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This case study focuses on the impact of research carried out at the University of Cambridge into the history of evolution by Professor James Secord and co-workers, notably the impact of two research programmes: the Darwin Correspondence Project and Darwin Online. These projects have contributed to a substantial reorientation of public discourse on the history of evolution. The impact has been achieved through web resources; museum and library exhibitions; teaching materials for schools and universities; and radio and television programmes. These outputs have encouraged public understanding of the range of contributors to science, including women; an awareness of the diversity of positions in the evolutionary debate; and an appreciation of the complex relations between evolutionary science and faith. The projects have shown that the highest achievements of scholarship can be made freely accessible to a global audience.
Dr Paul Chirico's research has directly shaped the work of the John Clare Trust. Dr Chirico has played a leading role in the work of the Trust, which he founded in 2004 with a view to the purchase of the poet's birthplace in Helpston, near Peterborough. Through the John Clare Cottage and the work of the Trust on which it depends, he has since 2008 achieved direct impact on the conservation, preservation and understanding of culture. He has had an impact on education through the materials he has developed for visitors to the Cottage, both school parties and the general public.
Over the last five years Dr Anne Witchard's research on the representations of China and the Chinese in Britain has generated considerable social, cultural and political impact on an international stage. The research has contributed significantly to international cultural relations between Britain and China, in particular through enhancing understanding of the social and historical ties between these nations. The research has also improved Britain's knowledge of its own multicultural history and altered public understanding of ethnic groups in contemporary urban Britain. Finally, the research has directly influenced the creative industries in their efforts to represent British-Chinese relations today.
There are two ways in which Erle's research on William Blake, Physiognomy and text-image relationships have achieved public impact. First, a display and a Scholar's Morning on "Blake and Physiognomy" at Tate Britain (2010-11) and there were also invitations to give public lectures for "Haus der Romantik", a Literature Museum specialising on Romanticism in Marburg (Germany) and for the Blake Society, a London-based but international organisation of Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Second, an online-exhibition on Lord Alfred Tennyson's copy of Blake's Job for the Tennyson Research Centre (2012-13) and a display on Blake, Tennyson and Anne Gilchrist in Lincoln Public Library.
Stefan Collini's research on the character of universities and their relations to their host societies has had a major impact on public discourse in Britain. Grounded in historical evidence concerning the growth of institutions and disciplines, and on the ways public debate about the functions of universities has evolved since the mid-nineteenth century, it has influenced political argument about legislation, the content of reporting on higher education, and public understanding of universities more generally. There is extensive evidence for the uptake of these ideas in documents produced by public bodies, citations in the media, and other published reports on policy debates.
Research on the discipline of Dutch Studies conducted at UCL contributed to recommendations from the Raad voor de Nederlandse Taal en Letteren (Council for Dutch Language and Literature), providing policy advice to the Committee of Ministers overseeing the Dutch Language Union, the intergovernmental organisation responsible for the internal and external language policies of the Netherlands and Flanders. This in turn led to a new policy of the Dutch Language Union, which influences a €12 million annual budget supporting Dutch language infrastructure across the world. It also led to substantial worldwide debate amongst university teachers and to changes in how these subjects are taught and researched.
This project has disseminated high-quality research through collaborative, curatorial, published, TV and digital outputs with a strong public engagement agenda. It has raised public awareness of the important role of gender in the development of eighteenth-century theatrical culture, influenced the public programmes of national collections, and involved collaborations with disciplines of music, theatre history and drama companies. The research has generated public lectures, a major curated exhibition with the National Portrait Gallery The First Actresses (2011-2012) and a smaller show of modern actress portraits The Actress Now, TV and radio features, linked digital resources on the `Open Arts Archive' (www.openartsarchive.org/oaa), and substantial press interest.
Dr Richard Noakes led `Connecting Cornwall', a project working with the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum (PTM) from February 2009 - July 2012, looking at the lives and careers of the `ordinary' men who operated the Victorian and Edwardian British submarine cable network.
The project was fundamental in building a working relationship with PTM that now paves the way for future research-based collaborations. The exhibition also raised the profile of PTM. A new section of the website was created for PTM, greatly improving its online presence and user experience. Impacts on the public have included providing access to previously unseen archival material, preserving and displaying artefacts of cultural heritage and in educating people with regards to their local history.
The Oxford World's Classics (OWC), re-founded in 1980 as a paperback series and now also available electronically, includes many new translations from European languages with introduction and notes written for a non-expert reader by scholars drawing on their academic research. Three members of the Oxford Modern Languages Faculty (Cronk, Kahn, Robertson) have been particularly active in translating and/or editing volumes and in advising the Series Commissioning Editor on the basis of their respective research expertise. The impact is partly economic (sales, including export sales), partly cultural in making key works of European literature accessible to an Anglophone public reliant on translations and partly educational as the editions are adopted worldwide on secondary school, undergraduate and graduate reading lists. The OWC editions have made classic European literature available to an international market, reaching out to new audiences.
The aim of the Ibarra Real Project was to fashion a distinctive Spanish font for use in contemporary print and digital media in order to create a twenty-first century typographic identity that was firmly rooted in Spanish culture. The project focused on the revival and re-establishing of the iconic eighteenth-century Ibarra Real typeface, and research by Sánchez Espinosa in the UoA provided the historical and cultural underpinning that validates the claim of the font to be characteristically Spanish. The project has had a clear impact on Spanish graphic and book design and has added a distinctive Hispanic typeface to Microsoft's suite of fonts. It has contributed to the promotion of cultural diversity in the context of global media dominated by the English language and Anglo-American visual culture.