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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.
Work undertaken by the Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts London (UAL) focuses on the role of identity and nation in the production and consumption of artwork and artefacts. This has resulted in an increased awareness and critical understanding of transnational art and design, to the benefit of the Museums and Galleries sector, arts organisations, and the artistic community.
Ysanne Holt was Academic Advisor and Commissioning Editor for Tate's Camden Town Group in Context project, funded through the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative which aims to transform how museums disseminate information about their collections. Holt undertook and commissioned new research into the Group's artworks and their broader contexts. Impacts derived from the project's online catalogue include increased awareness for national and international public and specialists; and improved access to the art and its contexts via a multi-platform open access facility. In addition, the project has influenced the Tate's Digital Strategy and led to the creation of the new post of Digital Editor within Tate's Research Department.
Professor Sinclair's project on `Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936' explores the difference between cultural representations of wrongdoing and their underlying realities, and includes the digitization and cataloguing of c4500 items of popular Spanish material held at the University Library, Cambridge (UL), and the British Library (BL). This contributes significantly to the conservation, stewardship, and enhanced accessibility of this ephemeral material, increasingly valued and recognized as important in Spain as part of its social history and heritage. Digitization also makes this fragile material available to support teaching. An exhibition of this material and comparable material in English runs at the UL, Cambridge April — December 2013, strongly supported by a virtual exhibition. Public engagement events extend the understanding of the relevance of this material to modern Britain.
In contrast to many European countries, public performance of music in languages other than English is still rare in the UK. French specialist Peter Hawkins has been researching and teaching the genre of chanson as a key element of French popular culture for most of his career. His research has fed into a regular series of public engagement activities over the past decade and beyond, including public performances of French chanson at a variety of venues. In a set of concerts given in spring 2013, Hawkins performed his own English translations of French chansons by the sometimes controversial Monegasque writer Léo Ferré, who is exceptionally well-known in France but much less so in the UK. The aim was to bring this particular type of musical poetry to a non-French-speaking audience. Feedback from the various audiences shows that some 70% feel that singing French chanson in English was a success and significantly extended and enhanced their cultural experience.
Bamforth's research on the Renaissance scientific marvel contributed to a major French exhibition The Birth of Modern Lorraine (Musée Lorrain, Nancy, 4 May-4 August 2013). The exhibition
The Leon Golub retrospective at Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum introduced Golub's politically engaged work to a city with a radical political history. Curated by Jon Bird, leading authority on Golub, it examined how Golub's depictions of political and military power impact upon individual and collective social bodies. It also related Golub's work to paintings by Goya and Picasso. Extensive public/media response, particularly as it spread through the Spanish-speaking world, confirmed the achievement and topicality of Golub's practice and the significance of the retrospective. Consideration of the role of painting as a mode of political commentary in itself, and as a catalyst for broader discussion of the visual representation of dictatorships and state violence, was found amongst curators, critics, and the general public. Bird's curatorial approach was informed by Middlesex University (MU)'s critical legacy of visual cultural studies, emphasizing works of art as social, material and expressive cultural objects.
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 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HT), the result of 44 years of research, was published in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim. It has been described as `perhaps the single most significant tool ever devised for investigating semantic, social, and intellectual history' (Randolph Quirk). It has so far generated an income of £1.6 million from global sales, bringing economic benefit to both the publisher and the wider publishing sector. Cultural enrichment has been delivered through the integration of the Thesaurus into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) website, opening it up to the c.1.5 million visitors per year who use the OED online. Notable user groups from outwith linguistics include novelists, poets, broadcasters and historians.
Research led by Cayley (the Exeter Manuscripts Project) has enhanced appreciation of medieval manuscript culture, drawing upon unique Exeter holdings, and has increased public understanding of medieval game cultures and European manuscript production (Impact 1). Her iPad app, developed with Antenna International, related exhibition and workshops have effected a `translation' of medieval material culture through modern media. Research by Roberts has disseminated new understandings of Renaissance obscenity in visual form, influencing artistic practice, and engaging regional communities (Impact 2). Jones has generated impact by stimulating public engagement with theatre and the visual arts (Impact 3) based on research offering new understandings of narrative and the visual.