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Archive of previous projects

Coercive Control: From Literature into Law

Led by Dr Hannah Roche (Principal Investigator) and Dr Katherine Mullin (Co-Investigator, University of Leeds), Coercive Control: From Literature into Law is the first interdisciplinary project to investigate the complex relationship between British literary fiction and the law of coercive control. 

In 2015, domestic violence legislation in England and Wales was extended to include ‘threats, humiliation and intimidation’ and ‘a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent’. This project will show how a ‘new’ crime of the mind has a long and disturbing history in the imaginations of British writers, helping to shape understandings of coercive control within the academy and beyond. 

Creative storytelling has played a crucial role in raising awareness of coercive control. With a focus on novelists ranging from the Brontës to Bernardine Evaristo, Roche and Mullin’s network of researchers and external partners will investigate how narratives of sustained psychological abuse have anticipated and underscored legal change. The network will ask important questions about British literature and its psychological, social, and educational impact. How have textual strategies of surveillance and regulation driven different fictions, from Victorian marriage plots and neo-Gothic mid-century melodramas to contemporary narratives of unequal unions? How might realist authorial omniscience and postmodern textual trickery be read as metafictional meditations on coercive control? Most importantly, how do narratives of coercive control empower readers and amplify the voices of survivors?

Coercive Control: From Literature into Law is funded by an AHRC Research Networking Award (April 2023 to April 2025). For more information, or to join the network, please contact hannah.roche@york.ac.uk. 

German Post-Terrorist Autobiography

Clare Bielby (Centre for Women’s Studies) has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-2024) for her monograph project on the post-terrorist  autobiographies of German left-wing militants who were active in the Red Army Faction and Movement 2. June and have, since the 1970s, been publishing accounts of their lives. With a particular focus on issues of gender, as it intersects with race and class, Clare conducts a feminist literary-critical analysis of these texts, mobilising autobiographical theoretical and area studies approaches, as well as sociological and narrative criminological perspectives on violence, identity and meaning-making. Questions the project asks include: What did it mean to be a left-wing militant and to function as part of a terrorist organisation in 1970s West Germany?; What are the attractions of joining a militant organisation and ‘doing’ terrorism in this particular time and place?; What gendered cultural modules/narrative resources do these authors mobilise to render intelligible their use of violence and political and historical agency?; How, if at all, do they distance themselves from constructions of ‘the terrorist’ and the (Nazi) perpetrator?; How do we account for the apparent will to write leftist post-terrorist autobiography and what does the writing of these texts ‘do’ for the post-terrorist author?; Finally, what are the generic features of German post-terrorist autobiography and what, if at all, are its gendered particularities?

Digital Index of Middle English Verse

Linne Mooney, Emerita Professor in the Department, has been awarded an Emeritus Grant by the Leverhulme Trust to pay for travel and subsistence so that she can complete entries relating to Middle English verse in manuscripts in the British Library for the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (www.DIMEV.net) of which she is the principal editor. 

The DIMEV (compiled with Daniel Mosser with the help of research assistants Elizabeth Solopova and Deborah Thorpe) records the first and last lines of all English poetry written between 1250 and 1525, giving information about the manuscripts in which each work survives. Since Middle English poetry was written before the advent of print, the manuscript witnesses each differ slightly from one another. Textual scholars of Middle English literature need to know where these manuscript witnesses are now kept so that they can study all of the surviving evidence for each text. 

An original Index of Middle English Verse was published in 1940 with a Supplement in 1965, and a revised New Index of Middle English Verse was published in 2005; but the DIMEV, freely accessible at www.DIMEV.net, corrects and enlarges upon all of these and is now the standard reference work in the field. 

Professor Mooney told us: ‘I’m very pleased to have been awarded this Emeritus Grant by the Leverhulme Trust. It will be a great help to my editorship of the Digital Index of Middle English Verse.’ 

With this support from the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Mooney will make monthly three-day trips to London to conduct research in the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room over the next two years to complete the entries for the DIMEV.

Erasmus and the Invention of Literature 

Brian Cummings, Anniversary Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature, has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust worth £209,009. The title of the project is “Erasmus and the Invention of Literature”. Before the 1980s, a consensus existed that Renaissance humanism formed the foundation of the modern liberal arts education system. Literary studies were central to the humanities, the argument went, and Erasmus’ idea of litterae humaniores paved the way to modernity. In recent years, scholars of the Renaissance have abandoned this idea, however, narrowing their interest to the technical disciplines of philology, grammar and rhetoric. Erasmus himself, while still a name of considerable power (the EU uses him to promote freedom of academic movement) is little read outside his epochal Praise of Folly. Meanwhile the concept of “literature” has been declared an anachronism or even the creation of imperial and colonial pressures. The principle aim of this new project is to demonstrate how a concept of “literature” is alive and well in Erasmus, indeed that he develops the Latin word litteratura to accommodate it. This rare classical and medieval word is used by him nearly 200 times in order to promote a distinctive and original idea of the “literary”. The literary is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, Erasmus claims, which structures any attempt to create a philosophy of language or of mind. A literary understanding (understood both as a theory of writing and of reading) also affects the art of interpretation in a whole range of disciplines from politics to religion. A surprising Erasmus emerges: one who despite a reputation for incredible learning constantly seeks out the playful, the emotional, or heretical, or what we now call the queer. 

The project reconstructs Erasmus’ concept of literature fully for the first time. It is based on a reading of all the various items – dialogues, poems, letters, adages, treatises, satires, commentaries – in the hundred volumes of his Collected Works. This has entailed also an archaeological delve into the Erasmian archive, the plethora of manuscripts that survive strewn across the libraries of most of the countries in Europe. At the same time, the project engages with twentieth and twenty-first century polemics concerning both the idea of liberal education and the principles of humanism. The effects of anti-humanism have led to a misunderstanding of Erasmus, whose radical literary theory is sometimes (incorrectly) reduced to a defence of the western canon; in addition, by attending to the imaginative power of humanist thought, it is possible to make insightful expositions of the significance of literature today. The idea of literature in Erasmus is more diverse, more creative, and more challenging than hitherto thought, and still has the capacity to surprise us today. 

Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India

The other project team members are Jayeeta Sharma, Saumya Gupta, Krishnendu Ray, Tarana Khan, and Razak Khan. Forgotten Food seeks to bridge the gap between culinary memory, local heritage, and lost agricultural varieties. Bringing food historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars into dialogue with heritage practitioners, authors, and plant scientists, it addresses challenges linked to local communities and food sustainability in India.Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for this Cultures, Behaviours and Histories of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition (AHRC-GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator is Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield. There, Siobhan works on the project with another Co-I Duncan Cameron from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.

Chambers’ role in this project will be to commission a new anthology of creative writing on South Asian food and foodways to capture memories and ideas relating to such themes as family, domesticity, feasting, and lack of food.

Street Life: Using York's Historic High Streets as Heritage Catalysts for Community Renewal

In collaboration with Professor Rachel Cowgill (Music) and Dr Kate Giles (Archaeology), Professor Helen Smith is leading a major project, funded by the Department for Leveling Up, Housing and Communities.

One of the UK’s most ancient cities, York has an extraordinary heritage and resilient communities. But key parts of York’s civic history are being forgotten, and its city centre faces a crisis rooted in changing technology, community needs and consumer trends, made more urgent by Covid-19. 

‘Street Life: Using York's Historic High Streets as Heritage Catalysts for Community Renewal’ is an ambitious partnership bringing together multiple stakeholders. It will create innovative, immersive experiences to revitalise Coney Street, combining digital innovation and physical engagement. Pop-up activities and virtual experiences will connect civic spaces to the community, transform the streetscape and its sounds, repurpose empty units, and forge links between retail premises and creative, heritage-led regeneration.

Helen's strand of the project celebrates and seeks to revitalise York’s long history of print, which reaches from the sixteenth century to the present day. The research team will work together to recover York’s printing heritage and engage a wider community in exploring York’s printing history, with an emphasis on oral histories and heritage. Together we will create a temporary printing museum and gallery, planned to run from late March / early April until the end of June 2022, on Coney Street in the historic heart of York. This space will include a printing press and associated equipment, alongside a gallery of contemporary printing and two exhibitions relating to fine press printing. The team will offer workshops to engage members of marginalised and underrepresented communities and produce new creative work.

Decolonial Feminisms in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Natasha Tanna holds a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project ‘Decolonial Feminisms in Contemporary Latin American Literature’. The project asks how literature connects with social movements and activism in areas suffering extreme structural and economic inequalities. Natasha’s research considers how individual and collaborative literary creation may be a tool for collective healing from experiences of violence, such as femicide, disappearance, and ecological destruction. She considers how the community-based nature of decolonial feminist activism (vs the emphasis on the individual in liberal feminisms) shapes creative forms in the region through collaborative processes, including co-authorship, plagiarism, translation, intertextuality, and anonymity. She also asks what is at stake in the often utopian celebration of the dissolution of a single individual author in contexts of literal disappearance. In the project texts created in the context of grassroots organising and writing workshops are analysed alongside works by more established writers such as Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres, and Dominican Rita Indiana. The project also explores the limits of conventional scholarly form, drawing on the work of writers such as Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa, who blurs distinctions between poetic, theoretical, and historical writing in her analysis of the US-Mexico border.

Storying Relationships

Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for Storying Relationships, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project. Storying Relationships examines how young men and women in British Pakistani Muslim communities understand and explore relationships in terms of both attitudes and practices, through the stories they consume and produce. The Principal Investigator is Professor Richard Phillips of the University of Sheffield, from where the project is run. The project team also comprises Dr Nafhesa Ali, Professor Peter Hopkins, and Dr Raksha Pande. The project asks how young British Muslims (aged 16-30), particularly those with Pakistani heritage, talk and think about their personal relationships. It additionally explores the role of stories and storytelling in this, focusing on relationship stories that are told in everyday life (with friends, for example) and also media such as fiction, films, and radio. At the moment the project team is conducting individual interviews with young people and organisations across Tyne and Wear, Glasgow, and Yorkshire. They will be starting creative workshops in Stage 2 (commencing May 2017) where young people involved in the project will work alongside published authors to create and share stories.

Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers

Sophie Coulombeau is a Co-Investigator for this three-year project, funded by a Standard Research Grant from the AHRC. The project is based at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester, and the Principal Investigator is Hannah Barker of the University of Manchester. The other project team members are David Denison, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Cassandra Ulph, Tino Oudesluijs and Christine Wallis. 

Centre for Medieval Literature

Our research is interdisciplinary and multilingual, combining literary study with history, history of art, history of science, and other disciplines.The Centre for Medieval Literature (CML) works to establish theoretical models for the study of medieval literature on a European scale, set within wider Eurasian and Mediterranean contexts, from c. 500 CE to c. 1500 CE.

CML is a Centre of Excellence founded in 2012 and funded for ten years by the Danish National Research Foundation. It is based at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and the University of York. At York, it is directed by Prof Elizabeth Tyler working with Dr George Younge. 

Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Network of Improvement, 1780-1840

The early period of the British ‘industrial revolution’ usually figures in literary studies, if at all, as the negative pole against which the creativity of romanticism is defined. Provincial cities such as Manchester are rarely mentioned in the literary-geography of the romantic-period, if anything they are just a black hole of dark satanic mills. But the physician-poet John Aikin’s Description of the country for Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester (1795) saw in the region the ‘beating heart’ of a new kind of body politic. For Aikin and his peers, many of the literary physicians, ‘genius’ was an attribute equally applicable to the inventions of engineers and poets: the product of environmental conditions in society and in the body. This project looks at the region in this period as a ‘transpennine enlightenment,’ a space where the appetite for improvement aimed at both literary and scientific innovation. This broadly materialist idea of enlightenment, invested in reforming character through environment, produced a complex dialectic in a new industrial society where the contradictions of liberalism supported as their twin progeny a machine society but also critics like the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.Jon Mee’s project, ‘Literature, Bodies, and Machines: Networks of Improvement, 1780-1840’, is funded by a British Academy-Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from January 2020 to January 2021.

Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment in Pakistan and India through Life Writing

The project team also comprises Nukhbah Langah and Rukhsana Zia (both Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan), and Radha Kapuria (University of Sheffield). The non-academic partners come from the following Non-Governmental Organizations in Pakistan and India: Bunyad Foundation, Abdul Aleem Khan Foundation, Pakistan’s Children, and Mahashakti Seva Kendra. Malala Yousafzai has become a global icon for her fearless attempts to defend every child’s right to education.Claire Chambers is a Co-Investigator for this Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator is Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield, from where the project is run.

Her autobiography, I Am Malala (2014) – detailing the life story of ‘the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban’ – inspired readers around the world. Taking a cue from Yousafzai’s work, the Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment project uses historical research linked to women’s life writing to improve female literacy and empowerment in Pakistan and India. 

Cultures of Care

The project explores the cultural history of care in the UK since 1965, through an analysis of archival materials, novels, poetry, film, theatre, media and policy documents. 'Cultures of Care' is developing an interdisciplinary literary-historical approach to care, drawing on feminist care ethics, disability studies, medical humanities scholarship, and theories of democratic citizenship. The project focuses particularly on so-called informal, non-institutional care (care in the home), and changing structures and concepts of care in contemporary society. Dr Alice Hall's project, 'Changing Cultures of Care', is funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences/Wellcome Trust, via the Springboard - Health of the Public 2040 scheme.

The Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research