Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

An Aberystwyth media historian has been awarded a Research Project Grant by the Leverhulme Trust to study the relationship between television and society in Wales during the 1970s. Dr Jamie Medhurst, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication and co-director of the University’s Centre for Media History, was awarded £114,000 for the three-year project which includes a PhD studentship to focus on a particular aspect of the study. Dr Medhurst said: ‘This project will create a unique and original history of television and society in Wales during the 1970s, paying particular attention to the ways in which television mediated the changing nature of society and how television itself, rather than merely reflecting what was happening, was subject to, and part of, the same changes. ‘Through systematic examination of primary source material, I want to explore the complex relationship between politics and policy, national identity, language, everyday life and television during the decade and hop...

Evangelical religion is one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing religious movements in the world today. While still a vibrant force in the USA evidenced in a recent evangelical President, that growth has taken place way beyond its traditional English-speaking heartlands to the Global South which includes China, South Korea, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The present-day global evangelical movement had its origins in the religious revivals that swept the British Atlantic world in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Dr David Ceri Jones from the Department of History & Welsh History, Aberystwyth University, has been awarded a £115,527 grant from the Leverhulme Trust to better understand the early evangelical movement through a reassessment of the life, context and legacy of its inventor and chief inspiration, the trans-Atlantic revivalist, George Whitefield (1714-70). George Whitefield was probably the most famous religious figure of the eighteenth century, cros...

Aberystwyth University’s Department of Law and Criminology has been awarded a £87,743 Leverhulme Research Project Grant to study the deterrent effect of legal measures taken against business cartels. The two year study, Explaining and Understanding Business Cartel Collusion, will be undertaken by Professor Christopher Harding and Dr Jennifer Edwards. The study’s main objective will be to produce and analyse a number of 'cartel biographies' which will draw upon the experience of dealing with some major international cartels in a number of jurisdictions over the past 30 years. Professor Christopher Harding, who is leading the research, says, “The activities of such cartels – price fixing, market sharing and the like – are considered to have a very detrimental effect on markets and consumers, but legal control is difficult and costly. There is therefore a strong public interest in effective enforcement.” “Research into the actual prosecution of international cartels and assess...

Aberystwyth University academic Dr Sarah Prescott has been awarded a Research Project Grant worth £248,395 by the Leverhulme Trust for a study of ‘Women’s Poetry 1400-1800 in English, Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Welsh’. Dr Prescott is a Reader at the Department of English and Creative Writing, and Director of the Centre for Women’s Writing and Literary Culture. She will be working with fellow scholars at the University of Edinburgh, National University of Ireland, Galway and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth on the three year project. The study will provide a major new literary history of women's poetry in Ireland, Scotland and Wales from 1400 to 1800, covering poetry in Welsh, Gaelic, Scots, Scots Gaelic and English through a fully edited anthology with translations and a critical study jointly written by the specialists engaged on the project. “The last twenty years has seen an explosion of interest in pre-1800 British women's writing,...

A deadly famine that struck England during the 14th century, killing upwards of half a million people in less than three years, will be the focus of a major new study by Aberystwyth University historian Professor Phillipp Schofield.  Professor Schofield, Head of the Department of History and Welsh History, has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship worth £140,507 which will run for three years from September 2012. The study will culminate with the publication of a book on “The Great Famine. Dearth and society in medieval England c.1300”. “Despite being northern Europe's most extensive famine event of the last millennium, relatively little has been written on it,” said Professor Schofield. "This work will not only bring us closer to an understanding of an event that may, on current estimates, have killed upwards of half a million people - out of a total population in England circa 1300 of around 5 million - in less than three years but will also draw to wide...

Acclaimed theatrical producer Mike Pearson, Professor of Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.  Professor Pearson is a member of the University’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies and has been awarded £87,208 over two years for a project entitled “Marking Time: Performance, Archaeology and the City”. A former co-director of Brith Gof Theatre Company, Professor Pearson directed the National Theatre Wales’s critically acclaimed production of Aeschylus’s The Persians which was staged at the military training village at Mynydd Epynt in the Brecon Beacons in August 2010. The Leverhulme funding will support a series of research activities and public engagements including the writing of a monograph and journal articles as well as organising guided tours, demonstrations, workshops and both restaged and new performances that trace the origins and development of alternative practices of th...