British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database
The database, edited and principally compiled by Dr. Jami Rogers, contains the records of over 1100 productions of Shakespeare to which British black or Asian actors, directors and other production personnel have contributed. The database spans the time period of 1930 – 2015 and tracks casting patterns for ethnic minority performers. It contains information about the production, the media reaction to the BAME personnel’s work within these productions, and lists the roles actors have played in the plays recorded. It provides a record of achievements and a statistical framework for analysing shifting professional opportunities over 85 years. The database is a major theatre history tool as well as having the ability to track casting policies from 1930 – 2015.
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Classics and Class in Britain, 1789-1917
Collection of encounters between consciousness of social class and Greek & Latin Classics
The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context
From the Project Abstract on the UKRI Grant List website: The key outputs will be 60 oral history interviews which will be available electronically and a searchable database of existing oral history resources on the ‘Windrush generation’. 30 of the interviews will focus on the response of Caribbean governments and their representatives in London to the legal restrictions imposed on immigration to the UK from the Caribbean from the early 1960s, and the plight of those members of the diaspora community whose right to remain in the UK was challenged by the British state. The other 30 interviews will focus on members of the diaspora community, those who found themselves under threat of deportation or actually deported, and their supporters and legal and political representatives. The interviews will explore the extent to which the complexities and ambiguities of the law governing nationality exacerbated confusion around competing notions of Caribbean and British identity and belonging. They will seek to identify the extent to which members of the diaspora community were aware of changes to their rights and obligations brought about by successive acts of parliament from 1962, and the stages by which it became clear that significant numbers of people were having their right to remain in the UK challenged. This oral history research will be supplemented by archival research in collections in the UK and the Caribbean. Selected documents will be digitized and made available on the project website alongside the recordings of the interviews and supporting explanatory materials including a series of podcasts produced by the project team.
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Whittingehame College Old Boy Interviews
Whittingehame College was a Jewish boys’ school located in Brighton and Hove between 1931 and 1958 and in Handcross Park from 1958 until 1967. Whittingehame’s founder was the British Zionist, Jakob Halévy (1898 – 1978). During the years of its existence, the school underwent significant transformations. From educating British Jewry in the early 1930s, Whittingehame attracted Jewish students from Germany and central Europe in the mid-1930s. After the war, Jewish students from Muslim-majorities countries in West Asia and North Africa (especially Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan) increasingly sought admission to the school. This data comprises twelve videos of interviews conducted by Magnus Marsden and Paul Anderson with former students at the College. The interviews were conducted and recorded in Brighton on 10th September 2023, in the context of a College reunion.
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The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016
The database contains entries of over 550 pageants (and growing). These list a wealth of information about individual historical pageants, sometimes in great detail. Insofar as records allow (and little trace remains of many pageants), we have sought to record details of the times and places of performances, those involved in organising and staging them, and how many people attended. For each pageant, we have also sought to record, again as fully as possible, whether the pageant made or lost money, details of the music that was played and who composed it, and synopses of the individual episodes which featured. In addition, for each pageant record we provide lists of the names of the notable historical figures that featured in the action. Last but certainly not least, we have prepared a detailed summary essay explaining each pageant and placing it in its wider historical context. We have information on all – or nearly all – of the largest pageants performed in twentieth-century Britain as well as a broadly representative sample of smaller pageants.
UK RED
The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world’s largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.
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Mapping Sculpture
Mapping Sculpture can be summed up as an investigation of sculptural practice that aims to reveal the numerous personal and professional connections underlying the production of sculpture. The project’s state of the art database provides the means of searching this complex web of connections.There are over 50,000 records in the database. This wealth of information can be used to answer many questions and will also suggest many new avenues for further investigation.
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Pinter Histories and Legacies: The Impact of Harold Pinter’s Work on the Development of British Stage and Screen Practices (1957-2017).
The ambition of this database has been to capture every instance of a professional production of a work by Harold Pinter in the UK since 1957 alongside a comprehensive catalogue of all broadcasts of his work for radio and television, and films for which he has written a screenplay. In addition, we have included plays, films and so on that Pinter directed or acted in.
War Widows’ Stories
The War Widows’ Stories website hosts all transcripts and recordings of the oral history interviews we have conducted in the course of the War Widows’ Stories project, and they can be access and downloaded for free by anyone. Recordings can be streamed or downloaded; transcripts can be read and searched online or downloaded as PDFs.