Partnerships
Find out about the organisations we work with and the exciting work we've done with them.
- The British Printing Museum
Britain holds an undeniably important place in printing history with many industrial advances made either in the United Kingdom or by British inventors. However, British printing heritage is at risk, with historical printing artefacts and archives neither documented nor preserved in a co-ordinated manner. The majority of museum holdings are in storage and inaccessible to the public. A British Printing Museum is long overdue. As a first step towards bringing the nation’s printing heritage together and making it publicly visible, Dr Rachel Stenner is working with a group of heritage professionals to create a virtual resource: the British Printing Museum. The virtual museum will draw together collections from around the country, and build towards creating, in the long term, a physical museum. This project is a multi-institutional collaboration between several major organisations: the Printing Historical Society, the Centre for Printing History and Culture, Winterbourne House and Garden, Ironbridge Gorge Museums, the University of Sussex, Birmingham City University.
- Kairos
In line with the recent ‘temporal turn’ in a number of related fields across the arts and humanities, this group studies a specific idea of time, kairos (also occasio and its translation into the various vernaculars), from its earliest mention in Greek literature to more modern (or even post-modern) ideas regarding exceptional time from across the globe. We aim to bring together researchers from classics, gender studies, history, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology and theology to better understand the history and development of this important concept, analysing its various manifestations across a broad range of sources. By sharing our work through seminars, workshops, conferences, special issue journals and online, we hope to contribute significantly to the study of each of these individual fields as well as to temporal studies as a whole.
Dr Joanne Paul is the Network Director of Kairos
- Petworth House (past partner)
CEMMS worked in partnership with the National Trust at Petworth House, West Sussex, and the West Sussex Record Office at Chichester in an investigation into the libraries and intellectual culture of the British country house during the early modern period.
The project involved an AHRC collaborative doctoral award which investigated a unique collection of early play quartos purchased by the 10th Earl of Northumberland during the seventeenth century. The quartos are housed at Petworth, where they have been kept since at least the 1690s. As part of the project some of the volumes were exhibited to the public, alongside display boards about the 10th Earl and the volumes themselves. Sussex researchers worked with The Guided Theatre Company and Petworth Festival to create a promenade performance featuring excerpts from some of the plays in the collection.
During the project, Petworth also played host to a symposium on Early Modern Sussex and a multi-disciplinary conference on libraries and the intellectual culture of the British country house (1500-1700). From the latter came a volume of collected essays edited by Professors Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield, and Margaret Healy.
- Red Dragonfly Theatre Productions
The Centre enjoys a continuing partnership with the energetic and trailblazing Red Dragonfly Theatre Productions.
In collaboration with the Centre, Red Dragonfly stage original productions which bring Western interactions with the East alive on the stage. With the Centre, they have devised and performed The Renaissance China Cabinet, which was workshopped with live readings on campus before a series of performances at Southwark Cathedral.
Their forthcoming collaboration with CEMMS, The China Masques, is scheduled for 2021.
You can find out more about Red Dragonfly by clicking here.
- Shakespeare's Globe
Sussex CEMMS has a long-standing partnership with Shakespeare’s Globe.
The Globe has been partners on the AHRC-funded ‘The Thomas Nashe Project’, hosting the reading of the stage adaptation of Terrors of the Night (May 2018) and a performance by Edward’s Boys of Summer’s Last Will and Testament at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (September 2018).
We teach an undergraduate course in collaboration, ‘Spectacular Imaginings’, and have lectured at the theatre and participated in events for many years (most recently at the ‘Shakespeare and Poland Festival’, July 2019).
In November 2020 we collaborated on a two-day online symposium on Shakespeare, race and the university classroom which attracted an audience of school and university students, academics, teachers, and theatre audiences and theatre practitioners. Over three events we focused on the teaching of race on the Shakespearean stage, as well as our approaches to the racial dynamics in play when Renaissance dramas are staged and taught today. In particular, we were looking to reinvigorate the teaching of Othello by situating Shakespeare’s play in the context of other early modern dramas that staged inter-racial and inter-cultural relationships.
- University College Dublin
The Sussex-UCD partnership is funded by the International Research Partnerships and Network Fund at Sussex, and the School of English at UCD.
It provides funding for the journal The Spenser Review, edited by Jane Grogan (UCD) and Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), and involves an academic exchange of faculty.