This project examines how theatres and museums are currently shaping public memory of difficult pasts through their staging of narratives and objects. Engaging directly with research partners and major cultural institutions, the project is a collaboration among the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of Minnesota, Cricoteka, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor (Kraków), Teatre Lliure (Barcelona), ESMA Museum and Teatro Cervantes (Buenos Aires), Holocaust Research Institute, Jewish Museum London and Imperial War Museum's Holocaust Gallery. The primary aims are: (i) to analyse how public memory of 'difficult pasts' is being staged in contemporary theatre and museal practices; (ii) to chart how these practices are increasingly informed cross-institutionally; (iii) and to foster transnational collaboration and dialogue to enhance these practices. Through fieldwork (archival research, research visits to museums and theatres, interviews with curators and theatre makers), workshops, public talks, and an international symposium the project team will specifically analyse transnational case studies in Argentina, Lithuania, Poland, Spain and the UK, which will widely extend research on the distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies and more broadly through memory studies, history, Holocaust studies, cultural geography and modern languages. Argentina, Lithuania, Poland and Spain all share highly politicized and extremely divisive debates over their difficult pasts, specifically in relation to authoritarianism, fascism and communism. Theatres and museums have been key sites for these debates, which shape and broaden public memory. Over the past few decades, widespread attempts to expose or reinterpret the public memory of formerly taboo historical narratives have come to public concern through their staging in theatres and museums for live audiences. We have also selected project partners in the UK to establish transcultural research links that will broaden the remit and impact of the research. Staging difficult pasts, theatre makers have innovated narrative forms and reframed theatrical and artefactual objects, while museum curators have increasingly privileged the 'staging' of historical narratives over the display of objects, producing performative encounters as their primary object. Thus, the project's focus will both advance transnational research on the staging of difficult pasts through narrative and object, and the key points of intersection between theatres and museums and their shaping global memory discourses. Workshops, public talks and the symposium will bring together practitioners and scholars from theatre and performance studies, visual culture, museum and curator studies, history, Holocaust studies, cultural geography and modern languages. Through workshops, we aim to document and analyse current strategies and aims employed by leading theatre makers and curators. Inviting artists to collaborate with institutions outside of their own cultural spheres, we will foster transnational dialogue and provide the opportunities for innovation across cultural sectors. We are inviting theatres and museums to work across their traditional disciplinary boundaries to generate innovation and develop strategies that serve their public aims. Forms of dissemination will have an extensive audience. These include interdisciplinary edited collections, workshops, public talks, learning materials for university libraries, the Routledge Performance Archive and the Holocaust Research Institute, and a project website, and grey literature reports.

The purpose of this grant is for an international network of scholars to explore how and why members of the Royal Society (RS), the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) and the Leopoldina (German Academy of Science, Halle) collected specimens of the natural world, art, and archaeology in the 17th and 18th centuries. These scholarly societies, founded before knowledge became subspecialised, had many common members. They explored natural philosophy (what we call science), antiquarianism (archaeology), and medicine in an interdisciplinary manner. In fact, the Leopoldina was begun not by scientists, but by doctors in 1652. Several of the fellows of the RS (founded 1660) and SAL (founded 1717), were also physicians and apothecaries. The overall shift from curiosity cabinets with objects playfully crossing the domains of art and nature, to their well-ordered Enlightenment museums is well known. What has to be explored fully is the process through which this transformation occurred, and the role of members of these academies in developing new techniques of classifying and organising objects to create the modern museum. How did academy fellows relate collections of art and nature in new ways, categorising knowledge and shaping global scientific enterprise? How was collection of ethnographic objects related to empire? Results from three of the network's workshops held from 2018-2019 will be used to develop a digital application of these academies' private and public collections that is integrated and pan-European. The workshops will be attended by a network of early-career and established scholars from the academic and heritage sectors who will draw in the histories of science, art, antiquarianism and material culture, and engage closely with a range of key public collections at the respective organisations. Workshop 1:Early modern collecting networks and practice: medicine and natural philosophy (At Leopoldina). As the RS, SAL and the Leopoldina consisted of a large number of doctors, we will analyse these early modern physicians and their approaches to collecting. Participants will also engage with the Leopoldina archives and the early museum housed in the August Francke Orphanage in Halle. In the 17th c., Francke created a global art and science museum as an experiential teaching tool for the children in his care; his learning-by-doing approach included teaching the children music that they publicly performed. The Francke Orphanage was a model for Coram's Foundling Hospital founded in 18th-century London, which via public concerts of music of Handel (who was from Halle) also raised money for the orphans. The network will consider the wider utility of collecting, antiquarianism and society, taking as its lead the involvement of medical and antiquarian collectors and their museums in early modern charity. To engage the public with our work, we will sponsor benefit music concerts in Halle and London for the Coram and Francke Museum and Foundation. Workshop 2:Antiquarian Science in the Scholarly Society (At SAL). Beyond the disciplines of medicine and natural history, physical scientists like mathematician and astronomer Martin Folkes (1690-1754) also were connoisseurs and antiquarians. Folkes was Sir Isaac Newton's protege, President of both the RS and SAL, and he tried to unite the two societies as they had many common members and interests. We will discuss the interplay and disciplinary boundaries between antiquarianism and natural philosophy and engage with the early modern museum collection at the SAL. This workshop would be a joint event with SAL as one of its Research Seminars. Workshop 3:Digital scientific collections: future afterlives (At RS). To plan our digital application, we will analyse current and developing digital approaches in surveying collections over time with the assistance of the RS-Google initiative, including integration of extant databases, data-mining and digital modelling of museum objects

Yiddish was the language spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Britain from the early 1880s. By the 1950s this working-class community was dispersed, communities of origin had been destroyed and Yiddish largely disappeared. Today, the literary and cultural heritage of Yiddish has been lost. As part of the AHRC-funded project 'Making and Remaking the Jewish East End', London Yiddish literary sources from archives across the world were collected, translated and analysed, and the project researchers built a picture of East End working-class Jewish life. Our follow-on project arises from the unforeseen public enthusiasm generated by our stagings of Yiddish performance. It aims to use these texts in Yiddish and English translation to engage a range of public audiences with the history of Jewish immigrants to London's East End, including people with an ancestral connection to this history and those interested in migration history or London cultures. Secondly we aim to stimulate and support the teaching and learning of the Yiddish language, which remains an endangered language in Britain. The project will produce 'The Cockney Yiddish Podcast', a series of podcasts and linked website about the history of Yiddish culture in London. The series celebrates the richness of Cockney Yiddish culture, and its close intertwinement with British culture and literature, as an integral part of British migration history. The podcasts will be presented by the project team with guest scholars, writers and actors and will explore the experience of immigration and acculturation through the medium of popular culture, especially fiction and song. These lively texts from London's popular Yiddish press will also be made available on the website as teaching and learning resources for intermediate-level Yiddish language, in order to serve the learning needs of the growing Yiddish language learning community. Interactivity among learners and listeners will be fostered through an online discussion forum and live events. Our UK community partners the Jewish Museum, the Jewish Music Institute, the Holocaust Survivors' Centre and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives will facilitate the involvement of a number of different audiences in the project, including both younger learners of Yiddish language and elderly native speakers. In turn the project will enable our community partner organisations to expand their provision of Yiddish-focused cultural programming. In addition, the team will use their existing connections to Yiddish language centres in the US and Israel to reach wider international audiences. At the same time, through making texts available in English translation in the podcast and website, the project also addresses people with no knowledge of Yiddish or Jewish culture. By generating engagement with these several audiences through informative, entertaining and provocative content, the project aims to expand knowledge of working-class Jewish history in Britain and to engage more people with Yiddish culture.

While British attitudes to immigration from the Victorian period onwards have increasingly come under scrutiny, the experience of immigrant minorities remains under-researched. Our project focuses on one instructive case study: the history of Jewish immigrants to east London, their children and grandchildren. Around 150,000 Jews migrated to Britain in the late Victorian period, the majority settling in east London. Their story has largely been written from sources produced by the leaders of the established Anglo-Jewish community, who regarded immigrant Jews as profoundly different from them - poor, pious and politically radical - and who had little understanding of the East End environment where Jewish immigrants settled. However, this perspective has limited our understanding of Jewish culture and social change in modern London. Our project seeks instead to attend to the voices of working-class and lower middle-class East End Jews. Crucially, this entails study of the Yiddish language culture of Jewish immigrants, which flourished in east London in the early twentieth century and subsequently became a formative influence on Jewish culture after World War II. The project will analyse a body of rarely used sources in Yiddish and English-language popular culture, drawing on literature, periodicals, theatre, songs, and oral history recordings. Contesting the still dominant view of Yiddish-speaking immigrants as pliable subjects moulded by philanthropy and schooling, our study will examine the forms of agency and creativity they exerted in the process of acculturation. Instead of assuming that Jewish immigrant culture in the East End was inward- and backward-looking, we will approach it as a mobile, hybrid and transnational phenomenon. For immigrants and their children, we contend, the East End was experienced not as a ghetto but through relationships to other social and cultural spaces: to the West End Jewish world but also to European or north American centres of Jewish culture, to Cockney London and to other immigrant communities. We will explore how this diasporic hybridity was enacted in immigrant culture, including London Yiddish - a dynamic language that absorbed and adapted words, ideas and literary forms from eastern Europe to the East End. In the postwar period, the Jewish East End continued to be remade. As Jews migrated to suburbs, it became a temporal as well as a spatial marker. We will examine how, in novels, memoirs and oral histories, looking back to the East End, and the Yiddish culture in which many Jews were raised, produced new understandings of the present. The research will be undertaken by two leading academics in the field of British Jewish studies from the disciplines of History and English, and a postdoctoral researcher experienced in Yiddish-language text and performance. Academic outputs will include articles, conference papers, an anthology of translated Yiddish literature and the digitization and transcription of oral history recordings. Impact activities will take place with partner institutions in north and east London and include public lectures, a rehearsed reading of London Yiddish drama, a guided walk in London's East End and a short film. A sound installation and creative workshops will involve contemporary East Enders with local oral history and reflection on east London's hybrid cultures in the past and present. The project's multi-dimensional approach to the history of Jewish immigration, acculturation and integration will speak to the history of other immigrant populations in Britain. As part of our impact programme we will bring together comparative perspectives from east London community history organisations and other historians of immigration, whose expertise will help shape our research. Documenting the multi-relational character of immigrant cultures in the past will, we believe, generate a more complex and empathetic understanding of immigrant cultures in the present.