11 May 2016

Funding grant success for international collaborative project

The four-year project, starting in July this year, will produce an eight-volume complete works published by Cambridge University Press of the writer Aphra Behn (1640-89). The project as a whole is valued at over £940,000 with the AHRC providing funding of £752,247.

Professor Hobby will act as Principal Investigator with Loughborough being the lead institution on the project. Academics from the University of Birmingham and the University of Leicester will work as Co-Investigators.

The project also employs Dr Claire Bowditch, who is one of the General Editors of the CUP edition, as a full-time Research Assistant. She will be based at Loughborough, where she was awarded her PhD in 2015. A second PDRA will be shared between Birmingham and Leicester.

More than 20 contributing editors based at universities across the UK, USA, Australia and continental Europe will be involved, and the project’s electronic workbench through which the team will share their work-in-progress, is being designed and built by the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield.

The project also includes partnerships with the National Archives, the National Theatre, theQueen’s Company in New York, and the National Library of Scotland.

Professor Hobby, currently on special leave, has spent the last 10 months on Fellowships at six US libraries including the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)Harvard UniversityPrinceton University, and the Huntington Library. She is currently based at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, moving on to Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, before returning to Loughborough in August this year.