Engagement and impact

Colleagues have been involved in collaborations with world-leading museums and heritage organisations, including the Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, LIMA (Amsterdam), the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, and the National Trust, among many others.    

Heritage collaborations have included an ongoing project with the Normal Lockyer Observatory in Sidmouth, where Professor Jason Hall has been working to support their large archive of glass plates and other materials relating to the history of astronomy. Professor Sinéad Moynihan has organised a series of public engagement events about the Irish Canadian writer Brian Moore as part of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research grant (2021-23), working in collaboration with the Belfast Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, the John Hewitt Society, the Seamus Heaney HomePlace, the Queen's Film Theatre, the Look North! Festival and, in London, the Irish Literary Society. Building on her research on early modern maritime history, Dr Jo Esra is involved in a new partnership with the National Maritime Museum of Cornwall (NMMC) to act as lead guest curator on a major two-year exhibition (2025-2026). Dr Felicity Gee is developing a collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh as part of her work on the Valentine Penrose collection at the Roland Penrose archive.  

Professor Gabriella Giannachi has received funding from RCUK, NLHF, EU, Nesta, and Innovate UK, to work in partnership with several museums, including Tate, Imperial War Museum, LIMA (in Amsterdam), The Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, the Exeter City Football Club Museum, and the Design Museum. Her work, often developed collaboratively with colleagues in computer science, conservation, and, in more recent times, climate science, geography, and architecture, has led to several documentation and preservation projects of both tangible and intangible forms of heritage, often using innovative and creative technologies to reach out to wider communities, including those who do not ordinarily visit museums. 

Professor Angelique Richardson is involved in various national and international projects within Thomas Hardy Studies. She is a member of the Hardy Country Steering Group, and she leads the education strategy of the group. She has reshaped the preservation, exhibition and accessibility of Hardy’s work through longstanding collaboration with Dorset History Centre, which holds the world’s largest Hardy archival collection, and Dorset Museum, which owns the collection, and two nearby National Trust properties, Hardy’s Cottage, and Max Gate, the Dorchester house that he designed and lived in. Richardson leads the Hardy’s Correspondents Project at Exeter, a collaboration with Dorset History Centre and Dorset Museum, and she contributed to Dorset Museum’s £11.3m HLF bid for a major transformation and expansion (2018–2020). As part of this, she led on digitising and making accessible the under-utilised Hardy Collection, producing a step change in the museum’s digital offering, and co-created new and expanded permanent exhibitions. 

Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and AHRC, Professor Andrew McRae and Professor Philip Schwyzer have collaborated on the Poly-Olbion and Children’s Poly-Olbion projects to develop heritage outreach projects looking at British landscape, history and identity through the prism of the English Renaissance poet Michael Drayton (1563-1631). These projects have involved collaboration with acclaimed arts educational organisation Flash of Splendour. Professor McRae and Lancaster University’s leading poet Professor Paul Farley have also led Places of Poetry, a 2019 national community arts project, which used creative writing to prompt reflection on national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place. Across a period of six months, writers pinned original poems of place to an unique digital map of England and Wales. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England, and was underpinned by national partnerships with the Ordnance Survey, The Poetry Society, and National Poetry Day. The project closed with 7500 poems pinned the map, which are all still available for reading. It also led to the publication of the anthology, Places of Poetry (Oneworld), edited by Professor McRae.   

Over the last ten years, Professor Jana Funke has collaborated with a range of museums and heritage institutions, including the National Trust, Wellcome Collections, Tate St Ives, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery to reveal and celebrate LGBTQ+ History. Projects have included the Institute of Sexology exhibition (2014-2015) and the Orlando: The Queer Element project (2016-2017). Most recently, she has co-directed the Out and About: Queering the Museum Project (2020-2022) to discover LGBTQ+ heritage in the RAMM’s collection. This National Lottery Heritage-funded project has involved collaboration with a number of commissioned artists, including the lead creative heritage producer and project co-director Natalie McGrath from Dreadnought South West.   

Professor Kate Hext is working as part of an HLF-funded project to restore Great Ambrook, a lost Italian Garden created, by Arthur Graham with architect T.H. Lyons, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Clearing and restoration work on the garden in South Devon involves volunteers, including some referred as part of the NHS ‘social prescription’ programme. Professor Hext is writing a cultural guidebook to the garden, situating it in the contexts of gay culture, gardening, and the South West's artistic communities at the turn of the twentieth century, while helping to train the garden’s tour guides on this history and organising an exhibition at the garden.     

Staff have also supervised Collaborative Doctoral Awards in this area. For instance, Professor John Plunkett is working with Historic Royal Palaces (Kensington Palace) on Queen Victoria’s Library, exploring how Victoria’s extensive reading shaped her political and social views. 

Colleagues have developed important partnerships across the creative industries to shape urgent conversations about the importance of the Humanities, to influence policy and political debate, and to contribute to positive changes in literary publishing.    

Professor Pascale Aebischer, who was awarded an MBE in 2023 for her AHRC-funded research during the pandemic, has been working in partnership with Creation Theatre in Oxford and Big Telly in Northern Ireland, looking into how theatre during the pandemic could move online. She was also funded by the British Academy in 2023 to research pandemic preparedness in the theatre industry in the G7 countries, identifying what could be learnt from it especially in relation to marginalised groups of creatives.   

The internationally acclaimed novelist Professor Vesna Goldworthy has worked with the German Federal agency for Civic Education which centres on promoting awareness for democracy and participation in politics. Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, Professor Goldworthy has contributed to the agency’s Project Group for Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, which offers specific expertise on national and regional contexts while also considering transnational histories of interconnectedness.    

Dr Kate Wallis has worked with a range of external partners to map and build literary communities and networks around African literary production. In particular, she has partnered with the Royal African Society, Roots Resistance, Bookbag, and Exeter City of Literature to establish an Exeter-based edition of leading literary festival Africa Writes. With Nairobi-based Saseni! and Kigali-based Huza Press she is engaged in a series of ongoing collaborative projects: these all explore and innovate within the structures and networks of creative writing teaching and literary publishing in East Africa.  She has also collaborated with Authors.Cafe, Bristol Ideas, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Hargeysa Cultural Centre, Jalada, No Bindings, and Writivism to produce workshops, literary events, and publications.   

Dr D-M Withers directs Lurid Editions Ltd, a micro but culturally ambitious publisher reprinting neglected books. Launched in 2023 with Mary Gordon's homage to the Ladies of Llangollen, Chase of the Wild Goose, Lurid will publish early anti-imperial classic The Awakening of Indian Women (September 2023) and David Rees's young adult novel The Milkman's On His Way (June 2024). Chase of the Wild Goose was featured in The Guardian, reviewed in the TLS, and chosen for February's book of the month in DIVAmagazine. To celebrate the publication of Chase, book launches were held in partnership with Plas Newydd (home of the Ladies), the British Library, National Museum Cardiff, and in independent bookshops Book Bag (Exeter), Gay's the Word (London), and Book Haus (Bristol).   

Staff regularly work with world-class libraries and archives, including the British Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to engage new audiences with their research and make archival materials more accessible to wider publics.    

Professor Amina Yaqin has led community engagement workshops with support from the South Asia Collections team (Olivia Majumdar and Arani Ilankuberan) at the British Library and Camden Council (Lilu Dewan) around the theme of Urdu Poetry, Women, and Wellbeing. The workshop featured items from the Library’s extensive Urdu and South Asia collections and focused on significant Urdu women poets from the 20th century such as Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riaz. The aim of this initiative was to provide a safe space for women to discuss their own experiences, connect them with Urdu poetry and explore how the reading and writing of poetry can support wellbeing, emotional expression and mindfulness. Co-creative exercises by workshop participants will be featured in the British library Africa and Asia blog by Olivia Majumdar. These events followed on from the book launch of Professor Yaqin’s new book Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing held at the British Library on April 26 2023.   

Professor Vike Plock has established an ongoing partnership with BBC Written Archives Centre as part of her book on the BBC German Service during the Second World War. She has also worked with Agatha Christie Ltd, Agatha Christie Archive Trust, Zurich James Joyce Foundation, the Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol, and Penguin Collectors Society (as part of the Penguin Research Network).  

Professor Jana Funke has worked with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to support, consult on and develop resources and teaching guides for the digitisation of the Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge Papers. The project was funded by a Digitizing Hidden Collection grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources and won the 2022 Archival Award for Excellence from the Texas Historical Records Advisory Board.    

Staff also supervise collaborative doctoral awards in this area. Professor Plock is working with the Head of BBC History to supervise research in the BBC Written Archives Centre.  

Reflecting the Department’s research strengths in the Medical Humanities, colleagues have developed innovative research-led forms of engagement to shape timely conversations about health and to improve wellbeing.    

Dr Michael Flexer’s and Professor Laura Salisbury’s research arising out of the collaborative Wellcome Trust-funded Waiting Times explores the temporalities of healthcare and investigated experiences of waiting for care, thus addressing one of the most urgent challenges faced by the NHS today. One of the key findings of the project was that, for both clinicians and patients, waiting can be intrinsic to care rather than its opposite. Flexer has established partnerships with NHS surgeries and practices across England (e.g. Helios Medical Centre in Bristol; Well Street Surgery in Hackney, London; and Wyndham House in Silverton, Devon) and has launched a new project (including a storytelling website) that has the potential to transform patient’s experiences of waiting while also improving the work of NHS practice managers and clinicians across the country.    

As part of the collaborative Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology project, Professor Jana Funke has worked closely with LGBTQ+ charities Intercom Trust and Gendered Intelligence to improve the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ communities across the country. Most recently, her research on the histories of sexology and LGBTQ+ history has shaped a range of creative outputs, produced by trans and non-binary artists and writers, to interrogate the legacies of Western sexology on understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality today. In addition to the creative Adventures in Time and Gender podcast drama and creative responses, the project has resulted in a new therapeutic resource to facilitate expansive conversations around gender.     

Dr Naya Tsentourou has developed a collaboration with Bristol Yoga Roots Project (BYRP), a community interest company in Bristol, offering trauma-informed inclusive yoga classes and training to under-represented communities in the South West. Together, they are looking to co-design an outreach session on breath and difference, and to develop creative methods of collecting feedback that can help BYRP demonstrate its impact to key stakeholders, such as the NHS.   

The Department has a track record of research excellence in the Environmental Humanities. Staff have combined research and creative practice and led pioneering interdisciplinary collaborations to intervene in debates about the environment and climate change. Core partners have included the National Trust, Natural England, Tate St Ives, and Cornwall Council among many others.    

Corinna Wagner combines critical and creative practice and her work unites word and image, writing and photography. Her artwork has appeared in a variety of publications and galleries in the UK and abroad. Recently, she has had a collaborative exhibition, Wicked Problems, with University of British Columbia (Okanagan) environmental artist Tara Nicholson, and has worked with arts initiative Time and Tide Bell on the question of how the arts can initiate action on climate change (supported by NERC). A solo exhibition on the relationship between water and land, TerraOceanus was held at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton. Currently, she is at work on a photobook about encountering ruins.   

As part of the AHRC-funded Red River project and the NERC-funded RENEW project, Professor John Wedgwood Clarke’s research and creative practice are addressing urgent challenges around the environment and climate crisis. The Red River project (2019-2021) has developed innovative creative methods to transform understandings of and engagements with the Red River in Cornwall. Through collaboration with schools, community action groups, artists, and scientists, Clarke’s research has improved the ways in which individuals and communities relate to the Red River and the environment more broadly. Ongoing work with Cornwall Council on the Red River is leading to a renewal of biodiversity and enhanced access to the river and surrounding landscape. The project has also led to a partnership with Tate St Ives, which is resulting in changes in curatorial practice and audience engagement. The documentary film, Cornwall's Red River, which was transmitted on BBC Four in February 2022 has allowed the project to reach even wider national audiences (over one million views). The ongoing collaborative RENEW project seeks to put people at the centre of action on biodiversity renewal and build expertise across different sectors and communities to address the environment and climate crises. Clarke is working with a wide range of partners, including the Book Trust, Natural History Museum & Royal Horticultural Society, Natural England, The Poetry Society, and National Trust. Associated projects focus on lowland peat bogs in Cumbria, Cheshire’s ghost ponds, changing the representation of nature in children’s books, and culture-led engagement projects to inform Natural England’s Protected Sites Strategy (PSS).    

Dr  Ellen Wiles was commissioned by The National Trust to create two immersive literary audio works designed to engage diverse audiences in the landscape of the 12,500-acre Holnicote Estate and in their pioneering work to increase its environmental resilience. Buzzard View, a literary soundwalk, follows a route around the estate, exploring its history, wildlife, and the various ways in which the Trust has been working, including in partnership with local farmers, to increase biodiversity and reduce flood risk. Riverlandia is a fictional sound story inspired by the Trust’s landmark river restoration project at Holnicote. It tells a tale of a changing river valley, narrated by ten of its human and non-human inhabitants including a beaver, a sheep, a dragonfly, a ranger, and a teenage girl. Voiceover actors include Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones), Mike Wozniak, Tom Parry, Spencer Jones, and Bethany Antonia. Riverlandia was launched with a 5-day sound installation at The British Library in July 2023. In producing the immersive soundscapes for both works, Ellen collaborated with nature sound recordist Ellie Williams and sound designer Nicholas Allan. You can listen to the audio and find out more information at: www.ellenwiles.com.   
  
Dr Ellen Wiles has been awarded a grant of £150,000 to be an artist in residence at CREWW, the University’s new Centre for Resilience in Environment, Water, and Waste, funded by South West Water, from 2024-2026. Ellen’s project, ‘Reservoir Stories’, will include creating new literary audio work and an informative podcast series exploring the environmental resilience of the water system, and co-writing an article on interdisciplinary collaboration between the arts and sciences in addressing the climate and biodiversity emergency with Prof Richard Brazier, Co-Director of CREWW. Ellen recently chaired a panel at the South West Innovation Expo on the future of water, featuring senior scientists at the University and representatives from South West Water and a leading engineering consultancy. 

In 2024, Dr Ben Smith will begin an AHRC-funded fellowship, A History of Storms: New Approaches to Climate Fiction and Climate Literacy, in partnership with the UK Met Office. This fellowship will involve a residency with the Met Office, in which Ben will write a novel exploring the history and current practice of climate science, drawing on the Met Office's archives and conversations with scientists at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change Attribution. He will also run workshops with scientists to help develop the Met Office's new institutional 'climate literacy' agenda. The fellowship will culminate in a 'Climate Literacy Salon', which will bring together writers, scientists, artists and activists with a view to developing an international interdisciplinary network for future public and policy engagement work around new models of climate literacy. 

Over the last ten years the Department has developed significant strength in Digital Humanities, co-operating internationally with colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, Stanford University, and Turin University to develop insight into the digital cultural heritage sector. Colleagues have collaborated with several artists, museums, and archives to develop novel platforms for cultural engagement to widen participation and create new sustainable conservation methods. 
  
Staff have also developed various platforms in collaboration with computer scientists, web, and game designers. These include a collaboration between interactive experience and narrative designer Dr Rob Sherman and children's mental health charity ApartOfMe, producing a therapeutic game app to help refugee families process traumatic experiences. In addition, Dr Sherman has worked with The Jane Austen House Museum, The Royal Mint, Nottingham Castle Museum and Libraries, Shelter UK, National Museum Wales, English Heritage, and National Trust For Scotland.  
  
Projects also include the platform ArtMaps, developed by Professor Gabriella Giannachi in collaboration with computer scientists at the University of Nottingham and the Tate, and Placeify, 1010 Media, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery. Placeify was adopted by a significant number of regional museums: RAMM, Exeter Civic Society, Topsham Museum, Sidmouth Museum, Tiverton Museum, Newton Abbott Museum, Barnstaple Museum, Royal Cornwall Museum, Mevagissey Museum, The Museum of Witchcraft, Wheal Martyn, Padstow Museum, Bodmin Museum, Fairfield House, Devon Garden Trust, St Ives Archive, and Exeter City Football Club Museum. RAMM alone had, at some point, 16 trails on its website.