AHRC grant for project on C18 creative networks

 An application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for network funding linking Southampton to colleagues in Leeds and at University College London has been successful. The Southampton participants in the project, on Creative Communities, 1750-1830, are Stephen Bygrave and Emma Clery (English) who will host a workshop on Regional Networks of Creativity at Chawton House Library in 2013. This event will ask how regional networks - comprising individuals such as publishers and patrons, or institutions such as periodicals and friendship groups - supported creative endeavour, and how the provinces might offer an alternative culture, by examining representative figures such as Joseph Priestley and William Roscoe, who played a key role in the establishment of cultural institutions as markers of civic pride and commercial identity. The event will involve an exhibition of relevant works, and one strand of the workshop will focus on the involvement of women writers in regional creative networks.