Northumbria University's MRes in Cultural Heritage

David Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature, relays new information about Northumbria University's MRes in Cultural Heritage:

We’ll be offering a funded MRes in Cultural Heritage for 2015/16 and are encouraging promising students to apply.  The advertisement is now live.

The deadline is fairly tight: 15 May.

There are three links to the application page via the MRes programmes in Arts, English and History, though it’s all the same studentship. Applicants are asked to develop a 500-word proposal for their project. As there is no MRes in Heritage Studies, they’d do the MRes in the subject area closest to them and be given a supervisor in an appropriate area. That said, it’s not just a chance to do an English, History or Arts MRes: the project must have a genuine heritage angle, and we’ll assess them on that basis.

History

English

Arts

Here's more from the announcement:

This studentship allows you to develop a dynamic and original project in the field of cultural heritage. Applicants may embrace an inclusive, open-ended approach to heritage research in History, English Literature, Arts, Cultural Management, and/or related fields, and should aim to design a proposal intended to maximise cross-fertilisation between disciplines and between the academy and the public. The MRes programme will allow you to work alongside students from a range of disciplines, developing and extending your research skills through tuition and support from a wide range of research-active staff in the Faculty. The studentship will culminate in an interdisciplinary thesis that will draw extensively on a wide range of approaches to cultural heritage. The MRes in Cultural Heritage is the ideal preparation for further study at doctoral level. read on >>>

Mapping Tyneside Radicalism

Joseph Hardwick

The members of Northumbria University's Histories of Activism group are currently putting together a website that maps moments of radical activity that have occurred on Tyneside since the seventeenth century. The project was inspired by our belief that Tyneside’s rich and diverse radical history is only fitfully commemorated in the urban fabric of Newcastle and Gateshead. Mapping Tyneside Radicalism is designed to create a space where academics, researchers and local communities can work together to build a permanent memorial to the region’s tradition of radicalism and activism. This interactive website has gathered an archive of historic activism, and it allows users to map this archive on to the modern Tyneside landscape. Every event comes with a short commentary and links to further readings, and so this resource will be of considerable use to students, schoolchildren, researchers and members of the public. The website is currently being developed by the Community IT Academy and will go live in May 2015.

We are looking for members of the public to help us to develop our understanding of Tyneside radicalism. If you have an event that you think should be commemorated on this website, then please get in touch with the project coordinator, Dr Joe Hardwick, at joseph.hardwick@northumbria.ac.uk.

The Newcastle YMCA First World War Memorial at Northumbria University

James McConnel

The Newcastle YMCA war memorial.

In late 2014, the Estates Office at Northumbria University contacted me about an interesting discovery they had made in a storage area in the University’s Wynne Jones building. Following my research into the war-related features of Trinity Building (formerly Trinity Presbyterian church), they knew I was interested in information about any war memorials on campus. It turned out that staff from Estates had discovered in Wynne Jones a hitherto unknown First World War memorial. The memorial was accompanied by a brass plaque commemorating the opening of the Newcastle YMCA building on Blackett Street in 1900. This building was knocked down in the 1970s to make way for the Eldon Square shopping centre. Various architectural features of the Victorian building were salvaged when it was demolished. These included stone carvings and door surrounds, which were mounted onto one of the exterior walls on Prudhoe Chare in 1976 (the alley by the side of Marks and Spenercs). But it appears that the YMCA’s war memorial was also rescued from the old building, which was then transferred to the Association’s new premises on Ellison Place. The University acquired this building twenty years later in the 1990s and – seemingly without realising it – also inherited the YMCA’s war memorial.

The memorial is made of wood and includes the names of about 100 men who ‘Gave Their All’ in the First World War. Three Northumbria history students are now researching the names of the men as part of a work placement module all students undertake in their second year. With the help of a
Masters student who is undertaking a project on war memorials in Newcastle schools, they have been introduced to the use of digitised local newspapers, the 1911 census, CWGC records, and military archives, in order to research the lives of those named on the memorial. We have also made contact with the modern-day YMCA in Newcastle and it is interested in collaborating with Northumbria on this project, with some of the young people from the Association helping with elements of the research . Ultimately, the hope is that the biographical information collected will contribute to a permanent online resource about Newcastle YMCA’s role in the First World War.