It is my pleasure as the new School Communications Lead to bring you a taste of our recent activities in our VERY FIRST biannual newsletter.
In my six-and-a-half years at Lincoln, I have always been aware that my colleagues are an extraordinarily impressive group of people. It is only since taking on the role of Communications Lead, however, that I have come to know what a truly awesome powerhouse of research, education and practice in the humanities and conservation the Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage is. It is an honour to help broadcast such amazing work.
The School has been recognised in so many major news outlets over the past semester that a full list would be unwieldy. These include the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, and the Telegraph to name a few. This very week sees our Honorary Professor of Medieval History, Katherine Lewis, join Melvyn Bragg to discuss the legendary Pope Joan on the BBC’s In Our Time.
Semester A has seen our academic staff organise or contribute to a far-reaching line-up of events, both here in the beautiful city of Lincoln, and around the world. In doing so, they have collaborated with the Bermuda Government, the British Library, the British Museum, Oxford University and many other august institutions. As home to a team of world-leading humanities and conservation specialists, the School has produced multiple outstanding publications in recent months, both in academic venues and those aimed at a general readership.
We are particularly excited, moreover, to celebrate two significant project grants awarded to members of the School, Tinashe Chipawe and Sara Dadvar, as well as the successful Ph.D. examinations of (shortly-to-be Dr.s) Megan Walker, Joe Broderick and Paula Del Val Vales.
By hopping to the blog home page, you can peruse a cornucopia of recent posts about our research, events, and life in the School, with several excellent new pieces by current students.
Meanwhile, please read on at your leisure, and on behalf of our Head of School, Professor Amy Livingstone, I wish a fantastic semester ahead to all our current staff and students, and send warm regards to our alumni and friends around the world.
Media Coverage
A major exhibition at the British Library with contributions from Prof. Louise Wilkinson and Dr Paula Del Val Vales appeared in several major outlets including The Guardian and the Telegraph. Writing for the latter, Francesca Peacock calls the display a “dazzling new show [that] does away with stereotypes of pre-Renaissance women and shows off the full glorious spread of medieval life”, awarding it five out of five stars.
Making further headlines, an exhibition on the postwar redevelopment of Hull by Prof. James Greenhalgh and his collaborator Dr Charlotte Tomlinson has featured on the BBC and in local news. The portfolio holder for culture and leisure at Hull City Council, Rob Pritchard, describes the exhibition as a “fascinating insight into post-war Hull up until the present day”.
Meanwhile, Dr Kristy Warren featured as the star guest at a networking event of the Bermuda Government London Office, reported on in Bermuda’s Royal Gazette. Kimberley Durrant of the London Office, is quoted as saying that “The work of Dr Kristy Warren is inspirational to us all and speaks to the importance of Bermuda’s historical impact while highlighting the strength of our diaspora in the UK.”
If that were not impressive enough, several news sources including the Times Radio, BBC Radio Lincolnshire, the Grimsby Telegraph and Lincolnshire Today have reported on a mysterious 18th Century bottle of liquid discovered in Cleethorpes which our B.A. Conservation of Cultural Heritage student, Zara Yeates, has been investigating for her third-year project.
Project Grants
We are delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate two important grants to members of the School, made all the more impressive by the fact that they were both awarded to students!
Tinashe Chipawe has been awarded a grant of £17,940 from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Scheme. The funding will support the development of the Community Resilience exhibition Tinashe is working on as part of the Innovate Artist’s Scheme with Lincoln Arts Centre.
Sara Dadvar, has received a grant from the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research and the Knights of Vartan Fund for Armenian Studies to bring Sara’s history M.A. thesis to publication. You can read more about Sara’s project here.
Ph.D. Successes
We are pleased to announce the following four successful Ph.D. examinations:
Megan Walker has passed the viva examination for her English Ph.D. thesis “Narrating Intersex: A Study of Contemporary Representations of Intersex Variations”.
Joe Broderick has passed the viva examination of his thesis on Martial’s role as social commentator on Flavian Imperial Rome, and will be awarded Lincoln University’s first Ph.D. in Classical Studies.
Paula Del Val Vales has passed the viva examination for her Ph.D. in medieval history, “‘The Queen’s Household in the Thirteenth Century: A Comparative Anglo-Iberian Study.”
Meanwhile, three LSHH Ph.D. students, Heather Glover, Megan Schlanker, and Jeanette Croen, along with Joe Rees from Life Sciences have started a new research society in the students’ union to help give postgraduates at Lincoln a place to socialise and find support across disciplines and schools.
Events
When they are not featuring in news stories or being awarded grants and doctoral degrees our researchers can often be found contributing to academic events. This semester has seen a rich assortment of conferences, seminars, and the like.
Way back on 11 October, Dr Kristy Warren was the star guest at a networking event of the Bermuda Government London Office. In a display of awe inspiring productivity, Dr Warren followed this with a seminar for the new digital trail at St Paul’s Cathedral run by the African and Caribbean Arts and Heritage organisation St Vincent and the 2nd Generation and organised an event at Lincoln centring Caribbean Cultural Heritage in its legacies in Britain today with writer Ioney Smallhorne, with the support of the LSHH Decolonising Lead, Dr Emily Timms, the EDI CoASSH team, and the Global and Transregional Studies Research Group.
On 19 October, a soft book launch took place at Merton College, University of Oxford, marking the release of Dr Alexandra Morris’s monograph about disability in Ancient Egypt as well as a co-edited volume by Dr Morris and her collaborator from Macquarie University, Hannah Vogel on the same topic. Dr Morris also gave a talk about her work at the start of the semester for the Lincoln Classics Society.
On 25 October a major British Library exhibition, “Medieval Women: In Their Own Words” opened, featuring contributions from Louise Wilkinson and Paula Del Val Vales. As noted above, you can read more about this exhibition in both the Guardian and the Telegraph.
On 8 November our Head of School, Prof. Amy Livingstone delivered a lecture for the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society on the fascinating life of Countess Ermengarde of Brittany (c.1070-1147), a figure all but forgotten in modern narratives about the Middle Ages.
On 20–22 November our Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow, Dr Anaïs Waag organised a three-day online conference examining the plurality of power and rulership across Latin Christendom, the Muslim worlds, and beyond in the period between c.1000 and c.1400.
On 4 December, Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo delivered the annual Simon Barton Lecture at Exeter University on the topic of frenemies in the Middle Ages. The Simon Barton Lecture is one of two named lectures that take place annually at Exeter’s Centre for Medieval Studies in honour of the historian of medieval Spain, Simon Barton.
On 5 December, Prof. Michele Vescovi delivered a keynote talk about his work on the historiography of medieval sculpture at a conference at the APE Parma Museum in Parma Italy, organised by the research project “Deconstructing Lombard Identity”, funded by the Italian Government.
Finally, on 6–8th December, your humble author, Dr Ralph Weir co-organised a graduate workshop at the University of Warsaw. Dr Weir also gave two guest lectures, on human nature and free will respectively, for the University of Buckingham’s Humanities Research Institute.
Academic Publications
While all academic publications are a big deal, it is especially gratifying to report that our former student, Annabelle Hamilton-Bing’s work experience in the School with Prof. Mark Gardiner has resulted in a co-authored article in the internationally recognised interdisciplinary journal Medieval Settlement Research. Annabelle graduated from the School’s B.A. in Conservation of Cultural Heritage in 2023.
Dr Laura Fernández-González has published a special issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians on “Race and the Built Environment in the Iberian World, c. 1400-180”.
Dr Pietro Di Paola’s introduction to the 7th volume of the complete works of the revolutionary writer Errico Malatesta (1853-01932) has also just been published. Dr Di Paola presented the volume on 21 December, at the cultural centre Carlo Cafiero in Rome.
A new open access chapter on Marie Paneth’s Art Therapy practice with young Holocaust survivors has been published by Dr Imogen Wiltshire.
An open-access article on the idea of “mind-uploading” has been published in the journal Philosophy by Dr Ralph Weir. Dr Weir’s monograph on the mind-body problem has also been positively reviewed in Philosophical Quarterly and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Wider Publications
The semester has also seen several publications from the School in popular venues. Dr Alexandra Morris and her co-author Kyle Lewis Jordan have written a piece about disability in Ancient Egypt for the British Museum.
Leah Warriner-Wood has published a contribution to our College Google Arts and Culture platform on how reconfiguring antique tapestries helped Doddington Hall’s owner, John Hussey Delaval, to elevate his social status in 18th century Lincolnshire.
Dr Alice Crossley has outlined seven Victorian paper craft projects to cut one’s Christmas consumption for The Conversation. Sadly you will now have to wait until next year to try them out.
Finally, the magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world, Works in Progress, has published an article on the aesthetics of architecture by Dr Ralph Weir, and AdvanceHE has published a piece on the future of AI grading in universities by the same.
LSHH Blog
Six new posts have been published on our School blog this term, providing further insights into what we have been up to. You can read Dr Erin Bell on our Disability History Month event, Rebekah Tribe on studying abroad in Germany, Sara Dadvar on her Armenian research grant, Zara Yeates on investigating a mysterious 18th century bottle, Jamie Markham on music and Cold War culture, and Prof. Mark Gardiner on his research project on medieval archaeology with Annabelle Hamilton-Bing.
This and the above sections cover only some of the scintillating accomplishments of our staff and students over the last semester. If you are a member of the School whose contribution has not yet featured then you are warmly encouraged to write to me at rweir@lincoln.ac.uk so I can ensure that it receives the fanfare it deserves. Meanwhile, I look forward to bringing you more Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage news in Semester B!
– Ralph Weir, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
