Grants and Publications
We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Leverhulme Trust for recently funding the following projects.
CSPI Co-Director Mathew Humphrey has received £44,039 over a 12 month duration (2019-20) to examine 'Riders’ Rights: Freedom, Identity, and Authenticity in Grassroots Political Activism', funded through a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. The fellowship involves fieldwork in Europe and California, USA.
The AHRC has funded Maiken Umbach, CSPI's Co-Director and colleagues to undertake the project 'Understanding and Improving Public Engagement with Holocaust Photography'. The income amounts to £33,000 for the period March 2020- March 2021. The research involves a pilot study on use of victim photos in educational settings. The research team are Maiken Umbach, Gary Mills (School of Education) and Paul Tennent (School of Computer Science).
Maiken Umbach has been awarded £20,000 for a "Cultures in Quarantine" call grant by AHRC (July 2020) to produce a film with the BBC on photographic research.
*CSPI has recently been awarded several grants to pursue these aims*
One of the current research projects hosted by CSPI is the 3-year AHRC-funded project “Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism”. Between 2018 and 2021, an interdisciplinary team from History, Education, Museum Studies, and Computer Science, led by Prof Maiken Umbach, is exploring how different actors used photography to (re)imagine or defend different identities and subjectivities in relation to the ideological actions of the Nazi regime. Our project partners are the National Holocaust Centre and Museum.
Along with grant capture, one of the key ambitions for CSPI is to foster the development of an active international network of researchers working in the area of political ideologies.
Publications resulting from CSPI's work
In 2020, Mathew Humphrey, Maiken Umbach and David Laycock's book Ideologies in Action: Morphological Adaptation and Political Ideas was published by Routledge. This was the result of the Ideological Translations Project, which as part of its work. hosted workshops at Simon Fraser University (Canada) and the University of Michigan.
In 2018, Mathew Humphrey and Maiken Umbach completed a research project on the role of authenticity in naturalising, or de-contesting, a range of ideological claims and constructions. The resulting book, which combines methods from Political Science and History, was published as “Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept” by Palgrave.
Also in 2018, Maiken Umbach and Elizabeth Harvey completed a research project on the ideological significance of the private sphere and the idea of privacy in Nazi Germany, in collaboration with the Institute for Contemporary History (IFZ) in Munich, funded by the Leibniz Foundation. The project resulted in several theses and post-doctoral monographs, and a large collected volume entitled “Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany” that will be published by Cambridge University Press in autumn 2019 (ISBN 978-1-108-48498-5).