Past Projects

The Architecture of lying-in was Emma Cheatle's project during her Institute Fellowship at Newcastle University (2015-2018). The research examined the buildings and interior spaces used for childbirth in England from the seventeenth century onwards. It evaluated their impact on the development of maternity practices, and the material understanding of the female body.

Until the 1750s, labour and delivery took place at home, the master bedroom carefully remade as a dark and airless ‘lying-in’ chamber.‘Lying-in’ described the month of recovery following labour. During this time the new mother recuperated, first bed-, then house-bound. The period ended with the public cleansing and thanksgiving ritual of ‘churching’.

From the 1750s the domesticity of maternity was more complex thanks to the emergence of lying-in hospitals. These hospitals were for the ‘industrious poor’. With lofty, neoclassical designs, containing roomy, airy wards of 6-8 beds, at each hospital a man-midwife was in charge. He had a formal space for medical experiment, including instrumental intervention and autopsy. Although welcome to women with poor domestic conditions, the hospitals offered a compromised, even dangerous, spatial experience. Further, as the risk of death in hospital rose throughout the eighteenth century, the man-midwife’s opportunities for dissection increased. This shifted the material understanding of the female body.

In this project, Emma drew on a range of archival and historical sources. This included architectural drawings and buildings, midwifery manuals, diaries, novels; and maps, woodcuts, watercolours and photographs. Using creative critical methods, Emma reconstructed the spaces of domestic and institutional lying-in. She examined their spatial and social affect on the body and home.

Emma Cheatle and Catalina Mejia Moreno wanted to create a discourse on voice and sound in medical spaces. They found inspiration in architectural, medical and performance art theory. They aimed to define a new area of interdisciplinary study: Architectural Medical Humanities.

The project proposed definitions and questions around verbal performance, architectural space and health. It explored how they shape each other or remain distinct or discrete. Topics included:

• historical or contemporary relationships between health issues such as dust, pollution, birth
• spaces including consulting rooms, hospital wards, operating/lecture theatres, clinics, domestic spaces, cities, and voices
• aspects and definitions of medical performance such as gestures and their spatial aspects; hierarchies and formalities, distances and protagonist proximity
• the fleeting ephemerality of voice against the permanency of architectural space
• the body as a determining factor
• other forms and definitions of voice in medicine: voice-hearing; internal voice; breath, and their spatial implications

There was also evaluation of the verbal forms of dissemination. This included radio or television broadcasts, recordings, film, lectures; or visual mediums. The latter incorporated wax models, historic woodcuts and medical manuals. Methods of exploration ranged from academic text to creative or performative practices.

On Wednesday 13th April 2016, the Institute hosted a Medical Humanities afternoon workshop. The aim was to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations with a view to launch new, innovative research projects. 50 researchers from across the HaSS and FMS Faculties attended the event.

The focus for the afternoon was on four strands, each containing three sessions:

Selfhood

• Health and the shaping of identity
• Minds
• Bodies (attitudes to, representations of)

Health and society

• Medicine, law and society
• Medical practices and rituals
• Influencing public debates

Patients

• Hearing from patients
• Patient-doctor interfaces
• Health behaviours (mapping; changing)

Practices and perceptions

• Senses
• Medical humanities methodologies
• Bioethics

After the event, a new mailing list was set up to make discussions easier. If you would like to join the list, please contact Clare Graham. A new Medical Humanities Steering Group launched to support future discussions in this area of research.

In 2015 the Institute supported the development of the script for a radio drama. The story focussed on the experiences of a group of military veterans located in Aden, Yemen in the 1960s. Meetings and workshops took place to help develop the script. This process brought together people from within and outside the university.

Dr Helen Limon, let the project, which evolved from an approach for help by the regional veteran support charity, Forward-Assist. The University was able to develop a strong working relationship with the charity. This project became part of a portfolio of research work. It prompted interest from Michael Harris, a commissioned BBC radio drama writer.

Michael heard Helen speak at the National Association for Writers in Education conference in Durham in 2015. He wanted to take the research through to a working proposal. The proposal developed with the veterans and caught the attention of the producer of BBC Radio 4 drama. The focus at the time was on stories of soldiers who served in the First World War, so this story's timing was not quite right. Helen hopes to review this work in the future with Forward-Assist.

Architecture Research Collaborative’s (ARC) exhibition and public talks covered the physicality and ascent of tall structures and artificial mountains. The project was temporarily installed in the Tyne Bridge’s North Tower. It provided a rare opportunity to explore one of Newcastle’s iconic buildings.

This event was part of Being Human, the UK’s only national festival of the humanities. The festival took place in over 45 towns and cities across the UK between 17-25 November 2016. The theme of the festival was ‘Hopes and Fears’.

Contemporary economic and social conditions are driving cities and their inhabitants ever higher into cloud-grazing skyscrapers and high-rises. We invited our audience to experience the history and mesmerising appeal of mountains and megastructures. The North Tower was unlit, unoccupied and unheated and without electrical supply. The event was set up as an entirely battery-powered show. The site was accessible from street level by a flight of stairs that led into the open tower cavity. The space was crisscrossed by steel supports, home to pigeons, prone to rain leaks, and echoed with humming traffic. Armed with a torch, each visitor navigated the exhibits.

The exhibits included:

• the installation ‘Everest Death Zone’ suspended in the vertical space by Architects Status
• Lucinda Grange; Amy Butt’s Sci-fi reading corner; a participatory sound installation using Tyne Bridge recordings by James Davoll and David de la Haye
• a curatorial cabinet of curiosity by Dr Christos Kakalis.

A programme of events and talks took place on the site over the week, including:

• architect Neil Barker’s talk Building the Tyne Bridge; a walking tour with Rutter Carroll
• Professor Steve Graham and Amy Butt discussing science fiction and the vertical city
• Dr Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes’ talk The Mountainous search for a modern architecture
• Dr Martin Beattie’s talk Travels on the edge of empire

The public was very enthusiastic about the opening of an iconic but rarely accessible Newcastle building as a site for Scaling the Heights. This has created ambition for further forays into temporary site-specific exhibits in the city. We hope this will profile the architectural research into the built environment that is coming out of ARC and APL.

The Institute supported this collaboration between HaSS Faculty, Newcastle University and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Durham University. Dr Ella Dzelzainis (Literature), Professor Máire Cross (French) and Professor Richard Clay (Digital Humanities) organised the project.

The story of the North East’s fall from its heights as a 19th-century industrial powerhouse is a familiar one. This interdisciplinary, cross-institutional discussion forum sought to generate an alternative narrative. It recognised the North East’s centrality in the generation of alternative cultural networks. It examined the North East as an engine for the movement of the people, goods, services and knowledge. These were essential to the expansion of the empire. It also acknowledged the complex legacies of imperialism.

The event attracted around 50 academics from departments ranging from Classics to the Business School. There were also external collaborators including Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Gateshead Libraries, the National Rail Museum, the Bowes Museum, and the Mining Institute. In small groups, attendees responded to the following questions:

• How was the North East a point of circulation and intersection, playing a part in the creation of the British Empire and shaped by empires across the globe?
• Who transformed the region?
• Who transmitted the region's influence through international networks of culture, including maritime, industrial, scientific, artistic, literary and financial?
• What resources and material objects in our institutions enable cultural recognition of the area as a global node of innovation and reception?
• How did the ingress and egress of people and their ideas shape the region and the relation between the local and the global?
• What radical and/or conservative cultural formations did the region give to and receive from imperial expansion?

The concluding feedback and plenary session produced a range of answers. It also generated further questions. These included:

• How do we move from the local to the global to link Newcastle’s nineteenth-century history to the birth of modernity?
• How does women’s experience map a crucial alternative story onto Newcastle’s ‘male’ heritage?

The Institute hosted the book launch for The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities.

Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton and Jennifer Richards edited this Landmark companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Within the book, contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities.

The volume is the first to comprehensively consider the scope of interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences. And in particular, how it might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human. With 'human' considered individually and collectively. The 36 chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields. They are always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking.

Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised. Each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic. These Afterwords outline future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge. They make an intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care to address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities is available from Edinburgh University Press.

Film screening co-hosted by the Institute.

NUHRI, Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal, School of Arts and Cultures and Research Centre for Film and Media screened Paper Tigers. The screening of the James Redford documentary film was in partnership with Keith Magee. There was a panel discussion after the screening with experts from the fields of education, film, media and health.

AHRC follow-on funding (97k; PI James Procter; CIs Gemma Robinson and Tom Schofield) supported completion of the first phase of the project. Project partners included:

• the British Library
• Bloodaxe Books
• Commonword
• the Scottish Poetry Library
• schools across England and Scotland

Working initially with 200 teachers and students, we re-purposed the critically acclaimed anthology, Out of Bounds. Caribbean poet, Fred D'Aguiar described the anthology as 'an alternative A-Z of Britain. We created a digital resource for schools in post-referendum Britain.

This collection of place-poems by black and Asian voices offers far-reaching opportunities to reflect on migration, diversity, and inclusion. These are key agendas in schools and British society. In addition to co-producing materials with schools, Out of Bounds has toured across the UK. It has travelled from the British Library to Scottish Poetry Library, from Manchester and Wales to Newcastle. The anthology itself has been widely cited in the national press and covered by the American public broadcaster: PBS.

Out of Bounds is available from Bloodaxe Books.

The first phase of the post-2014 impact study culminated in the creation of an app, a website, and a pamphlet for classrooms. The website will launch in tandem with the pamphlet in 2018.

A workshop explored the potential for collaborative research about the place of Newcastle and the North-East England in world history. The event took place on 1 July 2015, and the research period was from the middle ages to present day.

A group of 12 colleagues from across the Newcastle HASS faculty met with colleagues from Northumbria. They came from many disciplines, including History, Archaeology, English Literature, Art History and Music. Prof. Maxine Berg from Warwick University also attended. Prof. Berg is a renowned historian of both the British Industrial Revolution and early-modern global history.

Dr Scott Ashley (History) started the discussion. He gave a short presentation of the themes a research programme might include. This title was ‘Guns, Books and Coal: Newcastle and the North-East in Global History’. There was then a lively conversation around the table, as each participant explained their area of expertise and responses to the themes. After lunch in Northern Stage, Prof. Berg laid out her experiences of developing a global history programme at Warwick. She also gave her view on where the field is moving.

The day closed with a session devoted to the specifics of what a research funding application emerging from the themes of the day might look like. The session also covered practical issues such as developing a team, building impact and managing the project.

There was a feeling in the room that the interaction between the local and the global was a productive question to explore and could make a good research project. Scott Ashley is writing a grant application with Dr Annie Tindley (History) based on some of the ideas from the day. It is provisionally entitled ‘A Birthplace of the Anthropocene: An Environmental History of Britain’s First Fossil-Fuel Landscapes, c.1600-c.1830’.

The research will examine the global ecological and environmental impact of the emergence of a fossil-fuel economy. The focus will be through the lens of North-East England and its rich archival resources.

On 16th March 2016, the Humanities Research Institute held a symposium in collaboration with Kate De Rycker (Newcastle) and Peter Auger (London, Queen Mary). The event took place on 16 March 2016. It promoted foreign language skills and transnational collaboration in the humanities.

There were 20 participants from Newcastle, Northumbria, York, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Durham. The majority of attendees were PhD students and early career researchers.

Prof. Elizabeth Andersen gave a passionate defence of Modern Languages, a discipline which is under threat. She reminded the audience that there are institutions that are keen to encourage language learning. These include the ‘Open World Research Initiative’ (AHRC) and ‘Languages Matter More and More’ (British Academy).

Laura Leonardo outlined a pilot-scheme run by Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. lt incorporates online language courses and uses virtual classrooms and Skype-mentoring. The scheme also includes face-to-face teaching at the universities of Newcastle, Durham and Queen's University Belfast.

Participants agreed that early career researchers must be proactive in sharing information about their own areas of specialisation. This includes specialist language skills. The sharing of information also needs promotion across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Resources and have events have launched since, starting with a list of ‘Twenty ways to Promote Language Skills and Exchange’. An evolving guide of language resources is also available on the Early Modern Boundaries website.

This workshop led to the creation of an online network using funding from Peter Auger’s British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (BARSEA). This examined how working practices could better reflect research's transnational and multilingual nature .The Early Modern Boundaries Network launched in Autumn 2016. Hosted by the start-up company Mobilize, it will run until January 2019.

The network has 172 members from six continents. They can ask and answer research questions in their area of specialisation for other members.

Anyone interested in joining this network can find out more about the role of this online community and how to join on the Early Modern Boundaries website.

For early career researchers and PhD students in the North East, there was a free follow-up event called ‘Thinking Across Borders’. It took place at Newcastle University on the 18th September, 2017.

This event discussed the benefits for young researchers of building their own collaborative research environments.

For more information about this event, visit the Interdisciplinary Research Network’s website.

The Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of English Urban Commons’ brings together researchers from many disciplines. They plan to evaluate the past, present and future of commons. Newcastle’s Town Moor, Norwich’s Mousehold Heath, Bristol’s Clifton Hill and Brighton’s Valley Gardens are case studies.

Urban commons provide unique ‘green’ open spaces vital for health, culture, well-being and biodiversity. They have different legislative background and use-value to parks. Their ‘common’ use is often misunderstood and ill-defined. Many urban commons are now lost, neglected, underused, or threatened by austerity and commercialism.

This three-year project, through examination of case studies, aims to outline the status of urban commons. It will investigate their history of negotiation, resistance and freedom. It will also emphasise and promote the many benefits of open space for physical and mental wellbeing.

The research questions will go through inventive public engagement methods. The aim is to create a multifaceted, accountable definition of the urban common that redirects policy guidance and education.

The project will deliver a wide range of academic and public outcomes including:

• online resources including ‘Placebook’ histories, an online ‘Guide to Good Practice’ for further commons research
• a website and blog
• a radio essay on the political history of land ownership
• lively and accessible engagement and public activities
• oral histories, a final exposition including art, literature, exhibits, guided walking tours, exercise guides, talks, education materials and installations
• academic and creative outputs
• a monograph on the history and cultural value of urban common land, journal articles, poetry and art

This is an exciting project. It aims to restore political and cultural confidence in and provide public agency for, the future of these pieces of land.

Peter McDermott / Newcastle Town Moor / CC BY-SA 2.0

National festival of the humanities, Being Human, announced their 2016 festival theme as Hope & Fear. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for the Vital North Partnership to get involved.

On 24th November, the Children’s Literature Unit hosted an event at Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books. The aim of "Hope and Fear in Children’s Books" was to engage non-academic audiences in children’s literature research. The event aimed to do this in a fun and interesting way.

Dr Lucy Pearson gave an overview of how children’s books engage with hope and fear. Attendees then explored the "Michael Morpurgo: A Lifetime in Stories" gallery. Dr Jessica Medhurst gave us a guided tour of the Michael Morpurgo exhibition.

Next, we headed up to the Attic. The Seven Stories Collections Team and Dr Pearson ran a hands-on session with material from Seven Stories’ Catherine Storr, David Almond and Judith Kerr collections. Seven Stories’ Storycatchers Jayne and Lawrence introduced visitors to the Rhyme Around the World gallery. Here attendees explored hopes and fears in nursery rhymes.

The evening closed with a drinks reception and quiz in the Attic, sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute.

Read more about this event in the being part of Being Human blog post by Rachel Pattinson, Vital North Partnership Manager.

The installation took place at the Laing Art Gallery and Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne. A wooden filing drawer unit contained different visual displays and sound pieces. These related to the history of spaces used for birth from the 17th to 19th centuries.

One of the drawers contained record cards for parents to be, parents, grandparents, and midwifery/obstetric professionals. These cards shared their ‘spatial maternity stories’. Recordings and interviews of participants took place in a separate screened space. The oral history recordings and written cards will inform Emma’s further research and a radio play.

This October, Newcastle City Futures took over Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books. The weekend of Big Draw Festival activities encouraged children and families to design and build their future city.

Over 500 people visited Seven Stories throughout our Big Draw weekend. 2016’s STEAM Powered Big Draw Festival aims to inspire illustrators everywhere. The goal is to explore creative innovation, enterprise, digital technologies and the arts through drawing.

This seemed like a perfect theme for Seven Stories to connect with the Newcastle City Futures Urban Living Partnership. This is a project led by Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones at Newcastle University. Newcastle City Futures aims to get people and organisations in NewcastleGateshead talking and thinking about the city's future needs. The project encouraged people to work together to foster innovation.

Children and families added to our large map of Newcastle and Gateshead to create their vision of Newcastle in 2065. And their creativity was amazing! Visitors built homes, cultural, sports and science venues, businesses, hotels, transport systems, power stations and several bridges. The children organically created pretty much everything you’d need in a future city.

Dr Emine Thompson and students from Northumbria University came in to run a ‘Your City, You Design It!’ workshop. We looked at the streets of Newcastle in 3D and then participants designed a new Northumberland Street using SketchUp. It’s going to look pretty different in 2065…

You can find out more about these designs for the future - and see more images from the workshops - in the blog post by Rachel Pattinson, Vital North Partnership Manager.

Read Building a new city with Newcastle City futures.

Chaired by Dr Emma Cheatle, School of Architecture and Humanities Research Institute, Newcastle University.

This session consolidated previous conversations on urban common land inspired by academic research on the Town Moor, Newcastle. The session lasted 30 minutes.The aim was to stimulate and promote an interdisciplinary evaluation and further research of urban commons.

There were speeches inspired by Thomas Spence, Newcastle’s eighteenth-century advocate of common ownership. The five speakers were:

• Professor Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Newcastle University
• Dr Rachel Hammersley, History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University
• Dr John Wedgewood Clarke, Creative Writing, University of Hull
• Al Oswald, former English Heritage Landscape Archaeologist; PhD candidate, University of York
• Dr Alessandro Zambelli Architecture, University of Brighton

The speakers gave four-minute ‘manifestos’ on common land, suggesting its provenance, history, politics, and possible futures.

After the speeches, there was a discussion on the retrospective and prospective value of common land as space in and around cities. A film accompanied the session. It presented visual material and soundscapes of the Town Moor, Newcastle.

Co-organised by Samantha Knapton and Katherine Rossy and supported by the Institute, the workshop brought together scholars and experts of UNRRA. The workshop aimed to reveal how humanitarian needs conflicted with administrative and political restrictions within the context of WWII. It also considered its immediate aftermath.

UNRRA’s reputation amongst its contemporaries has caused this pioneering organisation to fall by the wayside when studying 20th-century history. Sandwiched between the historical giants of the Second World War and the Cold War, the topic of post-war reconstruction is gaining momentum.

Forced population displacement across the world has recently surpassed the levels caused by the Second World War. It has become imperative to look to the first organisation entrusted with helping those devastated by atrocities in that war’s aftermath.

To some observers, the Displaced Persons (DPs) of 1945 are showing alarming similarities to the refugees of the modern world. Through understanding the intricacies of UNRRA’s organisation, its achievements and failures. We can begin to comprehend the making of our modern refugees.

You can find out more by viewing the full UNRRA programme and UNRRA abstracts‌. Or, by reading a Workshop Report: Beyond Relief and Rehabilitation – UNRRA in Historical Perspective, 1943-1947 a Workshop Report: Beyond Relief and Rehabilitation written for the Centre for the Study of Internationalism.

Digital Humanities is now a mature discipline. But its methods and parameters, the forms it takes, and even its nomenclature, are fluid and up for debate.

This June 2018 event, brought to Newcastle Jane Winters, Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Advanced Study London. Jane is an expert in the analysis of Big Data in humanities, especially historical, research.

She presented her view of the current Digital Humanities landscape in the UK. This included her proposal for a new national Digital Humanities scholarly society. In return, we talked about how we at Newcastle ‘do digital’ in our humanities, arts and social science teaching and research. Richard Clay , Professor of Digital Cultures, addressed current and future work in digital cultures at Newcastle.

Wen Lin, Lecturer in Human Geography, discussed digital mapping in a location-aware society. James Cummings, Senior Lecturer in English and Digital Humanities, presented aspects of the digital editing project, Animating Text at Newcastle (ATNU).

The workshops included:

• a walk across campus
• translation
• an experiment with doing research in comics form and the archive
• an exercise in material writing with a cube of ice
• a display of a travelling site-writing table

We also addressed the possibilities and constraints of publishing creative critical writing. We did this with the editors of CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary. We also collaborated with the editors of The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice.

Companies, Commerce, and Consumers in the North-Atlantic World, 1783-1821.

David Hope is an economic historian specialising in the history of British overseas trade circa 1700 to 1850. He is particularly interested in the connections between commerce, colonialism, and consumption. The research incorporates trading companies, commodities, merchants, and distribution. David is the Economic History Society Anniversary Fellow. This is a one-year postdoctoral position. It is co-sponsored by the Economic History Society, Newcastle University, and the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

David is writing his first monograph on the subject of the late-eighteenth and early 19th-century British Atlantic fur trade. The publication advances his doctoral thesis beyond the records of the Hudson's Bay Company. It uses new research into Scottish-Canadian merchant papers undertaken in Montreal, Ottawa, and Winnipeg over the summer of 2018. The book explores how indigenous peoples, merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, and consumers used fur for wealth, warmth, and wonder. This happened across and beyond the British Atlantic.

The book explores the British fur trade at the close of the eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth century. Pelts shipped across the Atlantic for sale in the global port of London. Intensive exploitation of fur pushed the rapid geographic expansion of the trade. The North American animal pelt trade was in the millions for this period. It spread across North America in the late eighteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, there were new sources. These were in South America and the islands and archipelagos of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans. Atlantic, imperial, and global in its scope, the book examines the diverse layers of exploitation of the fur trade. By studying the entire commodity chain — from trap to trimming — it situates the fur trade within the wider Atlantic economy.

There are new insights into the organisation of overseas trade. It also explores the distribution and consumption of global luxuries and the synergy between environment and empire. David's research incorporates cultural, business, economic, environmental, maritime, imperial, Atlantic, and global history. He is keen to collaborate with scholars from other disciplines. In particular, he would like to work with others to explore the historical impact of the eighteenth-century 'world of goods'.

Before the fellowship, he worked as a Teacher in History at Newcastle University (2016-18). He completed his doctorate at Northumbria University in September 2016.

The people of Newcastle and the North East, and visitors to the region, have a long engaged with what we would now call ‘civil rights’ campaigns. This long pre-dates the visit of Dr Martin Luther King but provides a context for the Freedom City celebrations.

This project presents that history in an innovative format; an anthology of comics. It aims to reach a large public audience, including many children and young people, who would not usually engage with historical research.

The comics anthology is a collaboration between researchers at the University and some of the best comic artists and writers around. The anthology will be widely distributed as well as serialised in the Newcastle Journal. The comic will then form the basis of a framework for teachers, to take this unique history into schools.

Working with the community to create realistic virtual models of WW1 wrecks

Following its surrender and internment, the scuttling of the German fleet took place in Scapa Flow, Orkney. The date was June 21, 1919. Salvage operations raised most of the ships; seven remain on the seabed.

The wrecks have been extensively dived. A series of multi-beam sonar mapping exercises have attempted to measure the wrecks’ changing structures over recent years.

What has not been researched is how these wrecks have changed over time. This is both in terms of physical decay and their changing meanings for the public. The wrecks are visited by thousands of divers from around the world annually. They are of great significance to local communities. The wrecks provide a charismatic vehicle for connecting a wide variety of people to WW1 history, heritage and legacies.

This project, led by Professor Matthew Grenby, works with the community to create realistic virtual models of the wrecks. This uses new 3D photogrammetric techniques to try to understand how the wrecks are eroding structurally. This also preserves their current state for the future record.

This will enhance the local ‘Scapa 100’ initiative. It will ensure that robust data management underpins continuing wreck modelling and mapping efforts. It will also provide a lasting technical framework that community members and diver volunteers can contribute research to.

Our project facilitates effective volunteer participation. It does this by ensuring that volunteer divers will be able to add the photographs they take to the larger cache. They will also be able to index and archive them. This all contributes to the larger visual capture of the wrecks by photogrammetry.

Preparations for the 2019 centenary provide a perfect opportunity to explore what has happened to the ships. Their role in the commemoration of WW is a further point of discussion. How we can conserve and present this important element of maritime heritage is another important consideration.

It is possible to know a great deal about the function of democracy in eighteenth-century Britain. Surviving poll books tell us, for instance, how each voter cast his vote.

We can discover which particular segments of the electorate supported which candidates. We can also see how the votes stacked up over the course of an election that lasted several days. The first part of this project brings all this information together. It builds on the successful London Electoral History project. It will digitise provincial poll books and make data open to analysis.

Beyond this, the project seeks to integrate polling data with research into electoral culture more generally.

It references elements that formed the electoral experience in the 18th century, including:

• pamphlets
• images
• rituals
• practices
• material culture (clothes, cockades, jewellery and tableware)

We have recovered and re-recorded election ballads, and commissioned the making of electoral objects. Our aim is to recover the full experience of eighteenth-century elections. We present this material digitally in ways that enable scholarly enquiry and are accessible to the public.

The underlying aim is to understand how democracy worked, and how people participated in electoral culture. This is in the context of an age before widespread suffrage. The project will look at how this involvement paved the way for the franchise extensions. We would like to link 'proto-democracy’ to what could be a ‘post-democratic’ society in 21st-century Britain. In both societies, few may vote, but there exist many alternative opportunities for productive engagements with democratic process.

Find out more, visit our pilot project.

This project takes inspiration from Newcastle’s connection to Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The university and city will explore this connection during Freedom City 2017. The exhibit offers the chance to contemplate the black freedom struggle in one American city in a compelling multi-sensory way.

The focus is on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, famed for its central role in the US steel industry. It is one of the many cities where African Americans flocked to find better opportunities during the Great Migration. They also found new forms of segregation.

Ben Houston is the project coordinator. He directed the Remembering African American Pittsburgh (RAP) oral history project before he came to Newcastle. The exhibit matches digital audio clips from selected interviews with historic photos taken by the renowned Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris. Harris was a longtime Pittsburgh resident. His archive of over 80,000 images is one of the finest photographic archives of black urban life in the world. The combination of spoken memories and the visual imagery serves as an example of how African Americans experienced and fought against racism.

The exhibit Not As It Is Written: Black Pittsburgh in Voice and Image will run at the Great North Museum: Hancock during Freedom City. A similar version will feature at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh from 28 July 2017 to February 2019. The Carnegie Museum of Art is the home of the Teenie Harris archive.

Sound and Music in the Town Planning Movement, 1898-1939

Dr Jonathan Hicks (Institute Research Fellow)

This project lends a critical ear to the first major planning movement of the 20th century, one that can be traced back to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow, first published in 1898 under the title A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.

We can gain some measure of Howard’s influence by looking at the projected endpoint of my study: a 1939 documentary film entitled simply The City. Planned and shot in the eastern United States, this film followed the line espoused by cultural critic and urban theorist Lewis Mumford, who was one of the keenest advocates of Howard’s ideas in the New Deal era. The arc of the film runs from a Romantic vision of an old New England village to the planned ‘Green Cities’ of modern-day New Jersey, via the stresses and strains of the modern metropolis (represented, of course, by the towering office blocks and hurried commuters of Manhattan). What makes the documentary remarkable, especially for my purposes, is the musical score composed by Aaron Copland – a score completed the same year as Copland’s incidental music for the unsuccessful Broadway play, Quiet City. In both his film and stage work, we find Copland exploring urban and pastoral tropes, providing a musical counterpoint to the verbal argument.

If Copland’s contribution provides a logical conclusion for my study – before the outbreak of global conflict, which radically altered the scale and scope of urban planning – the origins of my topic reach back into the late 19th century and the debates sparked, in particular, by the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The first chapter of the book I plan to write at NUHRI thus places Howard and his contemporaries in the context of a broader concern with the social and political life of post-urban communities. At the very centre of Howard’s blueprint of the Garden City was a cluster of civic buildings, including a Concert Hall and Theatre. In practice, most of the developments that were realized after his design featured a single, multi-use hall, which played host to a range of musical and dramatic activities. Despite the fact that many of the communities sketched or inspired by Howard (notably Letchworth, Welwyn, and Hampstead Garden Suburb) now hold substantial archives detailing the work of clubs and societies, including active musical and theatrical groups, there has been almost no research to date into how the cultural practices of Garden City settlements related to, or diverged from, the planners’ visionary claims.

My research will take advantage of the abundant source material in order to ask wide-reaching questions about the importance of sound and music in what Henrietta Barnett, a key figure in the planning movement, termed ‘practicable socialism’.

My four case studies are grounded in the work of four different planners and critics:

• Howard and Barnett provide the first two examples, with a focus on their roles in developments close to London
• I then turn to Patrick Geddes, a biologist-cum-urbanist who made his name trying to refashion Dunfermline as the ‘Bayreuth of the north’ before undertaking consultancy work in India and Palestine, where he advocated musical performance as part of a drive to activate historical associations between ‘folk’ and land
• my final case study centres on Mumford’s advocacy of ‘green’ planning in the United States, which, as it happens, was where Howard began his career, as a stenographer, in the nineteenth century.

One of the main concerns of my research is the shared historicism of architects and composers: ‘mock-tudor’ was an insult thrown equally at Letchworth Morris Men, Welwyn recorder players, and Hampstead homes with black-on-white timber. By exploring the details of musical practices – professional and amateur, occasional and everyday – I hope to cast new light on the cultural assumptions and ambitions of an international network of cultural localists. At the same time, the word ‘sound’ in my title signals a sincere commitment to listen beyond the confines of the musical to the broader auditory structures of feeling in the new suburbs and cities.

Like the well-documented noise abatement campaigns of the early 20th century, the Town Planning Movement understood urban noise as a symptom of a broader sickness. However, Howard and Co. envisaged a more holistic remedy than the double-glazing and earplugs of the anti-noise brigade: they thought the good life was the quiet life and that is a formulation that, I think, bears further scrutiny.

The Living Legacies 1914-1918 First World War Engagement Centre aims to bring together communities. It particularly concerns communities in Northern Ireland and the North East of England. It does this through connecting projects that concern the First World War and its continued resonance.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council fund the Centre. This is part of their ‘World War One and Its Legacies’ scheme. It also benefits from the Heritage Lottery Fund from 2014 until 2019.

In the first three years, the Institute and NISR supported Research Associate Dr Emma Short to record activities and organise events. These took place at Newcastle University.

This collaboration has substantial potential to progress research. It also benefits our shared memory of the First World War. The work carried out by Living Legacies builds on and fosters existing and emerging research across the University.

This includes Dr Jane Webster’s NISR-funded development of the Armstrong FWW memorial into the Armstrong Digital Memory Book. It also includes the subsequent Universities at War project. The latter is a collaboration with Durham University that emerged from this project.

Living Legacies ran university events that aimed to:

• encourage and develop collaboration between academics and community partners
• increase public engagement with the work taking place at Newcastle University

One such event was ‘Your Community in the First World War’, which took place during September 2015. The event featured presentations from existing HLF-funded projects. This included Tynemouth WW1 Commemoration Project, Durham at War, Wor Women on the Home Front, and Universities at War. There were also presentations from the HLF and FWW Centenary Partnership. Community researchers had the opportunity to network, meet and discuss ideas with academic researchers.

It is now used to describe specific moments of systemic collapse. These include tipping points and systemic dysfunction.

It is also applied to processes of:

• systemic instability
• petrification
• uncontrollable change, such as precarity, austerity and global warming

In popular parlance, it's associated with moments of danger or states of emergency. This is at the expense of concepts of productive transformation such as:

• regeneration
• revolution
• utopia

The word ‘crisis’ derives from ancient Greek krinein. It refers to the human ability to differentiate. The term has medical discourse roots. It denotes the turning point in an illness, leading to either recovery or death.

It is also the root of humans’ ability to engage with their surroundings in a ‘critical’ way. This implies the human ability to change surroundings through ‘differentiating’ and ‘making decisions’.

‘Crisis’ equally refers to issues of the human condition and human-altered conditions. It also alludes to human faculties that respond to these conditions.

Our goal is to better understand what humanities bring to an exploration of ‘crisis’. This exploration will take place through interdisciplinary partnerships.

If you want to more or become involved in our research, contact Shirley Jordan.

Joan Flower and her illegitimate daughters, Margaret and Phillippa, faced trial. It followed the 'murder' of a young boy at Belvoir Castle.

Popular ‘cheap print’ reported the crime using constructed voices of the executed women.

This project is a creative response to academic research. The research is on the voices of marginalised and disenfranchised early modern women.

It will incorporate cross-disciplinary, collaborative workshops involving literary scholars, historians, and creative practitioners. It will culminate in a staged reading.

The project aims to develop the conversation between academic and creative interests. It will foster collaborations arising from the meeting point of these two worlds.

For more information, contact Emma Whipday.

For further information on this project please contact either Neelam Srivastava or Daniel Siemens.

For more information about the Gramsci Research Network please contact Emilio Zucchetti.

This concept has led to the recording of these ties and their transmission as a form of knowledge. Family history’s popularity, and use in a variety of heritage contexts, engages the public.

The project aims to bring together Newcastle scholars whose work speaks to the theme. It will also involve regional and external stakeholders. Partners will include the:

• National Trust
• Heritage England
• the BBC
• Newcastle City Council
• Newcastle Libraries

Northumberland & Durham Family History Society will also be collaborators.

For more information, please contact Anton Caruana-Galizia.

We're protecting and enhancing our archives.

Archives are central to much of the work supported by The Institute.

A key feature of our activities in this area has been the development of new models of access to archives.

This will encourage those not known for engaging with archives to access and use them. In some cases, it could encourage co-curation of archival material.

We are developing a strategy for archives. It connects to other themes that are in development, including:

• medical
• maritime
• digital humanities

We're also funding an internship. The holder will work with the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums service. They will exploit the extensive archives held here in Newcastle.

We are exploring opportunities to work with the British Library and Turing Institute. We want to connect to their work in the North East on data-driven libraries.

As we move towards remote and online approaches to research, the use of archival and secondary data is set to increase. This event explored critical philosophical and methodological approaches to the creation and use of digital research archives. In particular, it examined the ethical complexities and philosophies that underpin the creation of archives, calling into question the uncritical use of secondary data and asking how such data came to be.

The recording of the event can be found here.

For more information contact Jennifer Richards.

In a typical app triage experience, patients are asked to commit their faith to a chat bot exchange during which they are asked a series of diagnostic questions. Their AI collocutor responds with its knowledge derived from training on presumably large but otherwise unrevealed diagnostic exchanges. Where does this data come from? To what kind of patient did this data belong? What were the outcomes of their diagnosis and subsequent treatment? We don’t know but we are asked to rely on knowledge developed from that data, with the most serious consequences if the wrong assumptions are made.

Our project explores the ethics of privacy and consent in so-called ‘triage’ apps. Our work takes the form of a parody of AI triage apps based on a set of relatively simple machine learning algorithms designed and the affordances of modern mobile phones.

We are interested in creatively exploring the intersection of financial interests, data privacy, training bias and AI decision making. We match many of the bullet points you provide including issues of

• Trust in AI decision making and the decisions and data that underpin it
• Data exclusion and representation
• Transparency in the processing and acquisition of data
• Data privacy
• Holistic vs transactional understandings of ‘care’
• Material critiques of AI materials, processes and context

This project is a collaboration involving Dr Mwenza Blell, Dan Foster Smith, Kypros Kyprianou and Tom Schofield.

For more information about this project contact Tom Schofield.

Embodied understanding of reality relates to the physical and psychical interpretation of an actual or imaginary situation. Besides the multisensory, bodily realisation of an environment, human experience involves also memories, thoughts and beliefs. The reciprocal interrelation between these tangible and intangible components can lead to a phenomenal, eventful, space-time that is fluid and vibrant as a living organism.

Revisiting the way phenomenology has been practiced by different disciplines, this forum aims to explore embodied experience through the lens of diverse disciplines: architecture, music, literature, performance studies, philosophy, geopolitics.

For more information please email: Christos.Kakalis@ncl.ac.uk.

Our project sits at the intersection of many fields that are often held as disparate. All are fundamental to understanding what it is to be human. How might we apply this understanding to ‘novel beings’.

With Wellcome Trust support, we established a network of relevant expertise. This includes perspectives from:

• bioethics
• philosophy of mind
• company law
• medical law
• regulatory theory
• neuroscience
• biomedical sciences

It also brings together computer science, science and technology studies, and clinical practice. Our aim now is to include a greater wealth of perspectives from the humanities.

We envision this including disciplines such as:

• anthropology
• sociology
• literary studies
• creative arts culture

All these disciplines engage with considerations around what it is to be human. We are confident that work in these areas will lead to new horizons in our research.

For more information about our project, please contact Sarah Morley.

We're building a world class research network.

Newcastle is unique in having so much research engaging with orality and/or voice. This includes:

• oral health
• oral cultures
• oral histories
• internal voice
• physical voice
• performing voice

This is strong in the faculties of Humanities and Social Science and Medical Science. But this cluster of interests and expertise remains hidden from view (even to us).

We ran an Institute Banner project in 2018 called Recovering the Voice. It identified how much scope there is for research on the voice. It also made clear the desire of researchers in the faculties to work together.

The Institute is supporting the development of a network of scholars. It will bring together colleagues interested in investigating questions related to voice.

This includes the physical voice as carrier of meaning and empowerment through voicing. It also looks at those involved in caring for and recovering the voices of others.

Contact Pippa Anderson for more information.

For more information about this project please contact Gianluca Foschi (PGR)

For more information about this project please contact either Sarah Campbell or Karen Corrigan.

We're celebrating our relationship with the sea.

The city of Newcastle has strong links with the sea. Newcastle was a vibrant port city. The Tyne was home to the world’s leading shipbuilders. They were at the cutting edge of maritime design and technology and Newcastle was at the centre of a global network of port cities. At the same time the North East coastline, once scarred by old industry is now recognised as a vital natural resource that needs to be conserved and explored.

Maritime Humanities brings together academics from across the university along with key external partners such as Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Local Authorities and The National Trust to improve our understanding of the enduring relationship we have with the sea.

The institute supports the Maritime Humanities Hub project, which seeks to tell the story of Tyneside and the sea. It will also revive links with distant cities Newcastle to which Newcastle was once connected and explore the areas shipbuilding heritage. Contact Stella Ghervas for more information or visit our .

We also support the Seascapes project. Seascapes brings together a multitude of organisations and communities along the North East coast. It seeks to involve local communities in the conservation of this valuable resource and in the exploration of its rich heritage and natural wonders.

Within the broad area of life writing, encompassing, for instance, autobiography, confession, diary, meditation, etc., the genre of autofiction has gained special prominence in recent decades and years. It is generally considered to have found its first voices (Serge Doubrovsky, Nina Bouraoui, Catherine Millet, et al.) and theoretical treatments (Arnaud Genon, Philippe Lejeune, Jacques Lecarme, et al.) in the Francophone world, but has more recently emerged both in Anglophone contexts (Cusk, Lerner, Moshfegh) and in other European and world languages (Knausgård), both in practice and in theory.

Contemporary continental philosophy is concerned with a plethora of topics, issues and problems, but above all it is a philosophy of the contemporary world, despite also being historical and untimely. In other disciplines – and above all in those concerned with the study of literature – autofiction has increasingly been written about in recent years (e.g., Dix 2018; Wagner-Egelhaaf 2019), but continental philosophy has largely been silent about the phenomenon of autofiction. And yet autofiction raises a large number of fascinating questions and challenges for contemporary continental philosophy, some of which this workshop seeks to address.

This workshop aims to explore the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and literature, between writing and thinking, between theories of the subject and constructions of the self. In order to maintain its focus, it will specifically be concerned with recent and contemporary autofiction and not with other kinds of life writing or historical occurrences of autofiction, although questions of theoretical genre demarcation and of historical precedents may inevitably arise.

Programme:

10:00 Arrival and Introduction

10:30 Claire Boyle, “Queer Becomings: Autofiction and the Fashioning of the Self in the Writings of Nina Bouraoui and Fatima Daas”

11:00 Antonia Wimbush, “Writing the Exiled, Gendered, Homosexual Self in Nina Bouraoui’s Tous les hommes désirent naturellement savoir”

11:30 Christopher Kul-Want, “Formations of Phantasy in Autofiction and The Sexual Life of Catherine M.”

12:00 Pauline Henry-Tierney, “Sex, Subjectivity and Situation: Nelly Arcan’s Phenomenological Autofiction”

13:00 Lunch

14:00 Teresa Ludden, “Writing the Not-Self in Texts by Friederike Mayröcker: Auto-affection, Difference and Autofiction”

14:30 Miriam Baldwin, “Autofiction and Self-Learning: Between Fact and Fiction”

15:00 Andrea Rehberg, “The Birth and Death of Subjectivity in Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother”

15:30 Jill Marsden, “The Elimination of Self as an Aesthetic Project in Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Olivia Laing’s Crudo”

16:00 Final Thoughts

Community Storytime is a joint project across schools teaching linguistics, language and literature. Staff and students will come together with specialists from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics to train in delivering interactive story and song sessions. We will then jointly deliver weekly sessions free of charge for under 5s on campus, providing central Newcastle's preschoolers and their families with welcoming, friendly and regular access to a new world of language and ideas. The project will also provide opportunities for students who are interested in early years, primary teaching, speech and language therapy and child development to gain practical experience working with young children.

In psychological therapies involving speakers of limited English proficiency, interpreters play a critical role in facilitating communication between therapists and therapy service users. As language is at the core of talking therapy, the presence of an interpreter certainly has an impact on the three-party interaction and the quality of care provided to service users. This project aims to investigate the complexity of triadic interaction and the challenges facing clinical psychologists and interpreting professionals when working with each other in mental health setting. Bringing together clinical psychologists and interpreters, this project hopes to promote better understanding and build up trust between two professionals through interprofessional collaboration.

For more information about this project, please contact Jade Biyu Du (Biyu.Du@newcastle.ac.uk). 

Through discussion and screening this project explores cultural and industrial changes as well as innovations in practice to consider what kinds of stories can be brought to the screen. Writers will share experiences of collaboration, and reflect on training needs, opportunities and challenges for the next generation of writers. The project will involve scholars (including delegates from the French Studies conference running alongside), students and practitioners of screen media. This interdisciplinary, transnational project considers contemporary screenwriting practices from cultural, creative and industrial perspectives. Issues for debate include:

• screenwriters’ professional situation and practice – precarity and collaboration
• current industry challenges and impact for the next generation of writers

Cutting across creative practice, literary/screen arts and humanities, this project fosters intercultural engagement and knowledge exchange for students, scholars and practitioners of screen media and creative writing. It showcases screenwriting practice and research (Gharavi; Leahy and Vanderschelden) in an international context, connecting with a major conference (French Studies) and regional stakeholders (e.g. North East Screen). 

For more information about this project please contact Dr Sarah Leahy sarah.leahy@newcastle.ac.uk

Economic Humanities brings together researchers who are interested in the reciprocal relationship between the arts and social sciences. In particular, we interrogate the cultural metamorphosis through which economics was divested of the humanitarian concerns that were crucial to its Enlightenment origins, and became aligned with the ‘dismal’ pursuit of profit. By establishing a network across the fields of literature, history, business studies, law, philosophy, politics and beyond, we explore how economics shares with the humanities a view that individuals are driven by desire, imagination and creativity, as well as consider how this perspective can transform how we understand ‘value’ today.

For queries about the project, please contact Leanne Stokoe (leanne.stokoe@ncl.ac.uk)