Image: Mazer known as the Bute or Bannatyne mazer, associated with Robert the Bruce. Copyright National Museum of Scotland, all rights reserved. Used with permission.
A nearly £1-million-pound, Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded, research project running between 2017 and 2020, led by Dr Alice Taylor (Reader in Medieval History, King's) and supported by Professor Dauvit Broun (University of Glasgow) and Professor Steve Boardman (University of Edinburgh).
The aim of the project is to show how innovative ways of representing medieval texts in digital media can yield new understandings of medieval political communities and their written manifestations. This is particularly important given the longstanding consensus that 'nations' as political units exist only in the modern era; our project aims to test that position.
It employs two full-time post-doctoral researchers (Matthew Hammond and John Reuben Davies) and works with the team at King's Digital Lab. We will also be producing an innovative new digital edition of the Declaration of Arbroath, in time for the 700th anniversary of the issue of this iconic document.
More information can be found on the project website or on the project Twitter feed.
King’s and the Royal Household are collaborating on digitizing, interpreting, and making freely and easily accessible and searchable the Georgian Papers held in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, only 15% of which have previously been published
The papers range from high political correspondence to kitchen records and accounts from 1714 to 1837 (although the bulk of the papers relate to Georges III and IV). A substantial portion of them are now available as digital images on the publicly available Georgian Papers Online as a result of this project. .
As academic directors, Professor Arthur Burns (Department of History) and Professor Karin Wulf (director of the principal American partner, the Omohundro Institute) are organising an exciting and innovative range of academic events, research opportunities and student and public engagement over the next few years, reflected on the project website.
These events and opportunities include working with a further partner, the Library of Congress in Washington, towards a major international exhibition on 'The Two Georges' (the Third and Washington) in 2020-1.
Those interested are encouraged to join the King’s Friends, the project network.
Farm-level Interdisciplinary approaches to Endemic Livestock Disease (FIELD)
A £1.5m 4-year collaborative project funded by the Wellcome Trust commencing on 1 September 2018.
Endemic diseases pose a major threat to livestock health, welfare, productivity and profit. They can also potentially undermine human health. These diseases are not new. Many of the tools to tackle them already exist and yet they remain a problem. This project aims to explain why, and to work out what could be done about them. It breaks new ground in bringing together experts from history, geography, economics and epidemiology.
Working with livestock producers, consumers, expert advisors and policy makers, we foreground the frequently neglected human element as a key influence on disease spread. By developing new insights into disease in the past and present, we aim to develop better predictions of its possible futures. Findings will be used to inform the policy and practice of endemic disease control.
The lead PI for this project is Professor Abigail Woods, Head of the King's Department of History.
The other PIs are:
Project partners:
The Henry III fine rolls project was a collaborative project combing expertise from the Department of History and Department of Digital Humanities at King's, the University of Oxford, the University of Christ Church Canterbury and The National Archives at Kew.
It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and ran from 2005 to 2012. The project made freely available on its website translations of the 56 Latin fine rolls of the reign of King Henry III of England (1216-1272) running to some 2 million words. The Department of Digital Humanities developed innovative methods to make the rolls electronically searchable. Since 'fines' were offers of money to the king for concessions and favours, the rolls open many windows onto the political, social and economic life of the country during a period of formative change.
The website had a large amount of interpretative material and was designed to appeal to a broad group of constituencies. In a 'fine of the month' feature, both members of the project team and those outside it commented on material of interest in the rolls. The main finding of the project was to demonstrate the impact of Magna Carta (sealed in 1215) and show how it ended arbitrary government by the king. The king had to rule in a new way, hence the development of the tax based parliamentary state.
The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016
Historical pageants were a hugely important part of twentieth-century British culture. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were involved in these often-large scale theatrical re-enactments of events from local and national history.
Pageants were mounted in a wide variety of various communities and institutions, from small churches, villages and youth groups to cities such as Liverpool and Manchester.
This AHRC-funded project was the first comprehensive study of this major cultural phenomenon. It resulted in:
- A fully-searchable multi-million-word database of more than 650 historical pageants, including a short essay on each pageant, all publicly accessible via the project website
- A series of exhibitions in Carlisle, Bury St Edmunds, and Scarborough, material from which can be found here
- Academic publications, including articles in journals, essays in books and about 50 conference papers
Project Team
- PI: Professor Paul Readman, King’s College London
- Co-Is: Angela Bartie, Edinburgh and Mark Freeman, UCL
- Researchers: Linda Fleming, Glasgow; Tom Hulme, Queen's University Belfast; Alex Hutton, King’s College London
- Technical Team: Paul Caton; Ginestra Ferraro; Luis Figueira; Paul Vetch; David Little; Geoffroy Noël; Miguel Vieira, King's College London and Charlotte Tupman, Exeter
See a full list of past project in the Department of History