Networks offer a unique opportunity for collaborative research across the White Rose universities with three doctoral researchers working on separate projects on a common theme, with co-supervision across institutions.
Each Network has a three doctoral researchers, one at each of Leeds, Sheffield and York. Researchers are supported by a main supervisor at the home institution and a co-supervisor at one of the other institutions.
Electronic Soundscapes
We believe that scholarship in the Humanities relies excessively on visual and textual data. The field of Sound Studies has, we note, begun to correct this bias by investigating auditory experiences, notably the acoustics of buildings and the role of audio creative individuals and artefacts (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2012). We argue however that this niche field has not fully investigated the broader socio-economic and cultural environment within which sound technologies developed and has failed to comprehensively address the implications of new soundscapes.
Floods: living with water in the past, present and future
These three projects are connected through their shared interest in the stories of floods and how these can be mobilised to understand and mitigate the future impacts of flooding on humanity. They differ in their historical and geographical settings, and in their methodologies.
The Future of Holocaust Memory
The network looks at contemporary technological developments enabling new means of transmitting and preserving survivor testimony, while recent Holocaust historiography has drawn on newly accessible archives that allow for research outside the conventional focus on the camps and ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland. Research will analyse the implications of these changes for the ways in which Holocaust memory is conceived and taught, in relation to practices and locations where different histories overlap.
Imagining and Representing Species Extinction
This network brings together researchers in environmental conservation, English literature, interactive media, management, philosophy and religious studies in order to contribute critically to the cross-disciplinary study of extinction in all its different biological forms and socio-cultural functions today.
Expressive nonverbal communication in ensemble performance
This Network bridges the gap across disciplines, using digital transformation to fully integrate the approaches from the arts and sciences to provide meaningful research outcomes for theory and practice. Moreover, building on recent innovations, it will push forward the investigation of expressive communication in ensemble performance countering the existing focus on either solo performance or the ensemble.
Beyond Charlie: Anticlericalism and Freedom of the Press
The Paris attacks on 7 January 2015 make this an apposite moment to assess the deep cultural and historical links between iconoclastic thought and freedom of the press in western Europe. The proposed network will reassess anticlerical print culture and ideas of free speech, taking as its starting point the Hébertiste tradition of radical and…
Design Matters: Treasuring the past, enhancing the future
This is a network created around the theme of design. ‘Nostalgic design’ is a subset of affective or emotional design, which exerts a profound impact on academic design research, heritage and contemporary craft practice, and on public consumption of, and engagement with, design. Hitherto, design research has been pioneered by the creative and visual arts,…
Cultures of Consumption in Early Modern Europe
In early modern society, diet offered nutrition; expressed national, regional and class identity; and was used to maintain and restore health. Between 1500 and 1700 cultures of consumption and attitudes to diet were in transition due to changing medical attitudes, new commercial empires and an increasingly wide range of available comestibles (notably sugar, tomatoes, tobacco,…
European Film, European Heritage, European Identity
Thomas Elsaesser suggests that ‘European cinema distinguishes itself from Hollywood and Asian cinemas by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past’. And, even if one takes the briefest of looks at the European films most visible to international audiences he would appear to have a point. From Germany’s The Lives of Others (2006) to the…
Faith in Food and Food in Faith: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Dietary Practice
This network approaches the study of food and dietary practice in the past through molecular archaeology, nutritional epidemiology, zooarchaeology, history of medicine and artefactual archaeology.
Heroes and Heroism
Projects: Classical Heroism in War and Peace Classical Heroines, Modern Conflicts: French Notions of Heroism in the Context of War Ghosts of the Vortex’: reimagined memories, heroism and the necessary acts of metacognition The Ancient Greeks created the concept of the hero. From the very beginning of the literary record –in Homer’s Iliad and Greek…