As of December 2024 our colleague Dr Michael Brown is embarking upon a major externally funded research project. Developed in collaboration with Professor Joanne Begiato (University of the Arts London: London College of Fashion), this project, entitled ‘The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present’, has received £846,900 of Standard Research Grant funding from the AHRC to enable a major programme of both historical research and public and professional engagement.

The project, which will run from until 2028, explores the emotional and embodied history of the hand in Victorian Britain. It uncovers the ways in which hands enabled contemporaries to navigate the complexities of a globalised, urbanised, technologised modernity, functioning as a metonym for some of the most pressing concerns of the day, ranging from conceptions of gender, race and class, through ideas about the value of labour, art and craft, through to notions of character and value and debates about science and spirit.

As well as leading to a co-authored book and several articles, the project is concerned to promote and sustain wellbeing in the present through a wide range of impact and engagement activities involving project partners The Quilters’ Guild in York and the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London. This includes six workshops bringing quilters and surgeons together to explore the shared haptic dimensions of their work, as well as four workshops involving students at Lancaster and the London College of Fashion, getting them to reflect on the role of embodiment in shaping their sense of self as well as encouraging them to express themselves through embodied acts of creativity.

The project will also fund a specifically commissioned work of textile art as well as three short films, which, together with creative portfolios produced by the workshop participants, will form the basis for a touring exhibition to be held at the Festival of Quilts at the Birmingham NEC and the Hunterian Museum in London.

The project has just advertised for a full-time Post Doctoral Research Associate to be based at Lancaster, more details of which can be found here (closing date 9 December 2024), and will also employ a full-time Public Engagement Fellow, to be based in London.