University of Wales Trinity Saint David

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2026 · 2026-12

Indian Ocean and Silk Road histories have frequently been studied through the prism of empires and crossroads. In the former, emphasis has been placed on the role of major powers in sustaining corridors of communication and stimulating demand for goods between East and West. In the latter, communities in the Indus Valley, Central Asia, and the Tarim Basin have been repeatedly cast as “middlemen,” situated between supposedly more advanced civilisations. These entrenched narratives, rooted in colonial historiography, continue to shape academic discourse and public understanding. In some contexts, they also underpin ideologically charged representations of the so-called Silk Road, which are used to legitimise contemporary political claims. This project offers a timely and necessary intervention. It challenges dominant frameworks by investigating patterns of consumption and local agency in the Indus Valley, Central Asia, and the Tarim Basin during the early to mid-1st millennium CE. Rather than focusing on imperial centres, we apply conceptual tools from globalisation, glocalisation, and microhistory to foreground the role of smaller-scale actors. These include local traders, pastoralists, and consumers who contributed to long-distance exchange but are often absent from overarching narratives. The project also addresses a structural gap in the field. Indian Ocean and Silk Road studies are often pursued in isolation, divided along maritime and land-based lines. We aim to bridge this divide by creating a collaborative and comparative platform that draws these domains into conversation. Our objectives are fourfold: To undertake a synthetic survey of archaeological, textual, and scientific data from key sites across the three regions. To carry out comparative case studies at two sites, one in the Indus Valley and one in the Tarim Basin, to test the utility of microhistorical and glocal approaches. To organise a series of scholarly events—a seminar, a hybrid workshop, and an in-person colloquium—to facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange. To assemble a core team of collaborators with a view to developing a multi-partner interdisciplinary proposal for a future UKRI or ERC application. This work builds on a growing movement in global history to decentre traditional powers and explore alternative narratives of contact and mobility. By engaging directly with new material evidence, including archaeometric data such as botanical remains and mineral residues, we aim to assess the nature, scale, and direction of early connectivity. The combination of conceptual innovation and material analysis enables us to ask new questions about how ancient exchange functioned in practice. The project will produce a peer-reviewed article, an edited volume, and an international research network. It will establish a new agenda that brings Indian Ocean and Silk Road studies into meaningful dialogue, while also supporting equitable global partnerships and providing a foundation for larger-scale funding. To ensure inclusion, we have allocated additional funding (travel and subsistence) for participation by scholars from the Global South and provide mentoring and networking opportunities for early-career researchers at our project events. Through active engagement with museums and heritage organisations, we aim to promote historically grounded and critically informed public narratives that reflect the complexity of ancient global connections.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-08

The visitor to the Isles of Scilly (IoS), an archipelago of five inhabited islands some twenty-five miles south-west of Land’s End, encounters intriguing place-names at every turn: islands called Bryher, Tresco, Samson and Arthur, bays called Wingletang and Pelistry, rocks called Biggal and Crim. Such names are not mere curiosities: they offer precious clues to the languages, history and culture of the islands across millennia. They provide the only evidence for the local use of the Cornish language, and they offer a distinctive insight into the nature of the English speech that  replaced it from about the fifteenth century onwards. They point to contacts further afield, with Scandinavia, Brittany and perhaps Ireland; they allude to beliefs and stories; they record lost buildings and industries, changing flora, fauna and land-use. In this unique place they even offer an index against which to measure the sea-level rise that has made separate islands out of one land-mass within the span of human habitation. Our project, which revisits and develops material collected by Professor Charles Thomas for his 1985 award-winning study, Exploration of a Drowned Landscape, will for the first time publish a full record and discussion of Scilly’s place-names, combining systematic study of the documentary sources with comparative linguistic and onomastic analysis. The work will produce new insights into the linguistic history of an exceptional but often overlooked community, contributing to the study of both medieval Celtic language and modern English dialect. It will also supply an authoritative work of reference for researchers in many other fields. We shall involve scholars from a range of disciplines – history, archaeology, geography and environmental science, as well as linguistics and onomastics – to set the names fully in their context, and in addition to the survey we will publish a tightly focused case-study analysing the benefits of (and challenges to) co-ordinating disciplinary approaches to researching the past. Central to our work will be a programme of engagement with the community of the islands, both residents and visitors. Besides sharing our research with local audiences, we will draw on their knowledge of names, of explanations for them, and of local topography, to enrich our historical collection of documentary material. Our project is timed to coincide with the run-up to the 2026 opening of exciting new premises for an IoS Cultural Centre and Museum. We offer a distinctive strand in a range of activities which are planned to promote heritage in the islands, emphasising the vital part that heritage and culture play in the local tourist economy and the contribution that they make to education and to physical and mental well-being. The local school, the Five Islands Academy, is involved in a number of these activities, and is keen to partner with us in the delivery of our programme. An exhibition at the new museum and an accessible publication will present research results to a general audience. The islands’ rich and fascinating linguistic heritage currently enjoys little or no recognition – this project aims to change that.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass is an essential feature of thousands of buildings central to the history and identity of the UK, but has usually been overlooked by art historians and is subject to sweeping uninformed criticism that has pervaded assumptions and hindered analysis in established fields of study. Much more than transparent pictures, stained glass utilises the properties of glass, paint and lead to transform interior space, mediating cultural memory as monuments from the past. Stained glass is also increasingly at risk as the buildings that it was made for, especially places of worship, close and are redeveloped. Its significance is often overlooked in the listing of historic buildings, leaving it vulnerable during redevelopment. Appreciating the value of stained glass is profoundly constrained when the work of so many stained glass artists and studios remains unresearched and the historical and social significance of stained glass has yet to be explored. This project will develop new approaches for recognising and evaluating the significance of stained glass in the built environment. It will demonstrate methods for gathering data in partnership with specialists, stakeholders and local communities to increase our understanding of the variety and quality of an artform unrivalled for its immediacy and presence across so many communities. The project will affirm the importance of stained glass to the story of British Art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by drawing out examples of artistic and technical virtuosity and innovation. The project will also interrogate the intense locality and site-specific nature of stained glass, considering its social and community significance; the presence of stained glass in unusual locations; shifts in the situational meaning of windows after changes in building use; and the extent to which the commemorative functions and meanings of stained glass are contested. To do so, the project will deliver on three primary objectives: new survey of stained glass in north-west England and Wales will provide information on hundreds of examples of stained glass from a variety of building types for future study and comparison with other areas; a series of case studies on individual windows and schemes of windows will demonstrate different kinds of artistic, technical, heritage and community significance of stained glass; a research-led approach to understanding and assessing the significance of stained glass, published as a ChurchCare guidance document for the Cathedrals and Church Buildings Department of the Church of England, informing the allocation of funding for conservation and preservation of stained glass, and a guidance document for Cadw (Welsh Government’s historic environment service). Catalysing this combined approach to appreciating the significance of stained glass will not only extend the scope of its study in the history of art and architecture and visual studies, but also make significant advances in the study of the UK’s heritage, informing practical heritage planning, conservation and preservation. Assessing significance is essential when managing change for historic buildings and the guidance authored by the project, developed in partnership with stakeholders, will support informed judgements based on agreed criteria.

UKRI Gateway to Research · FY 2025 · 2025-07

The literary culture of north-east Wales in the later Middle Ages had a lasting legacy. This was a region where poets and scholars flourished, and where some of Wales’s most important manuscripts were produced. It would go on to make a significant contribution to the Renaissance scholarship that laid the foundation for the form of written Welsh for centuries to come, and helped ensure the language’s survival. What remains to be established, is how and why this distinctive culture developed. To what extent was it a product of the region’s complex history and the interplay of Welsh, English and European influences? And did it in some sense prefigure Renaissance scholarship before the effects of the Italian Renaissance were felt in Wales? Recent research has highlighted the importance of scholarship in late-medieval Wales in relation to genealogy, historical writing and bardic grammars, and recognises the contribution of one man, the poet and polymath Gutun Owain, in all three fields. Born into a gentry family from the Oswestry region, he was certainly a ‘Renaissance man’ in terms of his wide range of interests, and was at the centre of a network of other learned men. His poetry, however, has received relatively little attention, the full corpus having been last edited in a mid-twentieth century French-language edition which, though excellent for its time, is now outdated, incomplete and out of print. This gap in our knowledge and appreciation of Gutun Owain as a poet has begun to be filled by the PL’s recent work on his poetry addressed to abbots of Valle Crucis. Building upon this, the proposed project will edit and translate Gutun’s poems addressed to other, mostly secular patrons, making these important primary sources freely available to a wide audience for the first time. In tandem with this we will publish a new and wide-ranging analysis of Gutun Owain’s scholarship and scholarly connections. Like Gutun himself, the project will develop scholarly and social networks, engaging in discussions with academic and lay stakeholders throughout its duration. There will be a programme of public events, and the project will make its findings, and the poems themselves, available in a variety of formats aimed at different audiences. Its outputs and activities will contribute to the modern-day cultural life of the north-east, helping to foster a broader and deeper appreciation of the Welsh language and heritage, especially in relation to education, lifelong learning and tourism. For academic beneficiaries, the contextualised primary sources will allow Gutun’s works to be readily appreciated alongside those of well-studied English and Scots poets such as John Skelton and William Dunbar. Moreover, the project’s findings will allow Gutun’s contribution and legacy to be evaluated in the wider context of the development of the Renaissance in Britain. They will provide a Welsh perspective on the recent scholarly trends that recognise no hard-and-fast boundary between late-medieval and Renaissance literature, and will lay the foundation for a larger project on the role of the north-east during that crucial time of transition.