008

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Dr Helena Grice

Details:
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.

Project Title: The Book of the Needle

Date of Award: 2007

Awarding Body: Academi

Awarded to: Dr Matthew Francis

Details:
The award allowed Matthew to take extra leave from teaching to work on his novel The Book of the Needle.

Project Title: Franco-British Intellectual Exchange, 1688 - 1789

Date of Award: 2006

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Professor Sarah Hutton

Details:
Part of a network of British and French scholars working on cultural transfer in the long eighteenth century.

Project Title: Women as Authors and Readersin Medieval England (ca. 1100 - 1500)

Date of Award: 2006

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Professor Diane Watt

Details:
This project examined 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.

Project Title: Maxine Hong Kingston

Date of Award: 2005

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Dr Helena Grice

Details:
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.

Project Title: Poetry in Contexts

Date of Award: 2004

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Professor Peter Barry

Details:
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

Project Title: Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons

Date of Award: 2004

Awarding Body: AHRC

Awarded to: Dr Sarah Prescott

Details:
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.