Feminism is enjoying a global resurgence. In the English-speaking world, there is considerable interest in literature by women from other countries, supported by initiatives such as the #womenintranslation project (established 2013) and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (established 2017), and apparent in the emergence of new publishing houses focusing on women's literature in translation such as 3TimesRebel and Héloïse Press (both founded 2022). But does all literature by women merit a feminist approach to translation? What do writers and readers think about feminist translation? How would they react if they knew that the translator had set out to do a 'feminist' translation? The perspectives of writers, readers and publishers are rarely taken into account in academic theories of feminist translation. At the same time, emerging or practising translators who identify as feminists have little practical guidance or opportunities to share thoughts on what it might mean to undertake feminist translation in the twenty-first century. The 'Feminist Translation Network' brings together academics and stakeholders from outside academia to discuss feminist approaches to contemporary literary translation in English. Feminist translation has been a much-debated concept within the discipline of Translation Studies but recent developments in gender and queer theory have made it difficult for scholars to articulate what feminist approaches might look like in the age of fourth-wave feminism. This project will move debates about feminist translation beyond Translation Studies by bringing together academics from different disciplines (English Literature, Creative Writing, Modern Languages, Classics, Linguistics, Sociology, Women's and Gender Studies), writers, readers, translators, educators, and practitioners from theatre and publishing. We will explore the ways in which the feminist sensibility of a translator might leave tangible marks on a piece of literature or whether translating as a feminist is more a matter of identity. We will think about whether and how we might teach feminist translation, whether in schools, universities, or through CPD for professional translators. And we will ask what feminist translation is trying to achieve and whom it is for. The network will address these themes through a series of three events held in Birmingham, Oxford and Norwich in 2024 and 2025. Central to each event will be a public translation 'slam', at which a pair of professional literary translators will present and discuss new versions of the same source text: Marilyn Booth and Nariman Youssef translating Arabic women's writing at the Birmingham Literature Festival (October 2024), Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci and Lawrence Schimel translating Spanish YA fiction at The Queen's College, Oxford (February 2025), and Josephine Balmer and Henry Stead translating Latin poetry at Dragon Hall, Norwich (July 2025). Each slam will be followed by a linked symposium, ensuring that translation practice is at the heart of the network's research. The project seeks to provide clarity about what feminist literary translation in the twenty-first century might actually look like in practice and what place it has in the contemporary literary landscape; the resources generated by the project will be of considerable value to a range of stakeholders, such as those looking for inspiration or guidance in their own translation practice or those involved in teaching translation in different settings. The network's outputs will be widely disseminated through the project website and linked social media, a podcast series of interviews with professional literary translators, a report published on the project website entitled 'Feminist Literary Translation: Key Insights', two sets of classroom resources, and a special issue of an academic journal.

This project directs fresh attention to a marker of place and of social identity that is always, by definition, out of fashion: provincialism. Provincialism denotes a place, style, and mode of existence that is away from, but still under the dominion of, a powerful metropolis. Over the course of the nineteenth century in England, for historical reasons this study will examine, the term gained a fresh host of depreciative associations. From indicating an accent or style associated with one of the other three nations of the Union or settler cultures, it became increasingly associated with an inward-looking, complacent, mediocre state of Englishness. The project contrasts these negative associations of provincialism with the simultaneous rise of an enormously popular type of novel: fictions of English provincial life such as Gaskell's Cranford, Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I aim to explore what this enduringly popular genre - provincial fiction - has to offer as a means of thinking about provincialism as a sense of place, a style, and a world-view. Building on important recent scholarship that emphasizes the global networked nature of Victorian provincial fiction, the project contends that the formal aspects of those works construct an idea of off-centre 'middleness'. This aesthetic of middleness in realist provincial fiction, I suggest, invents a homely, fictive grounding for the new social identity of the middle class, still under-represented in nineteenth-century culture and politics at the time. Reconsidering provincial fiction and its intertwining with the idea of English provincialism is timely for several reasons. First, the genre played an important role in the emergence of the study of English literature as a discipline from the early twentieth century and the project will tell us more about the relation between ideas of Englishness and the critical history of Eng. Lit. at a time of fresh debates about canonicity, diversity, and class. The aesthetic value of provincial fiction, such as work by Eliot, was a flash point in debates between cosmopolitan critics, Bloomsbury modernists, and those inspired by F.R. Leavis. As significant work by post-colonial scholars has suggested, the discipline of English literature was one made at the margins, rather than the metropolitan centre of Imperial Britain. The project will emphasis the imperial dimension of 'Provincialism at Large' and the reception and circulation of provincial fiction outside the metropolis. Second, the simultaneous rise of provincial fiction and disparagement of provincialism in English cultural criticism during the nineteenth century represents neglected source for historicising present anti-metropolitan affect and critique, which is often accompanied by talk of vanishing or 'squeezed' middles. A strand of project activity is devoted to exploring the meanings of provincialism for writers and readers based across the diverse region of the West Midlands now. These project activities will coincide with the 2019 bicentenary of George Eliot, resident of Nuneaton and Coventry for her first 30 years, but who wrote her fiction in self-imposed exile in London. The PI will work with a Writer in Residence and the Writing West Midlands writer development agency to draw on project materials in a creative-critical dialogue around writing, locality, and non-metropolitan identities now.

Reading is important. We have to be able to read all kinds of texts to manage our way through life. From an early age we all are also instilled with the idea that we have to read and enjoy high brow literature and 'the canon'. Literary prizes and their winners receive much media attention. However, literary scholars are hard-pressed to explain what kind of books deserve such a literary prize or a place in the literary canon. Until recently, cultural sociologists were convinced that attributing literary value to a book has nothing to do with the quality of the book. Value is attributed based on sociological processes, such as prizes and academic attention for a title or an author. In the digital age, this changed. In the highly interdisciplinary and innovative Dutch Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality (2012-2019), scholars selected 400 contemporary novels and combined computational measurements with the opinions of readers gathered in a large survey. They were able to show that literary value for a large part correlates with linguistic features of the novels (use of words, sentences, etc.), but is also influenced by the perceived genre of the novel and the perceived gender of the author - to name but two things. The scholars uncovered unconscious biases in readers: for instance, women's fiction was consistently rated less literary than literary fiction written by men. They see these biases as a reflection of inequalities in Dutch society and found that reporting on their research helped to raise awareness about these inequalities and furthermore inspired changes in reading patterns and in views on the literary canon. Novel Perceptions (NOPE) seeks to replicate the Dutch research in the UK. We will select 400 recent novels and do a large survey asking readers for their opinions. We will make use of methods from computational literary studies such as stylometry to analyse the novels. Using quantitative analysis from cultural sociology, we will analyse the opinions of the UK readers of these novels. And we will combine both methodologies to explore correlations, making visible any unconscious biases in the UK reading public. We will extend the Dutch project with additional surveys in which we will analyse readers' preference of classic and historical versus newer, non-canonised texts; the volume of novels that readers consume; novels they finish and don't. We ask people to reread novels they read in the past to understand how memory operates. The aim of the project is to analyse, but the results will quite naturally lead to raising awareness and to challenging established reading habits. In turn, this will help us promote a more diverse, inclusive reading 'diet'. To reach these aims, we need as many participants for our surveys as possible. We are very happy that the BBC engagement project "Novels That Shaped Our World" (NOSOW, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/the-novels-that-shaped-our-world) provides a platform for our research. This project aims to stimulate inclusive and diverse reading cultures, literacy, library use and to celebrate 300 years of the English language novel whilst provoking discussions about a diverse, socially-inclusive twenty-first century canon. From January 2020, the public will be stimulated to read and think about these novels through a host of activities. People are rewarded for engaging with this survey by receiving recommendations for non-classic novels that they will (probably) like but are less well-known. Through these surveys we will draw in participants for our other surveys. The visibility of the BBC project will be essential for us to collect as many readers' opinions as possible for our data collection. All surveys have already been developed. Our grant application asks for funding to analyse the results, disseminate our findings, and to write up our results.

With the launch of the Coalition's plans to mark the centenary of the Great War, the Communities Secretary observed: 'As the First World War moves out of common memory into history, we're determined to make sure these memories are retained', but which common memories did he have in mind? Remembering, just like forgetting, is always a political act. The war was a global conflict which left its mark on the local. Was it experienced differently in urban and rural areas? What were the relationships between soldiers and civilians during and after the war? Did it shape individual and community identities? Did it have different meanings for contemporaries? There was a consensus that the dead were to be commemorated and remembered, but there was less agreement over how the example of sacrifice was to be understood and the meanings to be attributed to and experiences to be drawn from acts of commemoration. How have these meanings changed over time? How will it be understood today? Is it a truism that 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'? Certainly, Britain today is a very different country to that of 1914 and has been described by Parekh (2000) as 'a community of communities.' What sense will young people make of the local memorials to the dead which sit in the urban and rural landscapes and the acts of commemoration organised by an older generation which will centre upon them? What meaning will the war have for young people who have grown up in a society where live reports of conflict are readily available on a smartphone and where the return of the dead from Afghanistan is instantly reported in the media? How will they connect the past with their present and their future? As the First World War moves out of memory into history, what will be the record of commemoration they will have experienced that will be left after 2018 for future historians to reflect upon? These are just some of the questions which have been generated by reflecting on the joint Arts and Humanities Research Council/Heritage Lottery Fund commemorative project. These reflections have in turn shaped the 'Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its Legacy' project proposal. At the core of this cross disciplinary project is an institutional commitment to community engagement with research and a professional commitment 'in a mission of understanding' to investigate, analyse, apprehend, criticize and judge and thereby translate Edward Said's idea of 'communities of interpretation' into practice (Said 2003). Using Birmingham, the UK's second city, as its primary place of memory, the project will reach out to multiple communities/publics both local and national to explore through dialogue issues around memory, remembering and commemoration. The research network will respond to community requests for support in terms of capacity building and support community driven research agenda. Working with other funded centres and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) the project will invest in developing the community engagement experience of early career researchers. A strength of the network beyond its relevant knowledge expertise is the experience embedded within its membership of effective partnership working. As an internationally engaged network, it will seek out relations with cultural institutions in Birmingham's sister cities and through the Universitas 21 network to understand other national and local processes of commemoration and thereby further illuminate our understanding of memorial activities in the UK. Sharing knowledge, expertise and resources, it is intended that the project will leave its own legacy for community/academy relations in terms of the capacity for the co-design and co-production of research, an understanding of the complicated relationship between remembering and forgetting and a desire to continue to 'think forward through the past'.