1. Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures
  2. School of English
  3. Research and innovation
  4. Heritage and Archives

Heritage and Archives

Hand taking a book from a bookshelf

Research conducted with local communities, archives, and repositories continues to bring benefits to partners in the heritage sector and charitable organisations through ground-breaking scholarly work and innovative knowledge-sharing activities. 

Building on the research for a new biography of Charles Dickens through the houses he lived in, Emily Bell has contributed to a documentary hosted by Sir Tony Robinson on Dickens and the excavation of the Cleveland Street workhouse (History Hit, 2023), and two episodes of History Crush for the History Channel (2025); she has acted as a consultant and guest expert for radio programmes and podcasts including Homeschool History (Radio 4, 2020), You're Dead to Me (BBC Sounds, 2022), Opening Lines (Radio 4, 2024) and Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire. She has also contributed expert notes to an audiobook of A Christmas Carol for Audrey and spoken at Ilkley Literature Festival on Dickens's legacy. Dr Bell’s work on digital archives and preservation has fed back into how national libraries document their collections of nineteenth-century newspapers: see The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers for more information.

Bridget Bennett’s research on anti-slavery activism raised public awareness of abolitionist activity in Yorkshire. Her work underpinned a campaign to install a blue plaque on Lyddon Hall on the University of Leeds campus that commemorates nineteenth-century abolitionism in Leeds and identifies the building where Quaker activists Mary and Wilson Armistead hosted Ellen and William Craft in 1851 after they had emancipated themselves from enslavement and came to the UK.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Dialect and Heritage Project (DHP) established mutually beneficial partnerships with rural heritage institutions with and for whom they designed and implemented an innovative, inclusive set of activities based on Fiona Douglas ’s research on historical dialect usage. Through enabling public engagement with the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC), the project’s activities generated multiple societal benefits and are having a transformative effect on partner organisations (including Avoncroft Museum, Ryedale Folk Museum, the Dales Countryside Museum, Weald & Downland Museum, and the Food Museum) and on their visitors and surrounding communities. 

Jay Prosser’s project, ‘Learning from Yorkshire's Holocaust Torah Scrolls’, brings together Torah scrolls rescued from the Holocaust now on long-term loan to different organisations in Yorkshire, including Jewish communities and the University of Leeds Cultural Collections & Galleries. The first of its kind on this topic, this project allows charities, religious/cultural communities, an archive and researchers to learn these precious, powerfully symbolic objects, which are among the few relics to have survived the near erasure of the communities who used them. 

Alison Searle and Jo Sadgrove’ s work on the Pastoral Care, Literary Cure and Religious Dissent project focused on remote methods of pastoral caregiving through letters innovated by the early Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG, now USPG), an Anglican mission agency founded in 1701, and the complex challenges to this nascent organisation and its work to extend caregiving to missionaries in the American colonies posed by Sir Christopher Codrington’s bequest (in 1710) of two sugar plantations and 300 enslaved Black Africans on his estates in Barbados. The research collaboration’s examination of archival material necessitated the development of a USPG/ stakeholder conversation about history, caregiving, enslavement, and race. Research was disseminated in a series of webinars and through a global consultation of Anglican church leaders. This work has informed the development of an £8 million Reparations Project with the Codrington Trust in Barbados, and is also being taken up by black history education projects in the UK. USPG are piloting an educational resource shaped by the research and drawing on perspectives from Codrington College and wider stakeholders in Barbados. The research aims to interrogate and inform the ways diverse local church communities around the world access archival materials, often held in colonial metropoles, and understand the importance of conceptualising themselves as both descendants of a violent Christian history and as stewards for a repaired future.