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Humanities News (Archive 2007, 2008)

 

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See 'Funding News' for updates on the latest news from national funders of humanities research.

A selection of News from Cardiff University Humanities Schools from 2007 and 2008

ARCHIVE

 

Images to educate and inspire (Dec 2008)
A major public exhibition showcasing striking research images from across the University has been officially opened. Part of the 125th anniversary celebrations, the University's Community Engagement Team has developed the Research Images Exhibition, to help educate, inspire and enthuse people about Cardiffs research work. The exhibition will be running at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales in Cardiff, West Wing gallery, from Friday 5 December 2008 to March 2009.

Leverhulme Success - Fellowships to EUROS & HISAR (Dec 2008)
Dr Rosanne Palmer, EUROS has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship which she took up at the start of October 2008. Her project aims to redress an imbalance in the multi-level governance literature by providing a comparative study of the role of sub-state parliaments in the European Unions political system using cases studies from Germany, Spain and the UK.
Dr Ruth Westgate, HISAR has started her 12 month Leverhulme-funded Research Fellowship on 'Classical and Hellenistic Mosaics in Context'. The project will produce the first ever comprehensive study of Greek mosaics from the fifth to the first century BC, and examine the mosaics in their architectural, geographical and social contexts to produce a new model of their stylistic and technical development which takes full account of social processes and regional diversity.

New publication from Prof Simon Cottle, JOMEC (Dec 2008)
'Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global Age' by Professor Simon Cottle was published this month by OUP. Global crises, from climate change to the war on terror, from world poverty to humanitarian disasters, represent the dark side of our globalized planet. How we collectively recognize and respond to these different threats to humanity depends in large measure on how they become defined and deliberated, constructed and contested in the contemporary news media. The book sets out to explore how, why, and with what impacts some of these most pressing problems are conveyed and constituted in todays news media - and why possible others barely register at all.

Prime Minister's support for Cardiff Carers' conference in CLAWS (Dec 2008)
A high-level conference on carers rights, run by Cardiff Law School and the Law School at Glamorgan University on Friday 14th November, began with a filmed introductory message of support from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Conference delegates discussed ways of realising carers fundamental rights and considered how to deliver carers rights to equal life chances with other people, including the right to work, to receive education, and to pursue their own interests.

Prof Colin Williams from WELSH - research visit to Valencia (Dec 2008)
Professor Colin Williams visited Valencia in Spain in November to meet with Heads of Government Departments, such as Linguistic Normalisation and Terminology, together with academic sociolinguists and educationalists all across Valencia. This is part of his British Academy funded research project, which aims to investigate systems of language regulation, and is due for completion in 2010. Although the main aim of the project is to examine language regimes which are currently in place in the USA, Canada and Ireland, the situation of the Valencian/Catalan language in Spain offers excellent practical examples of how an official regional language is treated as an official language of the local state - not dissimilar to the situation of the Welsh language here in Wales and in the UK.

Emerging research network - Autism Spectrum People and Religion Research Group (RELIG) (Dec 2008)
ASPARRG is an inter-disciplinary network of academics and practitioners with an interest in the many ways in which matters of religion/spirituality and the spectrum of autism conditions may intersect. Its members come from the fields of anthropology, history of religion, psychiatry, nursing and health care, practical and disability theology, ethics and communication, autism research. It meets for symposia and in 2009 an issue of the Journal of Religion, Disability and Health (on the subject of Autism and Religion) will be the first outcome of its two 2007 British Academy - funded Workshops.

Large AHRC research grant award to HISAR (Oct 2008)
Professor Alasdair Whittle, School of History and Archaeology, has been awarded a £610,127 grant from the AHRC to carry out research into ‘The first farmers of central Europe - diversity in LBK lifeways’. The Linearbandkeramik culture (LBK), c. 5500-4900 cal BC, covered large areas of Europe north of the Alps, and has often been seen as a uniform population. Researchers are now beginning to debate local and regional economic and social differences. This project, led by Prof Whittle, with an inter-disciplinary team from Cardiff, Oxford and Durham Universities, and project friends in Strasbourg, Mainz and other European centres, combines archaeological research on settlements and cemeteries (to look at social variability) with osteological analyses of human remains (to look at nutrition and health) and an extensive isotopic sampling programme of people and their animals.

Cardiff rated top in Music in 2008 National Student Survey (Oct 2008)
Cardiff undergraduate students have given the School of Music the highest overall satisfaction rating of any UK Music Department - 96% - in the 2008 National Student Survey.

International Research Collaborations in the School of Welsh (Oct 2008)
During November, Dr Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost will be in Australia as a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Linguistics, the University of Sydney and at the School of Languages and Linguistics, the University of Melbourne, pursuing research in eco-linguistics and the rhetoric of sustainable, global linguistic diversity. The School of Welsh is also collaborating with the Smithsonian Institute, Washington as they prepare a special programme on Welsh traditional culture for the 'Smithsonian Folklife Festival' 2009.

New staff and awards in JOMEC (Oct 2008)
Congratulations to Daniel Meadows, Cardiff University lecturer in Photography and Participatory Media, who is to be awarded an Honorary Fellowship of The Royal Photographic Society (RPS). The School has also appointed three new members of staff. Dr Verica Rupar joins the School from Australia, following a career in academia and journalism to teach on the MA International Journalism Programme. Dr Paul Bowman joins from as post as Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at Roehampton University to teach on the JOMEC BA Journalism, Film and Media degree. Dr David Machin also joins the School to pursue research interests in visual communication and globalisation.

New Chair and staff in CLAWS (Oct 2008)
Stijn Smismans has been awarded a Jean Monnet Chair by the European Commission. Professor Dan Wincott, Christine Byron, Elen Stokes, Russell Sandberg and Isobel Roele have also joined the School this September, alongside new Graduate Teaching Assistant Tom Hayes, who is currently completing a MSc in Socio-Legal Studies at Bristol.

AHRC Research Leave to Dr Frances Rock, ENCAP (Oct 2008)
Dr Frances Rock, ENCAP, was successful in the last round of AHRC Research Leave, gaining an award for a project on 'Forensic Linguistics: Applied Sociolinguistics and the Law'. Further details on Dr Rock's research can be found at: http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/staff/rock.html . The AHRC Research Leave scheme (March 2008 deadline) funded 119 awards from 609 applications (19.5% success rate). The next round of the Research Leave scheme will close on 5 March 2009.

 Congratulations to Professor John Loughlin (Feb 2008)
Professor John Loughlin has been elected to the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences, and also as an individual Distinguished Academician to the Academy of the Social Sciences (UK). Prof Loughlin is Professor of Politics in the School of European Studies, with research interests in: Comparative politics; European Union policy and politics; territorial governance in Europe; regionalism and federalism; local government; local finances; UK devolution; French, UK, Irish, Swedish, Dutch and Spanish politics; religion and politics; political philosophy.

 Language and Communication research on 999 Emergency Calls (Jan 2008)

Professor Martin Innes of the Universities Police Science Institute and Dr Frances Rock of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy are involved in a long-term project with the police force to help improve telephone contact with the public.  As part of their research they will investigate the style changes introduced by South Wales Police when they answer 999 calls.  More...

 CHRI Inaugural launch (Nov 2007)

While CHRI activities have been taking place since October 2007, the Institute officially got under way on Monday 26th November with a series of performances and presentations at the new Optometry building in Maindy Road, celebrating some of the creative and scholarly work in the Humanities Schools. More...

For further details on forthcoming events see pages.

  New book published on Indian Temples

India saw an extraordinary explosion of temple building between the sixth and thirteenth centuries.  Dr Adam Hardy, of Welsh School of Architecture, has published a new book The Temple Architecture of India which aims to make these complex buildings understandable to the general reader. The book examines why these temples still have such vitality and explores the lessons they have for artists and architects today. Dr Hardy has been studying the structure of Indian temples for 25 years, during which time he has visited hundreds of temple sites all over the subcontinent. More ...

  AHRC Network Award for Ireland-Wales Research Network

Dr Claire Connolly has recently been successful in the AHRC's Network Scheme, winning an award of £48k to support a two-year international and interdisciplinary Research Network on Ireland-Wales. The funding was awarded to Drs Claire Connolly and Katie Gramich (Cardiff) in collaboration with Dr Paul O'Leary of the History department of the University of Aberystwyth.  

The main objectives of the Ireland-Wales Research Network are to launch high-quality comparative and interdisciplinary research on Ireland and Wales and to promote excellent single-discipline as well as cross-disciplinary scholarship that is fully alive and responsive to developments in related fields.

Belief in the ability of such a network to generate new high-quality cross-disciplinary research projects has been bolstered by recent experience of the Wales-Ireland research seminar hosted by Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, which generated original research projects offering genuinely novel perspectives on Irish-Welsh cultural and historical links. The papers from the first series of seminars (2006-7) will appear in a special issue of Irish Studies Review, edited by Claire Connolly and Katie Gramich.  For this semester's papers, please click here.

  Cardiff success in AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme

Cardiff has seen recent successes in the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme, receiving 2 out of a total of 8 awards made under the Large Grants scheme. The first project, 'Leadership and Capacity Building in the British Muslim Community: the case of Muslim Chaplains' (£270k) will be led
by the Centre for Study of Islam in the UK, and led by Principal Investigator, Dr Sophie Gilliat-Ray. The second project, led from the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff, will examine, 'Religious Nurture in Muslim Families (£365k). Dr Gilliat-Ray is also a co-applicant on this project.

Dr Gilliat-Ray stated: "These two awards are an exciting development for the Islam-UK Centre, and demonstrate that it's reputation as a centre of
excellence for research on Islam and Muslims in Britain is now recognised nationally."