Projects

Does consent have a history? A growing literature recognizes the pervasive discourses around consent in different realms of late medieval and early modern life: sex, marriage, religious conversion, labor, colonization, and contract law. But no existing scholarship has yet examined the general theme of consent across all of these areas. Indeed, it has been difficult to explain the prevalence of apparently egalitarian concerns for freely given consent in this era, when a stable social hierarchy was a much- sought after ideal. This project on “Historicizing Consent” has created and maintains an international, interdisciplinary scholarly network, defining a new research agenda for historians, literary scholars, legal scholars, theologians, and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, working on Europe and the Americas. This project involves a dispersed group of scholars, many of whom have—within their discrete topics of inquiry—analysed consent as a hegemonic concept that imposed order as much as it liberated individual choice. Meanwhile, emerging critiques of the concept of consent in present-day political and legal discussions, for instance around prosecutions of sexual assault, have similarly highlighted where consent falls short of its emancipatory promise. Such critiques in turn invite scholars to denaturalize the notion of consent and investigate its multiple uses and meanings in the past. We do so by observing the past and examining its relevance to the present. The Project Team: Professor Tamar Herzog, Harvard University Dr Sonia Tycko, University of Edinburgh

More information on the project.​​​​

Knitting together material from three collections — Victoria and Albert Museum, London, University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, and the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, New York — this project re-centers the locus of global textile trade from White Euro-American markets to African diaspora markets. Our aim is to bring historical textiles from museum collections, archival records of textile production and circulation, and information on the use of these textiles in African diaspora communities in the Americas together in an interactive visual format that is easily understood by the public. In linking lesser-known Indian and Indian-imitation textiles as objects that clothed and shaped the lived experiences and identities within those within lesser-studied historical communities of color, this digital humanities project highlights contributions of under-represented communities to global cultures of fashion.

The pilot phase of this project is funded through a Level 1 New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The Project Team:

Dr Meha Priyadarshini, University of Edinburgh

Dr Deepthi Murali, George Mason University

Avalon Fotheringham, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Find out more

This project seeks to understand and explain how East Africa’s global connections systematically broke down after independence, opening up a set of new and unpredictable paths forward.

This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and will run from 1 September 2018 to 31 August 2022. 

Objectives

1. To broaden our understanding of how East Africans imagined the world and their place in it by excavating networks of global affinity between authors and readers spread across the world.
2. To assess the implications of the implosion of cosmopolitan, internationalized utopian visions of Africa’s place in the world for the period of economic and political crisis that followed.
3. To emphasise the importance of the African experience for studies of globalization from across the humanities and social sciences.

The Project Team:

• Daniel Branch, University of Warwick
• Emma Hunter, University of Edinburgh
• Gerard McCann, University of York

More information on 'Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s'.

Objective

This project seeks to examine in tandem, with equal focus on structural parallels and divergences, the conscious revival and subsequent dialectics of classicising learning in middle and later Byzantium (c.800–1350) and Tang/Song China (618–1279) and trace the evolution of classicising learning in Byzantine and Tang/Song literati culture. 

This project was funded by the European Research Council  and will ran from August 2017 and runs until July 2022. The Project Team:

• Professor Niels Gaul

• Dr Curie Virág

• Dr Foteini Spingou

• Dr Michael Höckelmann

More information on the PAIXUE project.

€2 million grant for comparative Byzantine/Chinese studies project

This collaborative research project in partnership with the National Museums of Scotland explored the history and legacy of Scotland's connections with the transatlantic slave trade through objects in public collections.

The project was supported by a Research Network Grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It was led by Professor Nuala Zahedieh, University of Edinburgh (Principal Investigator) and Dr Sarah Laurenson, National Museums Scotland (Co-Investigator).

Professor Diana Paton worked with Talawa Theatre Company, the National Archives, and other partners to make her research on African-Caribbean diasporic religion and its suppression accessible to secondary school children.

Children at Addey and Stanhope school in London explore 'freedom' in a Theatre in Education workshop as part of the Freedom to Believe project.

Background

In this project Professor Diana Paton worked with Talawa Theatre Company, the National Archives, and other partners to make her research on African-Caribbean diasporic religion and its suppression accessible to secondary school children. Talawa Theatre Company has used her research to develop Theatre in Education workshops about slavery, the aftermath of slavery, and religion, and piloted these workshops in four secondary schools in 2017. The project also lead to the production of an education pack and other online educational material, and to a public database documenting trials for religious crimes in the Caribbean from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century.  The project was funded by the AHRC through its Follow on Fund for Impact and Engagement.

Find out more

• Professor Paton's staff profile
• Freedom to Believe: A Caribbean social and religious history resource

• Freedom to Believe - project video report

• Caribbean Religious Trials

This project used the economic and social worlds of Scottish country houses to highlight connections between Scottish participation in the Atlantic trading system (with its reliance on enslaved African workers) and the Scots at home.

Background

Following the Union of 1707, many Scots moved to take advantage of opportunities arising out of British imperial expansion. In so doing, they became directly, or indirectly, involved in the enforced movement of millions of Africans who provided the labour which underpinned the rise of the Atlantic trading system. Meanwhile, Scots at home witnessed radical change and modernization in Scotland’s rural economy manifested in a surge of country house building. Many have claimed that these developments were connected but discussion of the links between slavery and the domestic economy remain poorly specified. Taking a wide-angled approach, this project explored how slavery’s impact extended beyond individual merchant fortunes, and direct capital transfers, and transformed a broad swathe of Scotland’s rural economy and society.

Events

A programme of seminars and events was held promoting collaboration and exchange between researchers in universities, museums, and the heritage industry. The discussion was organized around four broad themes:

• Accumulation: How far were improvers (builders) directly, or indirectly, involved in the Atlantic slave system?  How did the injection of ‘new money’ affect family strategies, estate management, and the allocation of resources at home?
• Production: How did colonial markets for goods and services affect Scotland’s production and employment patterns?
• Consumption: How did supplies of colonial hardwoods, plants, foods, fruits, and other materials produced by enslaved Africans transform country house exteriors, interiors, diets, dress, and parks?
• Aesthetics: How did engagement with empire affect aesthetic values at home?

The first workshop was held on 14/15 July 2017. For further information on the workshop, including an overview and paper abstracts, please visit the workshop's website at scottishcountryhouseblog.wordpress.com

This project was in partnership with the Historical Publications Section of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History) for publication in the Colonial Records of North Carolina (second series) of editions of primary sources.

This project arisos from the work of the Scottish Records Program of the North Carolina Colonial Records project, funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of North Carolina from 1985-1993, which resulted in identification of primary sources from Scottish archives that have been placed on deposit in the British Records Collection in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh North Carolina. An edition of texts from both the British Records Collection and the collections of the North Carolina State Archives relating to Scottish settlement in North Carolina is projected which will include wills and testaments, migrant letters, land grants, business records, church records and the records of the colonial and state legislatures of North Carolina.

Recent volumes in the series include Alan Watson, African Americans in Early North Carolina, and a volume on Native Americans in Early North Carolina is due for publication shortly. An important aim of the volume on Scottish settlement will be an emphasis on the importance of bringing together documentary sources from Scotland, North Carolina and beyond (eg Ireland and Jamaica) to illustrate the place of migration to mainland North America in the eighteenth century as part of the Atlantic economy that proved to be such an essential dynamic in the development of North Carolina, the U.S., Scotland and the U.K. Titles published by North Carolina Historical Publications will be made available in an ebook format shortly, and it is planned that the Scottish Settlement volume in the Colonial Records series will be published initially as an ebook.

The Colonial Records Project website

The Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh and National Museums Scotland worked together on a collaborative research project, led by Dr Wendy Ugolini (University of Edinburgh) and David Forsyth (National Museums Scotland).

In 2012, Dr Wendy Ugolini published a chapter on Scottish Commonwealth Regiments in A Military History of Scotland, edited by Jeremy Crang, Edward Spiers and Matthew Strickland. This led to a research collaboration with David Forsyth, Principal Curator in Scottish History and Archaeology at the National Museum of Scotland. The first part of this project was an international research workshop, Wha' bears a blade for Scotland?: the construction of Scottish diasporic military identities, c.1880- present day which involved academics and museum curators from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. This was funded through a Scottish Government Arts and Humanities Award which was administered by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

This workshop undertook a comparative investigation of the phenomenon of ‘military Scottishness’ as an overlooked expression of Scottish diasporic identity. Overall, the project sought to enhance our understanding of military Scottishness in the wider context of the associational culture of the Scottish diaspora, which brings with it a material culture dimension.

This was followed by a well-attended public symposium hosted at the National Museum of Scotland in September 2012. Finally in April 2016, Edinburgh University Press published a jointly-edited volume, A Global Force: War, Identities and Scotland's Diaspora, which brings together the presentations and papers from the two events.

The project publication, which focused largely on First World War experience, was also being celebrated as part of the National Museum of Scotland’s First World War centenary project.

• Wha' bears a blade for Scotland website (National Museums Scotland)

• First World War centenary (National Museums Scotland)
• Dr Ugolini's staff profile

Since 1861, over twenty-five million Italians have emigrated from Italy, with their descendants around the world numbering around sixty million.

According to the Italian Embassy, there are now approximately 220,000 Italians in Britain, of whom 30,000 live in Scotland. Scholars such as Donna R. Gabaccia argue that Italy’s migratory workers and exiles repeatedly formed broad, transnational social networks that resembled ‘diasporas-in-formation’, scattering in multiple directions. Italians started to settle in Scotland around the mid-nineteenth century with peaks in immigration occurring at the turn of the century, in 1913, and again after the First World War in 1920-21. By the outbreak of the Second World War there was an Italian-born population of over five thousand in Scotland.

Dr Wendy Ugolini’s research challenges the romanticised nostalgia which surrounds the Italian presence in Scotland, rooted in its highly visible presence in coastal ice cream parlours and fish restaurants. Instead, her monograph, Experiencing War as the ‘Enemy Other’: Italian Scottish Experience in World War II (Manchester University Press, 2011), highlights the extent to which the Italian diasporic population was subjected to racialised hostility throughout the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in manifestations of anti-Italian violence during the Second World War.

Within Scotland, long-standing stereotypes of the Italian diasporic population as dirty, servile and racially inferior were reinforced by their marginalised religious identity as Roman Catholics. When Italy declared war on Britain in June 1940, Italophobia intensified with Italians redefined as the ‘enemy within’ - epitomised by the British government’s implementation of a policy of internment, deportation and relocation and the concurrent anti-Italian riots in cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow.

‘Communities of allegiance'

Ugolini’s research focuses particularly on the wartime existence of competing ‘communities of allegiance’ amongst second generation Italians, those of Italian parentage who were born and raised in Scotland. Through an analysis of oral history interviews with forty-four men and women of Italian origin and previously unpublished archival material, Ugolini’s research takes a case study of a long-established immigrant group and explores how notions of belonging and citizenship are undermined at a time of war.

Examining the question of contested loyalties amongst second generation Italians who served in the British forces, this research aims to contribute to the debate on how we examine and document the phenomenon of ‘hybrid identity’ amongst second-generation immigrants. Overall, it illuminates the complex and diverse ways in which ethnicity interacts with a sense of belonging to a nation at a time of conflict and how notions of who is entitled to be part of a ‘national’ community can shift and evolve over time.