Further public engagement activities
On this page you can find information concerning public engagement activities that relate to the work done by the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre. One of the Centre's founding aims is to celebrate Lawrence's legacy both within and outside academia. The Centre is therefore involved in a wide range of public engagement activities.
Selected past public engagement activities
- Collaborating with the University’s Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections to curate regular public exhibitions about the writer, drawing on the University’s outstanding D. H. Lawrence collections.
The latest exhibition was entitled ‘The Many Lives of D. H. Lawrence: Memoir, Legacy and Biography Revealed in The University of Nottingham’s D. H. Lawrence Collections’. It ran in the Weston Gallery, at the Lakeside Arts Centre on the University Park campus, from 4 May-16 September 2012 inclusive and attracted 6,360 visitors from the UK, Spain, France, Brazil, Canada, USA and Japan.
- Collaborating with D. H. Lawrence Heritage in Eastwood to organise and run events at their annual D. H. Lawrence Festival, which takes place over several weeks in September.
In recent years, the Centre has worked closely with staff and pupils from Eastwood Comprehensive School to stage public performances of scenes from Lawrence’s novels. Members of the Centre have also delivered regular public lectures and led reading groups on Lawrence’s writings. In September 2013, as part of the centenary celebrations to mark the publication of Sons and Lovers, Andrew Harrison and James Moran were commissioned by Broxtowe Borough Council/D.H. Lawrence Heritage to organise and direct a site-specific drama performance given by students from Eastwood Comprehensive School. The performance involved those talented students acting out specially adapted parts of the novel in the very locations that had inspired Lawrence to write the piece. This was the first time in 100 years that such a performance of Lawrence’s text had taken place in the locations fictionalised in the book.
- Working with the D. H. Lawrence Society in Eastwood to promote understanding of the writer’s life and works through its monthly meetings and papers.
Dr Andrew Harrison, Director of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre, is a Council Member of the Society.
- Collaborating with archives, private collectors and antiquarian booksellers worldwide to discover and publish new letters by and to D. H. Lawrence in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies.
The D. H. Lawrence Research Centre provides expertise to the holders of manuscripts, enabling them to interpret, contextualise and value the items in their possession.
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Public discussion of Lawrence’s play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.
The British Academy is funding James Moran’s current Lawrence research, which involves adding to these public engagement activities. Most notably, in 2014 these activities involved a rehearsed reading and public discussion of Lawrence’s play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, which was directed by Martin Berry at the Lakeside Theatre on 25 September 2014.
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The Drama of D.H. Lawrence: Regional Identity and Space.
D.H. Lawrence's life and novels have increasingly appeared onstage in theatres in the East Midlands during the past decade. His recurring presence has made Lawrence central to a regional sense of cultural and literary identity. Yet Lawrence's own plays remain little known to theatre audiences and have not been the subject of a book-length study for almost four decades, and, as Dollimore puts it, Lawrence is "increasingly disregarded" in the wider academy.
James Moran is currently working on a British Academy-funded project that seeks to understand these tensions, and to show that the French and Irish dimensions in Lawrence's plays shed light on the transnational turn in 'new' modernist studies. This project will reacquaint audiences in the East Midlands with Lawrence's own playwriting, through a rehearsed reading as part of the D.H. Lawrence festival in 2014; a set of interactive discussions on BBC Radio Nottingham; and a series of public lectures. The research will also produce a new monograph on Lawrence's drama, which will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2015 under the title 'The Theatre of D.H. Lawrence'.
- Working with the local, national and international media to highlight the extent of Lawrence’s literary and culture influence.
Members of the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre have made television appearances on the BBC One Show, Country Tracks, and Inside Out. There have been recent slots on BBC East Midlands Today and The Culture Show.
Dr James Moran has spoken about Lawrence’s writings on his monthly book review programme on BBC Radio Nottingham, which he has been presenting since 2010: the programme largely focuses upon local literature of Nottinghamshire and the midlands area, and Lawrence has played a large part in it. The broadcasts – usually at 2.30pm – have so far included discussions of Lady Chatterley's Lover (8 December 2010), 'An Enjoyable Christmas' (6 December 2011), The Rainbow (17 March 2012), Sons and Lovers (30 May 2013), and The Daughter-in-Law (5 December 2013).
Recent newspaper coverage of the Centre’s research activities has included an article on the discovery of an unpublished manuscript in the Times Literary Supplement for 29 March 2013, and resulting pieces in (among other sources) The Guardian and The New Zealand Herald.
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