Current research projects
Music
Dr. Laura Tunbridge's "Migrations of the Lied, 1918-1945" investigates the performance of German art song between the two world wars (Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship and AHRC Early Career Fellowship). Professor Phil Grange is completing a song cycle for performance at the Purcell Room as part of the Park Lane Group series. Dr. Camden Reeves is working on String Quartet No.2 for the Quatuor Danel and Piano Trio No.2 for the Lawson Trio (for CD release on Prima Facie Records). Professor David Fanning researches composer Mieczslaw Weinberg, Dr. Ricardo Climent focuses on the creative use of real-time 3D rendering game-engine technology and dynamic metadata for immersive environments and Professor Barry Cooper furthers research on Beethoven, including the completion of a new biography, Beethoven: An Extraordinary Life (for ABRSM). Dr. Rebecca Herissone's AHRC-funded major research project 'Musical Creativity in Restoration England' comprised the first systematic investigation of musical creativity in the mid-late seventeenth-century England. Two of the project's main outputs are to be published by Boydell and Brewer, and Cambridge University Press.
History
Mapping Migrant Cultures in Manchester 1880-2000
This project provides a new vision of the construction of diasporic cultures in modern Britain through enabling migrants to digitally map their own life experiences. It explores the changing cultural landscapes through which Jewish and Caribbean immigrants to Manchester constructed distinctive collective identities between 1880 and 2000. Connecting oral interviewing and the visualization capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology will generate a new micro-history of the spaces and movements through which migrants constructed their own identities.
Drama
The Leverhulme Trust recently awarded funding to support Dr Aleksandar Dundjerovic's work on 'Contemporary Brazilian Theatre Devising'; Professor David Mayer and Dr David Wilmore's project, 'James Winston and The Theatric Tourist'; and an international network based on Professor James Thompson's 'In place of war: theatre, performance and war' AHRC project. Other current research includes Dr Rajinder Dudrah's exhibition on 'Bollywood Stills' for Contact Theatre; Dr Vicky Lowe's development of a symposium on 'Star Voices' (with the University of Sunderland), hosted by the Centre of Screen Studies; and the completion of Professor Tony Jackson's AHRC project, 'Performance, Learning and Heritage'.
Religions and Theology
Religions and Theology is the home of several active research centres with externally funded projects. Amongst the most notable is an ongoing project under the aegis of the Centre for Jewish Studies in which it is planned to digitize all of the 11,000 medieval fragments from the Cairo Genizah that are in the collection of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. This project's attention to the cataloguing of each fragment has already revealed some fascinating discoveries. See here
Classics and Ancient History
Peter Pormann is currently pursuing a major research project entitled ‘Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’, funded by the ERC (€1.5m). The project aims to examine the entire Arabic commentary tradition on the Aphorisms, from the 9th–16th centuries. It will survey the manuscript tradition of these Arabic commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms, beginning with Hunayn ibn Ishaq's (d. c. 873) translation of Galen's commentary. By approaching the material as an electronic corpus, the project shall provide the first comprehensive study of the tradition of the Hippocratic commentary in Arabic. Both in approach and scope, this study seeks to alter our understanding of the role commentaries played in the transmission of scientific knowledge across countries and creeds.
Jacob Wackernagel, Lectures on Syntax With Special Reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic - Edited by David Langslow
An extensively annotated English edition of the two series of "Vorlesungen über Syntax" originally delivered in 1918-19 by the great Swiss linguist and classical philologist Jacob Wackernagel (1853-1938). Although out of print in German since 1996, the Lectures remain one of the best available introductions, in any language, not only to Greek, Latin, and comparative syntax but also to many topics in the history and pre-history of Greek and Latin, and their relations with other languages. Other subjects, such as the history of grammatical terminology, are also brilliantly dealt with. This new edition supplements the German original by providing a translation of all quotations and examples, numerous detailed footnotes offering background information and suggestions for further reading, and a single bibliography which brings together Wackernagel's references and those added in the notes. Available now through bookshops, or direct from Oxford University here
Ruth Morello and Roy Gibson have recently completed a book for Cambridge University Press on the Letters of Pliny the Younger.
Emma Griffiths and Tim Parkin are together working, in an unusual collaboration between a Greek literature expert and a Roman historian, on a book, commissioned by Blackwell, on the culture of the family in the Greek and Roman worlds.
Alison Sharrock has recently, in September 2009, published with Cambridge University Press a book entitled Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence.
Kate Cooper was recently awarded £450,367.45 by the Research Councils UK Global Uncertainties: ESRC/AHRC Fellowships on Ideas and Beliefs scheme, for a project running from 2009-12, entitled: Constantine's Dream: Belonging, Deviance and the Problem of Violence in Early Christianity.
Saskia Roselaar from Leiden University, joined us last year on an Isaac Newton International Fellowship: her project aims to clarify the processes of integration between Italians and Romans in the period 340-91 BC.
There are three current projects related to ancient medicine: Caroline Petit's (Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship) on the language of Galen, David Langslow's on the text and language of Alexander of Tralles, and Clare Pilsworth's (Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship) on the social status of medical practitioners in late antique and early medieval Italy.
The arrival of Roberta Mazza spells the beginning of serious work on the Rylands collection of Classical and early Christian papyri, many of which remain unpublished or in need of major editing.
Art History and Visual Studies Recent Research Highlights
Dr Anthony Gerbino was appointed in September 2010. His research expertise is in the early modern period, particularly the relationship between science and architecture.
The Surrealism Centre (directed by Professor David Lomas) continues its AHRC-funded research into Surrealism and sexuality.
Dr Emma Loosley published Messiah and Mahdi in 2009.
Professor Mark Crinson co-edited (with Claire Zimmerman) Neo-Avantgarde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (2010).
Postdoctoral awards were won by Dr Marian Endt (the cultural history of coral), Dr Paul Dobraczyck (Victorian decorative cast iron), and Dr Charles Miller (Surrealism and autobiography).