This three-year project explores the wide range of adaptations of Shakespeare in India, from the earliest translations and performances to more recent films and performances. Mark is working with Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Thea Buckley (QUB), and Visiting Scholar, Rosa García-Periago (University of Murcia), formerly a Marie Curie Individual Fellow (QUB), on a wide range of activities connected with the project, including film screenings, an international conference, an exhibition, book launches and events with local stakeholders (the Educational Shakespeare Company and Terra Nova). Currently, Mark is co-editing a collection of essays with Thea, Rosa and filmmaker/practitioner, Sangeeta Datta, entitled Women and Indian Shakespeares (Bloomsbury Academic) as one of the project outputs.

Working with Ryan Perry (Kent), Stephen’s new project, 'Whittington's Gift', aims to demonstrate that London citizens created new programmes of religious education for both the City's clergy and for literate lay communities that have hitherto gone largely unnoticed by scholarship. Thanks to the legacy of Richard Whittington (d. 1423), perhaps London’s most storied mayor, an extraordinary resource for religious education emerged under the auspices of Whittington’s innovative executor, John Carpenter, common clerk of London’s Guildhall. By tracking the transmission of texts that the applicants contend were sourced from the Guildhall Library, we aim to radically complicate understanding of fifteenth century devotional culture in the capital and beyond.

This project (2020-23) has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Jane’s project aims to carry research into the potential of fiction featuring characters with dementia to improve awareness of and empathy towards people living with the condition. It explores the representation of dementia in contemporary fiction, using a cognitive stylistic approach to reveal how the minds of characters with the condition are constructed in language. Extracts from the fiction are then used in Reading Groups with four key stakeholder groups: people in the early stages of dementia, caregivers, trainee social workers and general public. The readers’ responses to the fiction will establish the potential of dementia fiction to facilitate awareness and empathy, as well as feed back into our understanding of the literary language and its cognitive effects. 

Andrew’s project, run in conjunction with Brian Greenspan (Carleton University, Canada) and Dominique Jeannerod (French) and involving Orion Publishers as partner, has successfully adapted Set in Darkness (2000), the 11th novel in Ian Rankin’s popular Inspector Rebus detective series for location-based mobile media, or “locative” media. Set in Darkness (2001) is the 11th novel in Ian Rankin’s popular Inspector Rebus detective series. Designed with the StoryTrek platform, the Tailing Rebus app aligns the reader’s physical location in and movement through the streets of Edinburgh with story segments adapted from the Set In Darkness audiobook. As such, users can follow Inspector Rebus’s unfolding story in situ via their smartphones or tablets by moving through the spaces of Edinburgh where the story takes place. The app is being site tested with a view to publicly launching it in the near future.

Ramona is collaborating with Ann-Maria Walsh (QUB) on a two-year project to examine how one family of seventeenth-century women corresponded across the European territories.

Dating from 1605 to 1691, more than 350 manuscript letters survive from the Boyle women, the wife, daughters, daughters-in-law, and grand-daughters of Richard Boyle, the 1^st earl of Cork. While the hugely successful landowner/politician Boyle and his sons have received considerable scholarly attention, the rich epistolary legacy of the Boyle women has remained largely unexplored. Spanning three different generations, the women’s extant letters offer a rare perspective on the gendered experience at a time of tumultuous change in Ireland and Britain.

Transforming our understanding of the relationship between literature, history, and women’s writing, this study’s findings will be disseminated via a website, a major scholarly edition, a conference and a co-edited volume of essays.

This project is funded by the EC/Marie Curie Horizon 2020 – Research and Innovation Framework Programme

This project throws a spotlight on Elizabeth Cary, the closest thing we have to a female Shakespeare. Celebrated and reviled, Cary was well-known to her contemporaries as a dramatist, historian, translator and patroness. Her life was rife with controversies, including an ill-advised marriage, disinheritance, religious conversion, appearances before Star Chamber and eventual penury. Throughout it all, she wrote – dramas, petitions, histories, translations, poems, elegies, dedications, letters.

A Leverhulme Fellowship enabled Ramona to conduct the groundwork for a literary biography. The biography will address all of Cary’s extensive oeuvre while illuminating a major and iconic seventeenth-century female life. Preliminary work – which changes our understanding of early modern women’s participation in philanthropy, art, politics and religious and literary cultures – has already been published in chapters and articles.

This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.