GRADskills Innovation Projects 2011-12
Please see below for the successful projects during the academic year 2011-12.
Scottish Network for Japanese Visual Culture
- Film Studies: Andrews Dorman
- Amount awarded: £1000
This event is a one-day interdisciplinary network consortium which seeks to address issues of teaching and researching Japanese visual culture (mostly in the disciplines of film, media studies and art history). It is intended to consolidate the building of a lasting network between researchers, linking those working in Scotland (and specifically those at St Andrews) with the rest of the UK. Contributors will have the opportunity to meet and discuss new and innovative ways of researching, teaching, and promoting the study of Japanese visual culture as well as sharing their own research.
The changing experience of time in the long 19th century: Local, Regional, Transnational and Global perspectives
- History: Marie Ventura
- Amount awarded: £1000
This workshop aims to explore the development of the modern experience of time across various disciplines and on different spatial levels.
Film Programming and Curation at the Byre Theatre
- Film Studies: Pasquale Curation, Ralvca Iacob; Spanish/Film Studies: Beatrix Tadeo Fuica
- Amount awarded: £1400
This project will allow for highly innovative film programming based on the latest research we are carrying out, and make this available in a town that has, to date, been entirely starved of non-mainstream film culture. Specifically, the three undersigned doctoral candidates will draw on our personal expertise and research interests to programme three thematically-arranged film seasons over the course of the autumn term 2012. This will bring a dozen acclaimed films not currently in mainstream distribution in the UK to St Andrews, as well as inviting three filmmakers to discuss their work.
Eudaimonia in the Ancient World
- Philosophy: Daniele Labriola, Martin Sticker
- Amount awarded: £500
This conference will seek to bring together postgraduates and staff from St Andrews and beyond who have an interest in ancient philosophy. The overarching aim is to shed light on the various conceptions of eudaimonia (commonly translated as 'happiness') that multiple philosophical schools in the ancient Greek and Roman world held. It will highlight the great importance that eudaimonia (happiness), as variously defined, held for the ancient Greeks and Romans. In turn, this conference seeks to move its participants to compare and contrast ancient and modern conceptions of happiness.
St Andrews Graduate conference for Biblical and Early Christian Studies: Manuscripts and their Texts, Perspectives on Textual Criticism
- Divinity: Elizabeth Tracy, Dan Batavici, Hauna Ondrey
- Amount Awarded: £400
This conference aims to bring together postgraduate and early career biblical scholars to encourage open discussion regarding current research, promote the discipline, and create a body of work that will be published and distributed among scholars of all levels.
'Future Connections' Scottish Universities Postgraduate Sustainable Development Networking conference
- Geography & Geosciences: Rebecca Folly
- Amount awarded: £1000
To inaugurate a Scottish Universities Postgraduate Annual Conference in the field of sustainable development. The conference aims to create an interdisciplinary network of postgraduate researchers in the field of sustainable development; to address the challenges of interdisciplinary research; to provide training to early career researchers in: i) publishing papers in sustainable development- from first draft to journal article and where to publish: advice from senior editors in the field; ii) getting an interdisciplinary PhD – overcoming the challenges of choosing your external examiner and passing your viva; iii) presenting your research at conferences – where do sustainable development PhDs present their work?
Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages 2012
- History (Mediaeval): James Page
- Amount awarded: £700
The conference is intended to bring together postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers working on themes of gender and transgression in the mediaeval period with two main aims: (i) to facilitate networking and and allow early-career researchers to present their work in a friendly, rigorous atmosphere (ii) to allow the organisers to develop vital career skills in conference organisation.
Green Revolutions: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
- History: Troy Vettese, Matthew Holmes, Sarah Erman
- Amount awarded: £700
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the University of St. Andrew’s Institute of Environmental History will hold a conference, bringing together young scholars concerned with environmental issues. Postgraduate students and established academics from fields as diverse as sustainable development, religious studies, history and environmental science will present their research. This gathering will help direct historians towards subjects relevant to current policy debates, while more present-minded attendants will gain from a historical perspective. A secondary aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to build ties to environmental institutes in Canada, the US, the UK and continental Europe.
'A Brand of Fictional Magic: Imaginative Empathy in Harry Potter'
- English: John Pazdziora
- Amount awarded: £1000
A two-day interdisciplinary conference and subsequent publication critically examining J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (1997-2007). Given the immense and ongoing popularity of the Harry Potter series, this conference offers academics a chance not only to engage with each other across disciplines, but to meaningfully interact with lay readers, parents, young adults, and educators though Rowling's books, thereby increasing popular awareness of the value of critical research. http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2012/Title,86141,en.html
The Deleuze Cinema Network Resource site
- Film Studies: Matthew Holtmeier
- Amount awarded: £500
The Deleuze Cinema Network Resource Site (DCNRS) will establish an ongoing site of collaboration for PhD students and post-docs across the UK and abroad. This site will bring together researchers in diverse disciplines – English, Film, International Relations, Modern Languages, Media, Theater, Philosophy, Music, Theology, and more – studying Deleuze and cinema, and act as a focal point for networking opportunities, collaboration, and skills development.
Images of the Past: Interdisciplinary Postgraduate conference
- Modern Languages: Beatriz Tadeo Fuica, Jutta King; History: Andrew Dodd
- Amount awarded: £893
This conference aims to give postgraduate students of the Faculty of Arts at the University of St Andrews and neighbouring Scottish Universities the possibility to share their research in an interdisciplinary environment. This will give them the opportunity to have their papers discussed and receive feedback from different perspectives. By encouraging postgraduate contributions from various subject disciplines, the conference will be instrumental in generating a Scottish-wide postgraduate community and in forging interdisciplinary relations under the leadership of St Andrews. The presence of an external keynote speaker carrying out research across disciplines will both illustrate the potentials of this approach and give the event wider visibility. The interdisciplinarity we aim to foster will indeed help postgraduates to produce research with a broader theoretical and methodological range and encourage intellectual exchange.
The New Face of "Impact" in the Arts and Social Sciences: challenges and opportunities embedded in the Research Evaluation Framework
- Social Anthropology: Philip Kao, Christopher Hewlett
- Amount awarded: £1400
This workshop will help students, teachers, and other staff members in the arts and social sciences identify ways to make sense of their research and commitments in the context of this new impact assessment. We seek to examine and identify how “Impact” is being and could be measured in order to make research outcomes translatable, valuable, and meaningful across a wide range of social, academic and public policy contexts. Because the outcomes of research in many social sciences and the arts are not readily or easily articulated, researchers need to find ways of facilitating knowledge transfer while ensuring knowledge integrity. We hope that this workshop can help budding researchers identify ways to carve out an effective space for sharing their knowledge in the greater public sphere. Not only will participants learn how to better communicate their research findings and influence the public regarding their knowledge practices and findings, but they will also learn how to capture and create opportunities to reinvigorate research and its applications in light of the growing ‘culture of impact’.
The Cairo Geniza: Analysis of the Medieval Hebrew Collection at John Rylands Library, a collaborative venture with the University of Manchester
- Divinity: Garrick Allen, Sheree Lear, Sean Cook, Adam Harger and William Tooman
- Amount awarded: £850
This project aims to further research already begun by four Hebrew Bible postgraduate students who have been studying the history and relevance of ancient manuscripts found in the Geniza (storeroom) of a Ben-Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. 15,000 manuscript fragments dating from the 10th-19th centuries CE are held at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester.
The Divinity Postgraduate Job Colloquium
- Divinity: Andrew Hay
- Amount awarded: £800
The aim of the Colloquium is to develop in postgraduate students the basic skills needed for the international theology/biblical studies job market. The Colloquium will improve their job-application knowledge, and develop their presentation and interview skills. Simultaneously, the Colloquium is also intended as a time to foster and strengthen the research and social ties between the inner postgraduate communities in the School of Divinity. This will primarily be accomplished through papers given by postgraduates concerning their research and its direct link to the academy at large and the church.
The Unsleeping Angel: Literature and Learning, c.1130 - c.1160
- History: Jane Edwards, Maxine Esser
- Amount awarded: £500
The Literature and Learning in the mid twelfth century conference aims to provide a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate on the intellectual activity taking place in mid twelfth-century Europe.
Organisation of the Universities of Scotland Inorganic Conference 2012 (USIC 2012)
- Chemistry: Cesar Blanco, Brian Chalmers, Phillip Nejman and Lorenz Obrecht
- Amount awarded: £750
The USIC is designed to bring together chemistry PhD students from all Scottish Universities as well as Newcastle and Durham. Students participating in the conference will be given the chance to improve their transferable skills by presenting a poster or giving a talk. They will also increase their knowledge and gain insight into topics not related to their research.
Emblems of Nationhood, 1707-1901: a multidisciplinary conference organised by the Schools of Art History and Modern Languages
- Art History: Jennifer Whitty; Modern Languages (French): Christie Margrave; English: Rosalind Powell
- Amount awarded: £1000
This international conference explores national identity and will address the roots of this theme by discussing depictions of Britain and Britishness in literature, philosophy and art between the Act of Union in 1707 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. We aim to explore how expressions of nationalism have moulded both critical perspectives on national identity and their creative products.
