How can analysis of the clothing collections of Francis Golding, held in the Museum of London (MOL) and London College of Fashion Archives (LCF), be used as a case study for creating a dress-specific acquisition and cataloguing methodology. The Golding collections engage with masculinity and gender studies, LGBTQ+ dress, as well as British design history, providing a unique opportunity to analyse how dress-based collections are acquired and catalogued. The proposed research will establish a methodology that enables the full biography of an object of dress to be documented upon acquisition, connected to the wider collection, and catalogued in a manner that creates new avenues of accessibility, including online portals. By gathering the experiences and needs of donors, collections specialists, and museum audiences, my research aims to create a standard operative framework which currently does not exist. This framework can then be implemented by individual curators and collections practitioners and adopted by museums and galleries holding dress-based collections. This will allow for deeper analysis of the interconnectivity between personal identity and object biography, and broader socio-cultural, fashion and design histories in museum collections. These new lines of accessibility to collections will encourage engagement with diverse communities; therefore enriching the provenance of objects. This methodology aims to open up collections and include the histories of groups and individuals who have been previously under or misrepresented in museums.

How does the UK Home Office "do history" today? How have the Home, Colonial and Foreign Offices "done history" in the past? "Credibility" is a concept in British immigration often taken at face value but actually in need of historical analysis. My PhD investigates the development of "credibility" as notion that organises race, gender and criminality into governmental policies for deporting people in the U.K. to former British colonies. "Credibility" is central in legal sources of "refugee status determination" and since the 1990s part and parcel of a discourse about credible characters and authentic documentary evidence. My project sets out to historicise the authority given to Home Office caseworkers to validate or discredit life histories in relation to histories of British late colonial governance, decolonisation and post-war immigration controls. The project contextualises the provision of expert witness reports by today's Area Studies scholars to Asylum Tribunal Courts about asylum seekers' countries of origin within a wider genealogy of the production of academic knowledge and government policies relating to former British colonies. In addition to offering an account of "credibility" based on caselaw, legislation and parliamentary debates, my project parses how "credibility" discourse has been challenged and reformulated by very different kinds of campaigns and everyday interactions with British immigration controls. How have both racist and anti-racist groups - including imperialist white feminists, Colonial Service pensioners, New Commonwealth immigrants and refugee rights activists - rendered the "credibility" of migrants, of the immigration system, and of the British Empire's legacies? Ultimately, my project asks how the political language in which we register the history of British colonialism relates to the depoliticisation (within the five categories of the Refugee Convention) and subsequent criminalisation of economic migration to Britain from former British colonies. This project will historicise the separation between "genuine" asylum-seekers and "fraudulent" economic migrants, a binary now considered the hallmark of 'postliberal' political discourse.

This study raises the poet-translator Edward FitzGerald (1809-83) to critical attention by placing him at the vanguard of the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th Century. His Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) was a bestselling phenomenon, and frequently referenced by Aesthetic/Decadent writers; yet despite this, FitzGerald has been consistently sidelined in studies of Victorian literature, and his impact on the Aesthetic movement remains underexplored. As part of the wider critical revaluation of Aestheticism and Decadence as existential movements driven by an anxiety about the individual's place in society, my study intervenes by showing how these responses were presaged, even transcended by FitzGerald, who stands as a poet uniquely intuitive of the fundamental insubstantiality of identity and selfhood. This reading opens new avenues in translation studies by deriving from FitzGerald a radically non-hierarchical mode of relation between self and other. Discourse on the Rubáiyát's nature as a translation was originally a question of scholarly accuracy; more recently, with the emergence of postcolonial studies, criticism of his translation has taken a more ethical angle, invoking Edward Said's framework of 'Orientalism'. A representative example is Barbara J. Black's On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000), wherein she describes FitzGerald as an agent of 'popular imperialism' who domesticated the 'exotic' poems of Khayyám. This is an oversimplistic interpretation that does not account for FitzGerald's personal, anti-colonial sentiments, nor does it reckon with the ways in which his fundamental, self-annihilating apathy challenges the very assumptions that underpin orientalist narratives of intercultural exchange. In this respect, his translations are more expressions of his own poetic instincts. Thus, it is time we move beyond treating him simply as a translator and read him as a major author in his own right. My study will provide the first comprehensive reading of FitzGerald as a whole poetic personality unique within the canon of English poets. A critical revaluation of FitzGerald's apathy, premised on a principle of 'Aestheticist Nonentity', has a radical significance in our identity- and affect-charged contemporary age. If a feature of our age, as observed by critics like Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics (2017)) and Hans-Georg Moeller (You and Your Profile (2021)), is the increasing demand to self-optimise and self-expose, emptying interiority to exploit care and desire, then FitzGerald offers a philosophy of living that is truly subversive in its unexploitable disregard for selfhood and the relinquishing of care itself.

This project responds to the ambition set by the DCMS Culture and Heritage Capital (CHC) Programme to develop a systematic approach through which culture and heritage can be valued. Delivered by a multidisciplinary team committed to inter- and transdisciplinary ways of working, this scoping study supports the articulation of a comprehensive and integrated set of evidence and guidance for the purpose of valuing culture and heritage assets in the context of decision making. It offers: a) an analysis of the developments prompted by the concept of cultural capital and a preliminary taxonomy linking types of assets with the generated flows of services and the associated values, including special consideration for digital assets and heritage sites; b) methodological recommendations for the development of evaluation guidance operationalising the CHC framework in government decision-making, informed by the considerations of natural capital; c) an overview of key conceptual and methodological challenges, in particular those arising from a multidisciplinary research perspective; d) a priority list of research areas and interdisciplinary avenues of inquiry built around the challenges identified through research and dialogue with the funders, international Advisory Group, Partners and other stakeholders.

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