The Energy Transitions in Long Modernity (ETLM) network will generate exciting topical research on a pivotal epoch in the history of the planet: the gradual shift from an energy regime of wood, water, and wind to one powered by coal, oil, and nuclear fission. One of the most effective methods to sharpen our imagination of a post-petroleum future is by turning to the past. With an eye on our current energy predicament, participants will examine how previous societies coped with scarcity and crisis, analysing the narratives they created to promote the adoption of alternatives. Going beyond the vogue for steampunk, the network will explore other types of retro-futurism that might inspire us to repurpose or retrofit old technology to meet contemporary energy challenges. The research generated by this network will have wide-ranging impact both within and beyond academia. By bringing together a diverse cohort of experts across the humanities, sciences, and energy heritage, the network will enable conversations and knowledge exchange across disciplines and sectors as well as time periods, from the early modern to contemporary, revealing how energy studies can reshape humanities research agendas and inform policy to meet an urgent global challenge. In Year 1, we will host three online symposia via MS Teams on energy retro-futurism and the early history of renewables: Water, Wind, Solar. The first plumbs the uses and consequences of hydrological power, tracing its flows through politics, literature, and art. The second online event surveys the long history of wind-farming around the world. It examines the harnessing of wind in the age of sails, windmills and balloons, while reappraising cultural responses to the transition from wind to coal such as Turner's iconic Fighting Temeraire. The final online symposium explores the harvesting of energy from the sun prior to the invention of photovoltaic cells in 1954. This tripartite division will build upon the expertise and contacts from our previous environmental humanities network Earth, Sea, Sky, expanding and revamping it with an entirely new focus and research agenda. The online format will enable international participation while minimizing the carbon footprint. The PI and US lead will moderate each symposium and conclude with a series of questions: e.g., what cross-disciplinary knowledge has emerged, and what collaborations might arise that could translate this knowledge into action? In Year 2, we will run two in-person events. The first will be held at The National Coal Mining Museum in Yorkshire. It will assess the cultural factors contributing to the rise of a coal-based economy and the ways in which culture can fuel a transition towards a clean energy future. Hosting this gathering in situ will provide an immediate and visceral appreciation of the materiality and social history of energy extraction, framing and enriching the discussion. This will be followed by a tour of the newly refurbished Power Hall at the Manchester Science and Industry Museum. These visits will provide a first-hand knowledge of how the UK's industrial heritage is currently relayed to the public and how its saga might be retold to energise climate activism. The second event, hosted by the Clark Library at the University of California-Los Angeles, will build upon these discussions to demonstrate how the cultural history of past energy transitions can inspire and guide new habits and policies. California is a hotbed of the new energy economy, home to many energy tech researchers and think-tanks on energy policy, making it an ideal setting for the gathering. The archival resources of the Clark Library will provide a long view of the history of resource extraction in the Americas and of previous transitions brought about by European colonisation. In sum, the network will demonstrate the power of the humanities to deliver a jolt to energy studies and policy.

This project's overall objective is to co-produce, with women from coalfield communities, a comprehensive study of women's activism during the miners' strike of 1984-5, and a new history of continuity and change in working-class women's lives from 1945 on. Working-class women's activism during the miners' strike was unprecedented in scope and key to keeping the strike going. The time is right for a major oral history project on the strike, using it as a lens to examine working-class experiences and subjectivities more broadly in postwar Britain. We will address the project's overarching aim via the following research objectives: 1. We will co-produce with women from coalfield communities a major new oral history project: the first major study of women's activism in coalfields during the miners' strike, examining the causes, forms, and consequences of activism. This will involve 75 new oral history life-story interviews, 10 group interviews and one reminiscence day. 2. The research will be co-produced throughout through single and group oral histories. Findings will be shared and debated with interviewees and communities through 10 public workshops. The project website and monthly e-newsletter for all project associates (interviewees and other interested parties) will be another route for sharing findings. Research will also be shared with communities through the temporary exhibition at the National Coal Mining Museum (NCMM) and online exhibition. Understanding one's own history is key to the vitality of communities, and the project aims to significantly impact coalfield communities' understandings of their own recent history. 3. Our monograph (written in the 2 years after project) will be the first major historical analysis of women's activism in the miners' strike. 4. It will also, however, encompass a wider study of working-class women in coalfield communities' lives since 1945: their experiences, identities and subjectivities. Our interviews will be life-story interviews, allowing us to examine continuity and change over the long-term. We will hone in on questions about 'feminism' in interviews, to develop important new understandings of the impact of 'Second Wave' feminism on British society after 1968, and of the 'vernacular' discourses of gender equality which circulated in post-1945 British society; the latter have been largely overlooked thus far in existing historiography. 5. We will enhance public understanding of women's activism during the strike, working-class women's lives, and feminism, through our temporary exhibition at the NCMM and the permanent exhibition on the project website. Tapping into significant popular interest in the miners' strike and the history of 'ordinary' people, the project will highlight the importance of women's political activism (histories of activism and politics often focus on men). We also aim to provoke people to think about what different meanings 'feminism' can have. A workshop with feminist groups and History Acts will impact on contemporary feminist groups' understandings of feminist history and intersectionality. 2 complete lesson plans for Key Stage 3 history teachers (also on the project website) will enable school students to grapple with the sources and issues. 6. Our work will transform the research landscape, significantly impacting on the historiography of postwar Britain, including theoretical and methodological debates, and gender and feminist studies. We will present at 2 international conferences and disseminate our findings to academic audiences through a monograph and 3 peer-reviewed journal articles. 7. We will produce a major new collection of life-story oral history interviews with working-class women, to be archived at the National Coal Mining Museum (along with new physical archival collections relating to the strike). This will create a major new resource for historians to further develop understandings of working-class life in postwar Britain.

The project is a new intervention into academic, political, and public debates on the history of the British coal industry between 1947 and 1994. The study is particularly timely given the recent closure of Kellingley in December 2015 the last deep coal mine in Britain. It draws upon both the experiential and academic knowledge of PI Gildart who spent seven years as an underground coal miner in Wales between 1985 and 1992. The research will be based on extensive archival work in the coalfields, a comprehensive oral history project, interaction with former miners and colliery managers, a partnership with mining museums, and the development of a comprehensive interactive website, blog and touring exhibition. It will explore the development of the industry, its workplace cultures, industrial identities, politics, and individual and collective experiences through a detailed examination of eight collieries located in England, Scotland and Wales: Bickershaw Colliery (Lancashire, 1830-1992), Easington Colliery (Durham, 1899-1993), Hatfield Colliery (Yorkshire, 1916-2015), Annesley-Bentinck Colliery (Nottinghamshire, 1865-2000), Markham Colliery (Derbyshire, 1882-1993), Barony Colliery (Ayrshire, 1910-1989), Tower Colliery (Cynon Valley, 1864-2008), and Point of Ayr Colliery (Flintshire, 1890-1996). The oral history project will seek to understand the everyday experiences of coal miners and officials in the workplace, the community and the domestic sphere. This will involve interviews with around 80 participants and substantial community engagement in former mining localities. As such it represents a landmark scholarly intervention into the history of the industry by examining policy development, deployment and reception at macro (Government/NCB), meso (coalfield) and micro (colliery/community/domestic) levels. The project will tease out the unifying and diversifying identities and tensions in the eight collieries and their connected communities. In contrast with much of the existing scholarship on the industry there will be a specific emphasis on gender, generation, masculinity, femininity and regional/national identity and how these aspects of mining life contributed to a sense of individual and collective memory. The research will be organised around particular themes: the political evolution of public ownership and its local social/political impact, occupational culture and identity, the tensions between divergent industrial relations cultures and their impact on organisations, the changing nature of underground work, masculinity, gender relations, community fragmentation, deindustrialisation, memory, heritage, and the resilience of occupational and class identities. Chronologically the project will shed new light on key-moments in the history of the coal industry such as the debates around the nature of public ownership, the industrial disputes of 1972, 1974 and 1984/5 and the subsequent closure of all of the nation's deep mines in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Yet just as importantly it will gauge the impact of these events on miners, their wives/girlfriends, children, and the wider community in which the collieries were located. The project will go beyond the organisational/institutional frameworks adopted by many historians of the industry in order to reveal both the unifying and fragmentary nature of occupational, national, local, and class identity. The comprehensive coverage of the eight collieries, will support, stimulate and publicize research material that will be of use to academics, policymakers, schools, and the three major mining museums of England, Scotland and Wales. The website and published outputs will ensure that the project has broad impact in both the academic and public sphere. The project represents a significant reappraisal of the importance of the coal industry in shaping the identities, politics, and cultures of industrial localities in post-war Britain.

Sound, Craft, Vision, Place will draw together a team of researchers from the arts and humanities to assist the promotion, development and provision of innovative outreach activities to encourage community groups to explore and articulate their heritage for themselves, and to stimulate projects for HLF funding. The project themes emphasise the importance of oral history, music, art and design, and digital media at the University of Huddersfield, and our ability to draw on expertise beyond the humanities to provide tools that will attract community interest and prompt project ideas. Community groups themselves will be encouraged to specify the kinds of research areas and methods where collaboration or help would be welcomed. We are especially keen to involve those who have encountered barriers to enjoying the heritage, and an important part of our project will be the role to be played by local and virtual communities in the interpretation of their own backgrounds and surroundings, including web- and digital-based activity to encourage virtual volunteering as a communal activity, undertaken both by people who are connected by place and/or by shared experiences and interests. Among our partners will be the National Coal Mining Museum for England, English Heritage, the Royal Armouries, as well as local community groups, with all of whom we shall be working to develop ideas for projects involving free access to archive materials.

As the newspaper poetry columns, workers' periodicals, surviving records of local libraries and reading rooms, and society accounts show, industrial workers spent substantial amounts of their working lives and brief leisure time in writing, reading, and discussing works of literature. Every industrial workplace had its writer in this period. Most had more than one, like poets and journalists 'Nisbet Noble' (James Ferguson) and 'Will Harrow' (John Stanley) at Stanley Mills in Perthshire, or autobiographers and poets 'Rustic Rhymer' (Thomas Stewart) and 'Davie' (David Wingate) in the same Lanarkshire mine. 'Piston, Pen & Press' recovers the forgotten ways in which these industrial workers engaged with literary culture from the 1840s to the First World War. By focusing on miners, railway workers, and textile factory workers it will investigate how profession, location, and the perception of being part of a specific workforce community influenced workers' activities as authors, performers and readers. Our concentration is on Scotland and the North of England, with Britain's two greatest Victorian industrial cities, Manchester and Glasgow, as centres of interest. We will use archival research and scoping studies of newspaper and periodical databases to uncover the poems, songs, periodical and newspaper writings and other prose writings (including autobiography and biography) of workers in these industries. We will additionally work with the preserved records of nineteenth-century libraries and reading rooms to trace a history of reading through borrowers' records, and to study records of 'literary' associations (minute books, members' directories, manuscript magazines) linked to specific workplaces or operating in their vicinity. No previous project or published work has attempted to reflect on working-class literary cultures in the long Victorian period in terms of both profession and location. Further, existing studies and anthologies do not provide our interdisciplinary focus on the history of reading, the history of associational culture, and the literary analysis of workers' writings. Although recent historical work on Britain's industrial revolution has shifted towards a greater consideration of workers' writings, research into literary representations of Victorian industry is still dominated by accounts of observers or employers, not by how workers themselves represented their labour and presented themselves as a cultured workforce with investments in established as well as popular literature. Despite growing interest in working-class reading, much evidence of workers' cultural investments and cultural literacy remains scattered in local and regional archives. What we currently know or hypothesize about what Victorian workers (like those listed above) wrote, read or sung, and how they accessed literary works, is a fraction of what we could know through in-depth archival research and a careful and comparative analysis of findings. While the academic outcomes of this project will contribute significantly to the study of working-class culture, history and literature, and to our scholarly perceptions of Victorian industrialism, we also seek to create public awareness of this neglected aspect of industrial heritage. Building on our existing connections and developing new ones, we will work with selected museums and non-academic partners, both national and local, on ways to include this vital intangible heritage in their collections and outreach activities. In doing so we hope to foster fruitful discussions between institutions and individuals in the heritage sector in Scotland and the North of England about the status and significance of literary cultures in Britain's industrial past. Through our connections to the General Federation of Trades Unions and potentially other unions, 'Piston, Pen & Press' will also incorporate reflection on the 21st century workplace and historical workplace culture.