Nottingham Castle Project
Project summary
Dr Richard Gaunt (Department of History) has been the Curator of Rebellion at Nottingham Castle since March 2015. This Arts Council England (ACE) funded post has enabled Gaunt to provide detailed input to the £29.5m regeneration programme at Nottingham Castle. Gaunt has been responsible for helping to develop the content, interpretation and design of a new ‘Rebellion Gallery’, which focuses on key moments in Nottingham’s rebellious history since the 16th Century.
Key outcomes include:
(i) contributing to the Heritage Lottery Fund Stage 2 bid, which resulted in an award of £13.5m to the project in November 2016
(ii) advising on the choice, design and presentation of exhibits and gallery interpretation
(iii) new academic research on episodes featured in the gallery (including work associated with the Bicentenary of the Pentrich Rebellion of 1817)
(iv) strengthening the research partnership between University of Nottingham and Nottingham City Museums and Galleries through student placements and new funding bids
Publications
The Academic Residency builds on Dr Gaunt’s established research expertise in 18th and 19th-century British history. Key publications underpinning the work include:
- [1] (author) ‘Neighbours from Hell. The Fourth Duke of Newcastle and the People of Nottingham in the early Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 104 (2000), 99-111 [Peer reviewed journal of the county’s premier society for history and archaeology; wide academic readership]
- [2] (editor) Unrepentant Tory: political selections from the diaries of the fourth Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne, 1827-38 (Parliamentary History Record Series, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006)
- [3] (author) ‘The fourth Duke of Newcastle, the 'mob' and election contests in Nottinghamshire, 1818-1832’, Midland History, 33(2) (2008), 196-217 [Peer reviewed journal]
- [4] (Intro. and editor), 'It's not what you know...' Patronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Nottinghamshire (Southwell, Nottinghamshire, 2012), includes Gaunt’s essay ‘Keeping it in the family: political patronage in early nineteenth century Nottinghamshire’ [Peer reviewed collection of four papers from a day-school organised and convened by Gaunt in 2011]
- [5] (author) ‘Nottinghamshire and the Great Peace. Reflections on the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1814-15’, Midland History, 41(1) (2016), 20-36 [peer reviewed journal]
- [6] (author) ‘The Pentrich Rebellion: A Nottingham Affair?’, Midland History (Forthcoming). Also see: ‘The Pentrich Rebels (act.1817)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [online edition, November 2017], and ‘On the Trail of the Pentrich Rebels’, The Historian (Autumn 2017)