Arts and Humanities Research Council

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Arts and Humanities Research Council
AbbreviationAHRC
PredecessorArts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)
Formation1998;25 years ago (1998)
Legal status Non-departmental public body
PurposeFunding of arts and humanities research
HeadquartersPolaris House, Swindon, UK
Region served
United Kingdom
Chairman
Sir Drummond Bone
Executive Chair
Professor Christopher Smith
Main organ
AHRC Council
Parent organisation
Budget
£102 million
Website ahrc.ukri.org

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities.

Contents

History

The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) was founded in 1998 and became a Research Council in April 2005. [1]

Description

The AHRC is a non-departmental public body that provides approximately £102 million from the UK government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Postgraduate funding is organised through Doctoral Training Partnerships in 10 consortia that bring together a total of 72 higher education institutions throughout the UK. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. [2]

Governance

The AHRC is one of seven research councils in the UK.

Professor Christopher Smith is the current Executive Chair of the AHRC. [3] He succeeded Professor Andrew S. Thompson who served as Interim Chief Executive from December 2015 until August 2020. [4] His predecessor was Professor Rick Rylance who took up the post on 1 September 2009 and served until August 2017. [5]

The current[ when? ] Council Chair is Sir Drummond Bone who succeeded Sir Alan Wilson who retired in December 2013.

Recently funded research

Stonehenge Riverside Project (2009–14)

The Stonehenge Riverside Project was a major five-year AHRC-funded archaeological research study, announced in 2009, focusing on the development of the Stonehenge landscape in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. In particular, the project was interested in the relationship between the stones and surrounding monuments and features including; the River Avon, Durrington Walls, the Cursus, the Avenue, Woodhenge, burial mounds, and nearby standing stones. In August 2009 the project discovered a new stone circle, which was named Bluestonehenge by the research team, about one mile away from Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The project is run by a consortium of university teams. It was directed by Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University, with co-directors Josh Pollard (University of Southampton), Julian Thomas (Manchester University), Kate Welham (Bournemouth University) and Colin Richards (Manchester University). [6]

Medieval Soldier Database

Researchers at the University of Reading and University of Southampton analysed historic sources such as muster rolls records in the National Archives at Kew and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (for records of English garrisons in France). The resulting Medieval Soldier online database was launched in 2009 which enables people to search for soldiers by surname, rank or year of service. The online database contains 250,000 service records of soldiers who saw active duty in the latter phases of the Hundred Years' War (1369–1453). [7] [8]

British slave-ownership (2013–15)

Between 2013 and 2015, the AHRC co-funded a project known as the Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833 project at the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, along with the Economic and Social Research Council. This work continues to be built upon, creating Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, which is free for public use. [9]

Heritage in War

A project funded by AHRC looking at the circumstances in which belligerent parties in wars may intentionally or foreseeably damage sites of cultural property. [10]

Old Bailey Proceedings Archive

An AHRC research grant enabled academics from the University of Hertfordshire, University of Sheffield and the Open University to double in size the Old Bailey trial proceedings available to view on the Old Bailey Proceedings Online website and provide access to the largest single source of searchable information about ordinary British lives and behaviour ever published. [11]

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts, 1679 to 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn.

Publications

The AHRC publish reviews and reports on arts and humanities subjects, as well as corporate publications. Research news and findings are communicated in website features, press releases, and multimedia content such as podcasts. [12]

Between 2005 and 2010, the AHRC published a magazine called Podium twice a year, which contained news and case studies based on research that they have funded. [13]

Related Research Articles

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The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom. EPSRC research areas include mathematics, physics, chemistry, artificial intelligence and computer science, but exclude particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astronomy. Since 2018 it has been part of UK Research and Innovation, which is funded through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) was a United Kingdom national service aiding the discovery, creation and preservation of digital resources in and for research, teaching and learning in the arts and humanities. It was established in 1996 and ceased operation in 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Stoneham</span> British philosopher

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The Stonehenge Riverside Project was a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded archaeological research study of the development of the Stonehenge landscape in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. In particular, the project examined the relationship between the Stones and surrounding monuments and features, including the River Avon, Durrington Walls, the Cursus, the Avenue, Woodhenge, burial mounds, and nearby standing stones. The project involved a substantial amount of fieldwork and ran from 2003 to 2009. It found that Stonehenge was built 500 years earlier than previously thought. The monument is believed to have been built to unify the peoples of Britain. It also found a previously unknown stone circle, Bluestonehenge.

Mitra Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. She is a professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London. Mitra Tabrizian has exhibited and published widely and in major international museums and galleries, including her solo exhibition at the Tate Britain in 2008. Her book, Another Country, with texts by Homi Bhabha, David Green, and Hamid Naficy, was published by Hatje Cantz in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Liverpool Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology</span>

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.

Julian Stewart Thomas is a British archaeologist, publishing on the Neolithic and Bronze Age prehistory of Britain and north-west Europe. Thomas has been vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute since 2007. He has been Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester since 2000, and is former secretary of the World Archaeological Congress. Thomas is perhaps best known as the author of the academic publication Understanding the Neolithic in particular, and for his work with the Stonehenge Riverside Project.

Charlotte Ann Roberts, FBA is a British archaeologist, academic and former nurse. She is a bioarchaeologist and palaeopathologist, whose research focuses on health and the evolution of infectious disease in humans. From 2004 to 2020, she was Professor of Archaeology at Durham University: she is now professor emeritus.

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Harriet Hawkins is a British cultural geographer. She is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is the founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Geo-Humanities, and the Director of the Technē AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. As part of Research Excellence Framework 2021, she is a member of the Geography and Environmental Studies expert sub-panel. In 2016, she was winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Royal Geographical Society Gill Memorial Award. In 2019, she was awarded a five-year European Research Council grant, as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. She was previously the Chair of the Royal Geographical Society Social and Cultural Geography Research Group.

Lisa-Marie Shillito is a British archaeologist and senior lecturer in landscape archaeology as well as director of the Wolfson Archaeology Laboratory and Earthslides at Newcastle University. Her practical work focuses on using soil micromorphology, phytolith analysis and geochemistry in order to understand human behaviour and landscape change. Her work includes the Neolithic settlements of Çatalhöyük in Turkey and Ness of Brodgar and Durrington Walls in Britain, but also Crusader castles and medieval settlements in Poland and the Baltic and in the Near East.

Susan Greaney is a British archaeologist specialising in the study of British prehistory. She is a senior properties historian with English Heritage. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 27 June 2019.

Mary Lewis is Professor of Bioarchaeology at the University of Reading. After completing a PhD in bioarchaeology at the University of Bradford in 1999, Lewis went on to lecture at Bournemouth University (2000–2004) before moving to the University of Reading in 2004. She conducted the first osteological study of a body which has been hanged, drawn, and quartered. Lewis has held editorial roles with the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, International Journal of Paleopathology, and the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.

Sophie Gilliat-Ray, OBE FLSW is professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director for the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University.

Alison Phipps OBE FRSE FRSA FAcSS a University of Glasgow professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies and holds the first UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She has been awarded the Minerva Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

References

  1. Creating the AHRC: An Arts and Humanities Research Council for the United Kingdom in the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
  2. "AHRC commits to postgraduate research through new Doctoral Training Partnerships - Arts and Humanities Research Council". ahrc.ukri.org. Retrieved 2 July 2019.
  3. "Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair", AHRC.
  4. "Appointment of Interim Chief Executive for the Arts and Humanities Research Council" (Press release), Gov.uk, 30 November 2015.
  5. "Reappointment of Chief Executive for the AHRC - Arts & Humanities Research Council". Ahrc.ac.uk. 1 September 2013. Retrieved 19 June 2014.
  6. "News releases 2009". Sheffield University. 2012. Retrieved 18 February 2012.
  7. HeritageDaily (7 October 2016). "Did your ancestor fight in the Hundred Years War?". HeritageDaily - Archaeology News. Retrieved 2 July 2019.
  8. "Medieval battle records go online". BBC News. 20 July 2009. Retrieved 2 July 2019.
  9. "Home". Legacies of British Slave-ownership. University College London. Retrieved 12 December 2020.
  10. AHRC (2017), Heritage in War, accessed 10 May 2023
  11. "The Old Bailey Online - Arts and Humanities Research Council". ahrc.ukri.org. Retrieved 2 July 2019.
  12. "Publications - Arts & Humanities Research Council". Ahrc.ac.uk. Retrieved 19 June 2014.
  13. "Publications archive - Arts & Humanities Research Council". Ahrc.ac.uk. Retrieved 19 June 2014.