Dr Shafquat Towheed

Reading the Middle East: examining the reading culture of Freya Stark, 1919-1945 ‘Reading the Middle East’ is the first detailed examination of the reading culture of Dame Freya Madeline Stark (1893-1993). Stark was only the second woman (after Gertrude Bell) to receive the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1942) for her Middle East explorations. An explorer, Orientalist scholar and diplomat, Stark was a prodigious reader and a highly knowledgeable informant about the reading cultures (print, manuscript and oral) she encountered. Stark's reading directly informed her political actions as a diplomat and civil servant. Despite considerable biographical interest and publications in area studies, geography, travel writing and international relations, there has to date been no systematic examination of Stark’s reading that shaped her thinking and resulted in political action (e.g. British Arabic language propaganda during WW2). Using archival sources, in this project I closely examine Stark's reading (1919-1945), asking what, where, how and why she read, and also illuminate her detailed observations about the reading practices of communities and individuals across the Middle East. As part of the research, I will be examining the extensive Freya Stark archive at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin, Texas), as well as the Stark bequest at the Middle East Centre Archive (St Anthony’s College, Oxford). ‘Reading the Middle East’ will aim to answer the following key questions by drawing upon information recoverable from recorded textual evidence and visual (photographic) material. 1. To what extent did Stark's reading in this period lead directly to action, whether political, diplomatic, creative, or journalistic? 2. Based on the evidence from unpublished and published sources, what did Stark read between 1919 and 1945? 3. How, where and when did Stark’s reading in this period take place? What where the contingencies and habitual practices that emerge from investigating the evidence? 4. What observations did Stark record about the extant reading cultures, practices and preferences she encountered while travelling in the Middle East from 1927 to 1945? How did she engage with (for example) the oral culture of Arabic praise poetry composition, or with storytelling? 5. What is the relationship (if any) between sites of reading and sites of literary composition in Stark’s travel writing?

READ-IT (Reading Europe Advanced Data Investigation Tool) is a 3-years (2018-2020) transnational, interdisciplinary R&D project funded by the Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage that will build a unique large-scale, user-friendly, open access, semantically-enriched investigation tool to identify and share groundbreaking evidence about 18th-21st century Cultural Heritage of reading in Europe. The interdisciplinary collaboration between digital humanists, human & social sciences scholars and computer researchers will investigate innovative ways of gathering new resources through crowdsourcing and web-crawling as well as linking and reusing preexisting datasets. Extracting descriptors from a sample of multilingual textual sources will contribute to a robust ontology as well as to multiple thesauri of invariants accounting for the lowest common denominator of European reading experiences across times and cultures. READ-IT will thus ensure the sustainable and reusable aggregation of qualitative data allowing an in-depth analysis of the Cultural Heritage of reading. The corpus encompassed is a rich ‘human archive’ in multiple media and languages depicting a transaction between reading subjects and reading material. Yet it is currently scattered and insufficiently labeled, thus untraceable. Without gathering, describing and structuring, it will remain unknown. READ-IT consists in a robust consortium of 5 academic partners from 4 European countries (Institute of Czech Literature, Academy of Sciences, Prague; Open U. London, UK including the SME IN2; Utrecht University, Netherlands; CNRS-IRISA, Rennes and Le Mans U.-3LAM, France). The consortium is led by U. of Le Mans and the participants have international level of expertise in the different strands of research. Established stakeholders in education, cultural industries, cultural institutions, and disability advocacy groups will participate in evaluation and contribute to dissemination through joint events. 4 Associate partners from U. Mainz, U. Milano, Queen Mary U. London, U.Tours will contribute specific expertise and data

This a public engagement and impact activity and a retrospective AMS submission. As part of the national Being Human Festival, The OU, MK Gallery and MK Theatre come together for a day of family activities on the theme of Lost and Found in Milton Keynes on Saturday 18 November at MK Gallery and another date tbc for a lunchtime concert by OU Choir at Walton Hall. This national, public outreach festival is centrally organised by the School of Advanced Study (SAS) and includes over 250 events by universities across the country. SAS have AHRC funding - Shaf has secured £600 towards the costs on the day. The OU (FASS) have participated in this festival over the past 2 years.

To present a conference paper titled '"Like every book, it requires a reader to correct it": An examination of Vernon Lee’s marginalia, c.1880-1935' at 'Tradition and Innovation: the state of Book History', the 17th annual conference of SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), Toronto University, Canada, 23-27 June 2009. See abstract below. Please note that research for this paper was supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant, and that I am the current chair of SHARP's annual DeLong Book Prize for the best work in the history of the book (as such my attendance at the Toronto conference will be essential). Abstract: The author of over 40 books on a range of subjects from aesthetics to music, and from fiction to literary criticism, the Anglo-Florentine novelist and critic Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget, 1856-1935) was responsible for introducing the term empathy into English literary usage and was widely considered to be one of the leading public intellectuals of her era. But Lee was not just a remarkably prodigious writer; she was also an exceptionally voracious reader, and for much of her life, she kept a meticulous record of her own reading. She read in four European languages (English, French, German and Italian) and in an impressively wide range of disciplines: literature, philosophy, aesthetics, art history, history, economics, evolutionary science, religion, politics, music and anthropology. As well as keeping commonplace books recording considered responses to her reading (often as the first step towards a published response), Lee was also an extraordinary annotator of her books. Of the c.430 books in her library that survive (housed in the British Institute in Florence), over 300 are marked, many with detailed and highly involved marginal glosses that constitute a considerable investment in the act of reading and/or re-reading. Re-reading George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism (1928) in January 1932, a ‘fine book…full of wisdom and humanity’, Lee felt obliged to declare that ‘like every book, it requires a reader to correct it’. This paper will explore the extent to which Lee’s marginalia in her books did just that, and to use H.J. Jackson’s term, will examine how marginalia ‘reveals the codes’ of a particular reader’s reading practice. Drawing upon this extraordinary archival resource and the data from it entered into the Reading Experience Database, this paper will offer an overview of the marginalia in Lee’s books, examine some of the evidences of reading that they contain, map the range of her reading in the period, and draw together some tentative conclusions from the collated data. In doing so, I want to draw our attention to the multiple functions that marginalia performs: translation, abbreviation, assent, dissent, cultural assimilation, the demarcation between public and private spheres, the evidence of shared reading, and the structuring of a response both during and after the act of reading.

‘Reading Communities: Connecting the Past and Present’ addresses the AHRC 10th-Anniversary Follow-On Scheme Highlight Notice, which invites proposals that will ‘enhance engagement with, and impact from, research funded by the AHRC during the first two years after its establishment in 2005’. This project is intended as a follow on from the ‘Reading Experience Database 1800–1945’ (2006–2009), which was funded by a £292,108 Resource Enhancement grant awarded by the AHRC in 2006. This one-year project builds on the success of the Reading Experience Database (RED) to create a series of city-focused reading outreach events. These will include lectures, oral history interviews and community workshops focused on crowdsourcing from participants' diaries or other documents. Activities will take place in Belfast, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Birmingham and London.