January
The most comprehensive database ever compiled of any European kingdom’s inhabitants in the central Middle Ages is published online by the University of Glasgow thanks to a grant from the AHRC. The database contains information on every person mentioned in more than 6,000 Scottish documents between 1093 and 1286.
Professor Rick Rylance, Chief Executive of the AHRC, speaks on the Radio 3 programme Night Waves to help launch the AHRC/Radio 3 collaboration New Generation Thinkers, a pilot scheme to find the public intellectuals of the future. The scheme attracts more than 1,000 applications for 60 places at BBC workshops and subsequent ten final places.
February
The online database ‘Early Modern London Theatres’ (EMLoT) is launched at the Globe Theatre in London. Thanks to an international research project funded by the AHRC and led by the University of Southampton, it makes freely available online for the first time a wealth of documentary evidence relating to theatres and society in London, both at the time of Shakespeare and later.
Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts joins leading figures from science, business and academia at an event at Tate Modern in London to launch ‘The Public Value of the Humanities’, a collection of essays commissioned by the AHRC and edited by Jonathan Bate and including contributions from Mary Beard, Onora O’Neill, Mike Parker Pearson, Christopher Breward and many others.
The University of Glasgow receives an award of nearly £1million from the AHRC to produce the first complete scholarly edition of the works of Robert Burns. The project will be responsible for the publication of six volumes over the next eight years including The Oxford Handbook to Robert Burns and The Collected Prose of Robert Burns, with another six to follow in the next decade.
A research award is made by the AHRC to support the next phase of the University College London project ‘Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction’ which allows the team to continue their ground-breaking study of the world-famous stone statues on Easter Island.
March
A major new initiative called Brighton Fuse is announced which brings together a consortium of experts to support innovation and economic growth and generate new business and employment opportunities. The project, developed by the AHRC and the Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), involves the city’s two universities and Wired Sussex, an umbrella organisation for over 2,000 digital, media and technology companies in the region.
A Concordat is signed by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Led by the AHRC, the agreement will bring together researchers and government officials to share knowledge and stimulate further research.
Professor Rick Rylance is elected as the new Chair of Research Councils UK (RCUK) Executive Group. Professor Rylance takes up the post a few months later in July.
The AHRC announces funding of nearly £12m for 27 research projects across the breadth of the arts and humanities, including the first large-scale history of the French language in Russia, video-art in Italy 1968-1994 and a comprehensive online edition of Newton's Theological Papers, amongst many others.
April
A silent film score by British composer Frederick Laurence receives its first public performance in over 80 years. Found in the attic of the grandson of Laurence thanks to research by Dr Julie Brown from Royal Holloway College and last performed in 1925, the score is performed at the Barbican Cinema as part of the British Silent Film Festival.
The latest round of AHRC Fellowships totalling over £2.5m of awards are made. Forty-nine researchers are funded in this round and the project topics cover a broad range of arts and humanities disciplines.
May
A new report is launched which reveals that the arts and humanities make a significant contribution to the UK economy in part thanks to researchers being so highly connected with UK businesses. Commissioned by the AHRC and undertaken by the Centre for Business Research (CBR) at the University of Cambridge, the Hidden Connections report surveys over 3500 academics in the arts and humanities and more than 2,500 businesses in all sectors of the UK economy.
A ground-breaking concert funded by the AHRC takes place in George Square Theatre, Edinburgh, exploring the prehistoric past through the use of film, sound and dance. Palaeophonics, a live multimedia public performance exploring ways humans have created and been inspired by sound and music since early human origins, brings together eight new works by composers, film-makers and archaeologists from across the world at the first concert of its kind.
June
The AHRC joins forces with Arts Council England and NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) to set up the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, a new £500,000 fund to allow arts and cultural organisations to harness digital technologies to connect with wider audiences and explore new ways of working.
BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC announce the ten winners of the inaugural New Generation Thinkers Scheme, the culmination of a nationwide search for the brightest academic minds with the potential to turn their ideas into fascinating broadcasts. The Guardian features the winners on its front page.
An AHRC-funded project, using the latest 3D scanning technology to recreate the tombs of a Tudor aristocrat, is discussed on Radio 4’s Today Programme. The project team led by art historian Dr Philip Lindley from the University of Leicester, academics from Oxford and Yale and scientists from the Space Research Centre in Leicester, uses technologies more often used to scan moon rocks to explore 16th-century tombs.
July
An innovative ‘all-in-one’ search engine is launched that allows users to access nine online databases, containing more than 13 million records relating to film, television and radio content. Developed by Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) and the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), the project is part of a £4m investment made under the AHRC’s Digital Equipment and Database enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) programme.
Research funded by the AHRC enables a new dating technique to be developed to give the first detailed picture of life in Stone Age Britain. Researchers at Cardiff University and English Heritage cross-reference radio carbon dating with statistical analysis and other archaeological dating techniques to give a clearer picture of events that occurred during the Neolithic period in Britain, around 6-4,000 years ago.
August
The AHRC funds a research project at the British Museum that will underpin its major international exhibition ‘Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam’ to be held in 2012. It will be the first major exhibition dedicated to the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which is central to the Muslim faith.
The AHRC announces the four successful consortia that will run its prestigious ‘Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy’ over the next four years. Representing an investment by the AHRC of some £16m over that time, the Hubs will build new partnerships and entrepreneurial capacity in the Creative Economy and increase the number of arts and humanities researchers actively engaged in research-based knowledge exchange.
The first Autonomy summer school is held at the University of Essex to help frontline professionals and researchers dealing with challenges surrounding autonomy and mental capacity. Attended by social workers, NHS staff, psychiatrists, researchers and local government workers, the three-day event – one of the outputs of commissioned research funded by the AHRC at Essex – highlights the practical issues faced by professionals in the field. The initiative receives coverage in the Guardian.
The secrets embedded in one of the earliest maps to show Britain in its geographically recognised form are uncovered, as AHRC-funded researchers at the Bodleian Library, King’s College London and Queen’s University Belfast launch the newly-digitised Gough Map. Drawn on two pieces of sheepskin in the 14th century, the map shows Great Britain on its side, before the convention of maps pointing north, and details green rivers and red-roofed cathedrals.
September
Pioneering fine art workshops, funded by the AHRC, are held to help consultant plastic surgeons from major UK hospitals work alongside academics at the University of Lincoln to develop drawing and modelling skills, which they can then apply to breast and facial reconstruction. The objective is to instil in surgeons the same aesthetic principles which underpin artists’ understanding of the form of the human body.
University of Southampton and British School at Rome archaeologists, leading an international excavation of Portus – the ancient port of Rome, announce that they have discovered what could be a large Roman shipyard. The team, funded by the AHRC and working with the Italian Archaeological Superintendancy of Rome, uncovers the remains of a massive building close to the distinctive hexagonal basin or ‘harbour’, at the centre of the port complex.
European efforts to coordinate activities to protect its cultural heritage take a significant step forward with the launch in Rome of the Heritage Portal. The portal, a freely accessible online resource for anyone interested in European cultural heritage science and built by the AHRC, brings the insights of scientific and technological research across Europe to bear on the enormous challenges of protecting European cultural heritage.
October
An innovative kitchen that gives step-by-step cooking instructions in French is developed by language experts and computer scientists at Newcastle University through research supported by five of the UK research councils, including the AHRC, through their RCUK Digital Economy Programme. The kitchen breaks new ground by taking language learning out of the classroom and linking it with an enjoyable and rewarding real-life activity.
The discovery of a manuscript hidden among papers in an ancient family archive sheds new light on the colourful career of poet and playwright Ben Jonson, thanks to funding from the AHRC and research undertaken at the universities of Nottingham and Edinburgh. The leading wit of his time and weighing in at just under 20 stone, Jonson famously completed a walk from London to Scotland in 1618 but because his own account of the journey was destroyed by fire, no direct record of the trip had been extant until now.
The experience of incivility shapes the way people feel about their communities and general social health more than crime statistics do, according to new research co-funded by the AHRC and ESRC which receives significant press and broadcast coverage. ‘Charm Offensive’, published by the Young Foundation, finds that the public still cares deeply about civility and challenges the common perception that Britain has been experiencing a spiral of decline into rudeness.
November
The ss Great Britain Trust and the University of Bristol announce an initiative that will see AHRC-funded doctoral students split their time between the ss Great Britain, the Brunel Institute and the University of Bristol to research the history of Brunel's iconic steamship from 1843 onwards.
The AHRC announces that Professor Mark Llewellyn, holder of the John Anderson Research Leadership Chair in English Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde, will be the AHRC’s new Director of Research. Professor Llewellyn begins his work at the AHRC in January 2012.
Scholars at the University of York launch a major research project focusing on the impact and extent of immigration into England in the Middle Ages. The project will create a database of around 80,000 immigrants who lived in England between 1330 and 1550, giving free public access to material that has never been available before outside academia.
An exhibition, curated by an AHRC-funded doctoral student, showcases some of the most important election posters of the 20th Century. Held at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, the exhibition delves into the Museum’s own unique collection of political posters, the largest in the UK.
December
A series of archaeological discoveries made in Oman challenge long-held assumptions about the timing and route of early human expansion out of Africa. Using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), AHRC-funded researchers led by Dr Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham claim that Nubian Middle Stone Age toolmakers had entered Arabia by 106,000 years ago, considerably earlier than geneticists have put forward for the modern human exodus from Africa.
The latest phase of a Bournemouth University project, based on initial work funded by the AHRC, makes the archaeology of Stonehenge more accessible than ever before. By adding layers of archaeological information to Google Earth technology, Google Under-the-Earth: Seeing Beneath Stonehenge is the first application of its kind to transport users around a virtual prehistoric landscape, exploring the magnificent and internationally important monument.
Images courtesy of the projects featured or AHRC