Cultural Heritage Research Group – Zoom forum

The Cultural Heritage Research Group is aligned with the Centre for Culture, Media and Society (CCMS) but membership is open to everyone with relevant interests, irrespective of affiliation with other research groups, centres or academic departments.

This group aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from across the university who share interests in what can be termed ‘intangible cultural heritage’.  This can encompass unwritten, unofficial histories and vernacular culture relating to all forms of media, events, traditions, rituals, spaces and places.

The first research event held last month, as part of the Contemporary Conversations in Culture, Media and Society seminar series, presented Dr Tom Clark’s The Devil Rides In:  The Development of Satanic Narratives in the Swinging Sixties and Beyond (University of Sheffield).  This group aims to encourage similar ongoing conversations and collaboration among staff and postgraduate research students on common themes and interests which may include vernacular culture and contemporary folklore, often unrecorded or overlooked, and ranges from that which might be seen as historical and ancient to the extremely contemporary.

Our interests concern unearthing, preserving and archiving material relating to unrealised cultural visions: unbuilt cinemas; oral histories; unproduced, hauntological or lost visions of film and television; and shadow histories of what might have been.  This approach of media archaeology aims to examine as yet unearthed media, stories and legends that remain untold or unexamined: what might have been, that which is everyday, and how and why ideas, events, traditions, narratives and stories may (or may not) surface.

The Cultural Heritage Research Group aims to hold regular events linked to topics of current research interest, accessible to staff and postgraduate students in all areas.

We aim to provide a forum to share ideas, knowledge and practice; to exchange feedback on current and developing projects and to share funding and knowledge transfer opportunities.

We would like to invite you to a brief introductory meeting, held via Zoom, at 1300 on Tuesday 3 May.  The Zoom link is: https://shu.zoom.us/j/93149121760

To make informal enquiries regarding the Cultural Heritage Research Group, please contact the group leaders:

Dr David Clarke (Associate Professor/Reader in Journalism, Department of Media Arts and Communication) david.clarke@shu.ac.uk

Dr James Fenwick (Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, Department of Media Arts and Communication) j.fenwick@shu.ac.uk

Diane A Rodgers (Senior Lecturer in Media, Department of Media Arts and Communication) d.rodgers@shu.ac.uk