Staff at the Centre have been involved in several large externally funded projects:
Invisible Mentors: British Poetry in Partnership, 1960-2020Â is an AHRC Leadership Fellowship Project, led by Dr Will May. This project will uncover the history of mentoring in British poetry since 1960, chronicling its development alongside the growth of creative writing courses in HEIs, the informal networks of independent poetry presses, and schemes supported by literary festivals, publishers, and arts organisations. It will use the insights of cultural, literary and archival history to address recommendations and reports from the creative industries, and economic and structural critiques of the sector. It will contend that mentoring’s hidden history has not only shaped our notions of authorship, creative practice, and the professional artist, but our expectations of the institutions and funders that support them. This project is being pursued in collaboration with Artful Scribe and Winchester Poetry Festival.
Voices in the Gallery  is an AHRC Innovation Leadership Fellowship project, led by Dr Sarah Hayden, working in partnership with John Hansard Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary to explore contemporary artâs invisible (withheld) textuality, as it manifests in the voiceover and voiced writing. As part of the project, Hayden curated the exhibition, Many voices, all of them loved, at John Hansard Gallery in 2020. This exhibition featured work by Emma Wolukau Wanambwa, Laure Prouvost, Kader Attia, Willem de Rooij, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Liza Sylvestre.
History of Financial Advice is a three-year AHRC-funded project that is writing the first comprehensive history of the genre of personal financial advice. The team includes economists, historians and literary critics as well as partnerships with a financial think tank, a financial library and the key providers of financial literacy education in the UK.
Calling the Shots is a four-year, AHRC-funded research project that investigates what is distinctive about the work of women in British cinema and what obstacles women face in the industry. Working with project partners including the BFI, Women in Film and Television UK, BECTU, Birds Eye View, and Harbour Lights Cinema, the project team are conducting primary research through a detailed statistical analysis of British films from 2000-2015, and conducting interviews with 50 women in six key filmmaking roles.
In 2014-2015 the Centre supported the AHRC and Arts Council funded exhibition Show Me the Money: the Image of Finance from 1700 to the present which was shown in five locations across two years. The Centre was involved with the events accompanying the exhibition when it was in Hampshire, including a two-day event, The Image of Finance: Why Jane Austen on the ÂŁ10 Note Matters, a public talk by activist Caroline Criado-Perez, an artistâs evening on the subject of âShadow Moneyâ and a Poetry symposium JHG3. Show Me the Money: the Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present
In 2012 the Centre hosted a Symposium celebrating the centenary of the poet F. T. Prince bringing together scholars, editors, and poets for conference papers, an exhibition of Prince’s work, and a poetry reading. Video recordings of the talks and readings are available from the Prince Centenary Symposium page.
In 2012, Beyond the Gene, an AHRC-funded project led by Professor Clare Hanson, held a workshop and public event at the Linnaean Society headquarters in London, at which Tim Spector, Evelyn Fox Keller and Jeannette Winterson gave talks. Beyond the Gene is the result of a collaboration between English and researchers in the Faculty of Medicine.
Between 2007 and 2010, Caroline Bergvall joined us as an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Creative Writing Fellow. Her project was entitled Writing in Tongues: Multi-Media and Poetic Projects and led to exhibitions at the Arnolfini in Bristol and the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, as well as a volume of poetry.