The project examines how understandings of our shared pasts have tangible impacts upon the politics, culture and even built environments of cities through a study of the post-war experience and memory of one of Britain's most historically neglected cities, Kingston-Upon-Hull. Local memory contends that Hull was Britain's most heavily bombed city, but was excluded from the roll call of national sacrifice that focuses upon emblematic examples like London and Coventry. The severity of the Blitz on Hull and the fortitude of the citizenry have become pillars of a civic memory that forms a stark and contentious counterpoint to the city's alleged excision from what, in the twenty-first century is one of Britain's most potent, contentious and frequently invoked national stories. Combined with Hull's relatively isolated position - in both geographical terms and in the national consciousness- a comparative lack of post-war reconstruction and the subsequent decline of the local economy, the narrative that Hull's sacrifice was forgotten, even maligned has become central to the city's personal, historical and political narratives of the post-war. Hull gives us a visible example of how a powerful narrative can infuse debates and cultural forms. The project enables us to ask broader questions about the importance of historically contingent identities in other urban settings, so has important implications for heritage and planning, whilst also examining contentious areas of contemporary debate over the place of the Second World War in constructions of twenty-first century Britishness. In Hull, inconsistent post-war rebuilding, halting urban renewal schemes, deindustrialisation, lack of investment and unemployment have, over the last 80 years, been repeatedly framed through a narrative that civic fortitude was not reciprocated by the post-war state. Contemporary understandings of the tangible links to the Blitz have been underscored by the popularity of Hull's 'Blitz Trail' walking tour, invoked in angry reactions to rumours of the city's exclusion from 'HS3' rail links, fed into political narratives of 'forgotten' northern towns and ignored populations, and featured in campaigns to preserve symbolic post-war buildings. By exploring the progression, contestation and deployment of these narratives the project uses the centrality of the Blitz's legacy as a lens through which to historicise the formation and importance of contentious local identities, and their tangible impacts upon the fabric and governance of cities. The project's first phase involves a series of public workshops, surveys and interviews that will build-up a legacy of local engagement and resources, but also constantly shape the first strand of the research, helping the project team develop the direction of their investigations The second phase then uses the directions generated through public engagement to inform research approaches from oral, urban and governmental history, examining local and central government documents and schemes alongside campaigns and media coverage to track how the evolving legacy of the Blitz has been imagined and used, whilst conducting oral history interviews with residents. The project builds on its partnership with Hull History Centre to create spaces and opportunities for a diverse set of interested groups, organisations and individuals to engage with their urban and civic past. The public will have the opportunity to follow the ways that their contributions shape the project via social media and the internet. School workshops, online accessibility to workshops, social media and short videos will stimulate participation beyond traditional audiences for history and heritage. We aim to create a live dialogue during the duration of the project that will continually stimulate an already vibrant heritage and historical community of interest in Hull, but also move the researchers past their own a priori judgements about what should be researched.

This project encourages and supports people and communities to explore the criminal past of their own families, towns and regions. In this project we interpret 'criminal' broadly to mean people who have (historically) encountered the criminal justice system. This might include the accused, victims, witnesses, prisoners, police and prison-officers, amongst others. Moreover, the project will reveal that 'Our Criminal Ancestors' were often ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. It will allow a greater understanding of the difficult situations that often led to individuals, and sometimes groups of people, encountering the criminal justice system. Hence, criminal ancestors might include, not only pickpockets, shop-lifters and horse-thieves, but also vagrants, drunkards, debtors and political protestors. Through this project, we hope that the public will gain greater understanding not only of their own family history, but also the history of the communities, towns and regions in which they live and work. Consequently, this project is characterised by a desire to encourage and facilitate public engagement with crime history. It will do this through knowledge exchange, interactive workshops and website dissemination. This will be achieved through engaging with our 'criminal past' as local communities, regions and nationally, primarily through a collective interest in our criminal ancestors. A central aim of the project, is to share knowledge and expertise which will support the public in finding, interpreting and using criminal records and to trace their criminal ancestors; in other words, it will promote creative interaction between academic researchers and the public. Hull's City of Culture status will act as an initial vehicle for the project. However, the project reaches beyond the city of Hull and/or the region, and the website will have both national and international impact. Whilst the collaboration with Hull History Centre and the engagement events are central to the evolution of the project, it is our intention to develop a set of resources with the potential to engender longer-term and wider public engagement. This will be achieved through the following objectives: 1) three interactive public engagement workshops with our partners, the Hull History Centre, in Hull during City of Culture Year 2017; 2) establishing and maintaining an interactive and open access website which guides, assists and directs members of public, from across the World, with tracing their criminal ancestors in the UK - this would provide free expert advice from leading researchers in the field; 3) creating and producing a detailed source guide on the use of criminal records and identifying the national and most important local collections held at the Hull History Centre and in the East Riding; and 4) to develop a blueprint for 'Criminal Ancestors' workshops which is innovative, flexible and portable, and will (alongside the website) encourage and facilitate future interactions and creative engagement with user communities.

Ruins - the material remains of decayed buildings, cities, and cultures - have been a recurrent theme in the art and literature of Western Europe since at least the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the early modern period Roman ruins inspired an outpouring of poems and paintings across France, Italy, and the Low Countries. Britain's experience of ruins in this period was highly distinctive, however, defined less by Roman ruins than by the Roman Catholic ruins of the 650 abbeys suppressed during the English Reformation in the 1530s. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the defining event for representations of ruins in English literature, its significance reflected in the titles of later works like Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' (1798-9) and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798). Yet while ruins are widely acknowledged as an important motif in Gothic and Romantic literatures, their significance for our understanding of English Renaissance literature has been largely overlooked. There has been some critical recognition of ruins in writing by Spenser and Shakespeare, but no book-length study charting their significance in literature across the early modern period. This project offers an in-depth assessment of this underexplored topic, investigating how and why ruins were represented in English Renaissance literature within the long century following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. While it acknowledges the influence on English literature of French and Italian models for representing Roman ruins, it also argues for the distinctiveness of England's experience of the protestant Reformation and its impact on English literary representations of ruins. Critics have argued that ruins in English Renaissance literature reflect the antiquarian interests of this period. But ruins were more than a window onto the past; they were also a mirror reflecting the future fate of the present, their fragility a reminder of the decline and fall of civilisations. It is as a comment on the vanity of early modern imperial endeavour that the French Renaissance poet Joachim Du Bellay read the ruins of Rome's past in the mid-sixteenth century, and in this project I trace the translation of this perspective to the particular context of protestant England and its own self-image as an empire in the early modern period. In ruins, the project reads a radical undercurrent in English Renaissance writing that questions and critiques the constructs of empire it appears to support. The project brings this approach to ruins into dialogue with current critical debates about the mechanics of British state-formation under the Tudors and Stuarts, arguing against a stream of recent criticism that sees English Renaissance literature as largely supportive of England's imperial ambitions over Britain and Ireland. Its findings will make a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both English literature and English identity, its focus on ruins revealing sites of resistance in literature to England's imperial ideology in the early modern period. The project will be based at the University of Hull, where the Andrew Marvell Centre offers an established framework for interdisciplinary research in the medieval and early modern periods, and where significant archival resources on Marvell are housed at the Hull History Centre. Marvell is a poet and politician with lifelong connections to Hull, and his relationship to the medieval monastic ruins of Hull and Yorkshire is a key focus for the project. Alongside the monograph 'Renaissance literatures of ruin: Spenser to Marvell', the project's findings will be disseminated through a journal article, conference paper and academic conference on Marvell, and through a school session, public lecture and the public exhibition 'Marvell and medieval Hull', produced in partnership with the Hull History Centre, and in collaboration with the leading Marvell expert, Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton).

Religion was central to the world view of mariners and merchants in the age of imperialism but there has been little research on the mentalities and realities of working seamen and the Christian charities which sought to convert and support them. Mariners aims to create a new religious history of missions to seamen through a study of institutional archives, oral histories of present and past marine chaplains, and the visual and material record of missions in ports and places. It will illuminate the hidden histories of British seamen and seamen of colour, who have been neglected by both historians of missions and historians of Britain's maritime inheritance. Marine missions were once ubiquitous features of British ports, coasts, canals and lighthouses where their object was to save the drunken and lascivious sailor from themselves. They evolved into vitally important humanitarian societies which continue to support merchant crews around the world. Through partnership with the Anglican Mission to Seafarers (founded 1856) and the Hull History Centre, the project will open up the archives of major marine missions. It will investigate the London-based missions to lascars, the common term for Asian seafarers, including the Strangers' Home (1857), which have not yet been fully integrated into our understanding of the British maritime past. The work is urgent and important, not just because of the scale and importance of the marine workforce in the nineteenth century, but because many of the problems faced by the merchant marine, from low wages, to insecure employment, hazardous conditions, risk of shipwreck, piracy, disease and abandonment, remain just as urgent today. Research has been divided into three thematic workstreams, each with a dedicated team with the necessary skills and access to archives and resources. The first workstream will focus on British mariners, especially those who were clients of the Anglican Mission to Seafarers and Sailors' Society. With the support of project partners, it will interrogate the ways institutional missions grappled with local and global issues, including that of over rapid expansion. The second workstream will focus on lascars, who by the later decades of the nineteenth century made up to a third of the British marine workforce. It will assess the effectiveness of the few missions created to cater for them, and innovations such as the Liverpool and Hull missions for Indian seamen. Because of the sheer scale of the marine mission movement, the third workstream will focus on three port cities: Bristol, Liverpool and Hull. This will investigate ways in which local missions were integrated into port environments and the significance of their legacy today. It will address pressing issues about the status and future of marine missions in sites such as Liverpool, which in 2021 lost world heritage standing for its historic port. The project is committed to ensuring outputs are diverse, accessible and academically rigorous. To ensure this, there are a wide range of outputs built around three key milestones: (1) the Mariners' website, which will include archival text, maps, images, interviews, and directories of people and places (2) the Mariners' conference, which will engage academic historians from the UK, Europe and South Asia to reflect and challenge our research questions (3) the Mariners' exhibition will tour Bristol, Liverpool, London and Hull and will form the capstone event for the project. It will include commissions from local artists, text, images, and artefacts chosen from the archives, including those from the Hull History Centre, as well as education resources. Mariners addresses timely and challenging questions about marine missions which currently lack scholarly histories and context. It provides a fresh analysis of the multi-faith and multi-racial merchant marine and the religious encounters of these working people.

Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926) is celebrated in South Africa as a heroine of the South African War (1899-1902), but her wider involvement in South African affairs and international campaigning are largely unknown. Meanwhile in Britain she has been disregarded, her controversial attempts at relief work and international reconciliation during the First World War never properly accounted for. The Emily Hobhouse Letters project is an international research project centrally concerned with recovering Hobhouse's transnational epistolary network of activists, writers, journalists and politicians, in doing so offering a necessary re-internationalisation of early twentieth-century imperial and South African history and correcting her neglect in Britain. It will be led by a UK-based Principal Investigator, who will work alongside Co-Investigators in the UK and South Africa, and in partnership with archivists and museum professionals in the UK and South Africa, to renew scholarly and public engagement with Hobhouse's legacy and to ask why, for Hobhouse and her circle, South Africa became the test-case of early twentieth-century liberal imperialism and liberal internationalism. The project will produce a joint-authored monograph and journal articles, and an international exhibition (touring to the Bodleian, Hull History Centre, the Liskeard Museum, the War Museum, and Smuts House Museum), which will focus on Hobhouse's mobilisation of an influential and interlocking transnational epistolary network of Quakers, international suffrage campaigners, anti-slavery activists, colonial politicians, reformers and writers, members of the Indian and African National Congresses, New Liberals and socialists in Britain. These will highlight the formative experience of Hobhouse and her circle's work for reconciliation in South Africa during an era of war, reconstruction, labour disputes, and arguments over national self-determination and will explore the legacy of this involvement - particularly their attitudes to race - for their approach to the politics of peace, relief and international oversight in Europe and South Africa after the First World War. The exhibition will showcase material from the newly-deposited Emily Hobhouse papers at the Bodleian, which will for the first time be placed alongside her voluminous correspondence in archives in Britain, Geneva and South Africa in order to evaluate her strategic use of letter-writing and the behind-the-scenes influence of women's politicking. The project will employ two Research Assistants: one employed full-time to carry out research in South African archives and libraries; the other, employed on a 0.5 post for 18 months, to carry out research in the archives of international organisations such as Save the Children in Geneva. Both will be fully engaged in the project's outputs and its wider dissemination. The research team will also guide the cataloguing and selective digitisation of the Hobhouse Papers by trainee archivists and report on this to the SCOLMA conference for researchers and archivists of African history, and in its bulletin. A workshop in South Africa with the Bodleian archivist, school teachers and heritage professionals will explore the optimum ways to present this new research to multiple audiences, including secondary-school pupils, in preparation for the exhibition, associated public lectures and website launch. The project website will include dedicated 'Gateways to Learning' which will use digitised Hobhouse material as gateways to structured teaching and learning material and include downloadable museum audio-guides to items in the collections of the War Museum and Smuts House (to accompany the exhibition or for use remotely). A conference at the University of the Free State on the re-internationalisation of South Africa's imperial history will extend this commitment to engaging with the ongoing post-apartheid revisioning and rethinking of the South African past.