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Regional and national audiences have benefited from enhanced perceptions of the linguistic and literary heritage of the West Midlands. Cultural capital has been created by engaging members of the public in the discovery of their linguistic and literary past through their unprecedented access to and understanding of a manuscript written in the dialect of the medieval West Midlands. Increased national interest in the region's cultural heritage has been generated.
The Newton Project transforms public understanding of one of the most significant intellectual figures in history. A pioneering initiative that has set international standards for the digital humanities, it provides an open access online scholarly edition of Sir Isaac Newton's complete writings, making available previously unseen material relating to his ideas about science, mathematics and theology. Under the directorship of Rob Iliffe, the Project has reached a wide variety of benefactors, including secondary schools, broadcasters and the performing arts. Through these creative collaborations, it serves as an outstanding resource for the popularisation of scientific thought.
Jane Austen has, since the late nineteenth century, occupied a powerful position within English- speaking culture, popular and canonical, accessible and complexly academic. Kathryn Sutherland's engagement with audiences beyond academia has improved public understanding of how Austen's works and life acquired the forms and significance they have had. Sutherland's research has enabled better-informed teaching of Austen at secondary school and university level, and assisted high quality educational programme making for television. Her collaborative work on the digitization of Austen's working drafts has set new standards for the encoding of literary manuscripts, assisting literary curatorship and improving public accessibility to cultural heritage.
Professor Nicholas Cronk, has in collaboration with others, created an app which is an enhanced edition of Voltaire's Candide, freely available, for use on tablets. Candide is a timeless and universal text with perennial appeal, and this digital edition renders it accessible to a wide variety of new readers. Cronk has been encouraging engagement with Voltaire's texts through more traditional channels but this latest innovation has won new readers for Voltaire, especially among a young generation often more familiar with new media than with traditional books. The app, with its dual level of annotations, illustrations, manuscript images, commentaries, and the Polyadès recording, has been well received by a wide range of readers, and functions in a curatorial capacity to preserve an important work of French classical literary heritage in a new, sustainable format. The Candide app represents a revolutionary tool for both independent learning, and also for classroom teaching.
Editorial and biographical research on the work of Virginia Woolf, carried out primarily by Susan Sellers, fed directly into the composition of Vanessa and Virginia, a novel by Sellers about Woolf's relationship with her sister. In 2008 Vanessa and Virginia was published by a small independent publisher set up in 2006 in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. It became the press's most commercially successful publication and ensured its early economic viability. The novel was subsequently published in North America and translated into more than a dozen languages. It was also turned into a successful, inter-nationally-staged play. This case study therefore claims several types of impact: (1) exporting the cultural heritage of the UK and stimulating international public interest in Woolf; (2) generating economic prosperity for a small entrepreneurial business in a remote part of Scotland, and for the creative industries (theatre and international publishing) more widely; (3) inspiring and facilitating the work of other cultural practitioners; (4) enriching cultural life in the UK and abroad. The users of this research are: the directors of an independent publishing company; translators and international publishing houses; the director, producer and actors of a touring theatre company; the reading and theatre-going public.
James Hogg (1770-1835) is an important but hitherto little known nineteenth-century Scottish author and songwriter. In recent years, Stirling research has demonstrably expanded the audience for Hogg's songs and poetry in Scotland, the wider UK, and USA. Contemporary writers and artists have become more engaged with Hogg's work, and among the public this research has generated greater appreciation of the Scottish literary and music tradition in particular, while promoting Scottish cultural heritage in general, at home, and around the world.
This case study describes the impact of Professor Mervyn Cooke's research on the music of Benjamin Britten. A six-volume edition of Britten's correspondence, new performance editions, public talks, and programme notes for concerts and CDs has enhanced the understanding of Britten's music amongst a wide general audience, contributed to the educational and outreach remit of performance organisations, and stimulated creative output in the form of performances, recordings, and popular biographies.
William Wordsworth's poetry is of lasting value to our cultural and national identity and to perceptions of the Lake District. The desire to communicate core Wordsworthian principles shapes and informs the research undertaken by the Wordsworth Centre, Lancaster University, which seeks to vitally reconnect poetry and the region in the twenty-first century. Such research has produced an increased engagement with Wordsworth's poetry and transformed the understanding of his work and its continuing relevance for a range of beneficiaries.
Two research projects undertaken through collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere have realised considerable impact in the assessment period through three main channels:
1) a pioneering website, designed for diverse users, containing the first digital versions of selected Wordsworth manuscripts, which has received over 580,000 hits;
2) contributions to the visitor experience at Dove Cottage, Grasmere;
3) 40 `Wordsworth Walks' around Grasmere and its environs involving over 950 participants from a range of different groupings (business, public sector, general public).
The Gutzkow project, co-directed by Lauster and Vonhoff of the Department of Modern Languages (German), has transformed public access to the author's work through open-access, on-line publication. The project, which combines specialist scholarship with innovative editing, has considerably enhanced public appreciation of a widened canon of 19th-century German literature (impact 1). User testimonies, the international press, public acknowledgement and public involvement in events in the region reveal a significant renewal of public interest in Gutzkow. The editorial results of the Gutzkow project have been requested by an interdisciplinary linguistic digitization project in Berlin and will be fully integrated in this open access linguistic database (impact 2).
Wide-ranging research undertaken by Andrew Bennett from 1994 onwards has had a profound and sustained impact on the teaching of literary theory at higher education institutions (HEIs) across the world. Bennett co-authored the first edition of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (ILCT) with Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex) in 1995. The reception of the book has been remarkable for its enthusiasm and international reach: ILCT has become a key text in literary theory, literature and language courses in HEIs in the UK and elsewhere (including in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere). The book, which has sold c. 73,000 copies, has materially influenced how literary theory is taught, making the subject more accessible to students by presenting key critical concepts in the context of readings of individual literary texts. The success of ILCT has led to the commissioning of a second, more general book directed at beginning undergraduates, Studying Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, which will be published by Pearson in 2014.