Here is a sample of the Centre’s impact, engagement, and knowledge exchange work with collaborative partners.
Heritage and Preservation
Dr. Dustin Frazier Wood works closely with cultural heritage organisations and the communities in which they operate to promote public and academic engagement with archives, libraries, and museum collections, and to make collections more accessible both physically and digitally. Dustin is the Director of Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), Britain’s oldest provincial learned society and second-oldest museum. Alongside research projects, exhibitions, public engagement activities, conservation, digitisation, and volunteer coordination at SGS, Dustin collaborates with the Fenland Heritage Network, Ayscoughfee Hall Museum and Gardens, and the South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Arts Council NPO, to provide training and consultancy for heritage collections throughout the Midlands and beyond. In London, Dustin leads Roehampton's collaboration with Wandsworth Council's Heritage Collection, working with Council staff, community members, students, and Roehampton colleagues to make the borough's heritage collection more visible and digitally accessible. Dustin also advises Wandsworth on evaluation strategy for its cultural and heritage activities as London Borough of Culture 2025.
Dustin also spearheads Roehampton’s collaboration with the University of the 3rd Age (u3a) and leads projects that bring u3a members together with heritage collections for research-based projects. Recent examples of u3a collaboration include the Stukeley Memoirs Project, in which u3a and SGS members have transcribed and researched a five-volume manuscript account of the history of the Royal Society in the 18th century in order to produce an open access digital edition: the first edition in the public domain and a key resource for the history of science and the international Republic of Letters; and Travelling Plants, funded by The National Archives, in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Library and Archives, in which u3a members have transcribed, researched, and encoded the first of Kew’s Record Books, a vital but little-known resource for the global history of plants.
Harm Prevention
Professor Amanda Holt engages in research at the intersections of families, young people, and harm. Much of Amanda's research in recent years has focused on the problem of adolescent family violence. Amanda is the author of the UK’s first book on the topic, Adolescent-to-Parent Abuse: Current Understandings in Research, Policy and Practice (Policy Press, 2013) and she is also the editor of Working with Adolescent Violence and Abuse towards Parents: Approaches and Contexts for Intervention (Routledge, 2016). Amanda's research has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the European Commission, and the Mayor's Office for Policing & Crime (MOPAC), amongst others. Most recently, she was funded by MOPAC to produce a cross-London needs assessment of adolescent family violence, and many of the recommendations of the report have been implemented across the London boroughs. Amanda has also advised the Home Office on their responses to adolescent family violence and contributed to their first response to the problem (Home Office, 2015) and more recently contributed to the Domestic Abuse Statutory Guidance (2021). Amanda’s research has also been cited in UK Parliament. Amanda regularly provides expert commentary to international media outlets including BBC News, Newsnight, Women’s Hour, The Times and The Guardian. She recently contributed to two episodes of BBC Radio 4's File on Four (listen here and here) and also appears in Sky Crime's Killing Mum and Dad and Channel 5's Killer at the Crime Scene. Amanda is a member of the Risk of Harm committee at Family Lives and she sits on the advisory board for PEGS.
Faith Communities
Dr. Andrew Rogers works with faith communities, church leaders, parachurch, and academic organisations to enrich understanding of how the Bible is, and might be, used in practice. He has convened and spoken at workshops with the Whitelands Centre for Pentecostalism and Community Engagement comprising church leaders, academics, and students on how hermeneutics work in congregations, and similarly delivered courses on Bible and practice in faith communities. Andrew is the convenor of the Bible User Research Network, an international network of scholars that seeks to learn together about Bible and its use in communities around the world. He is also the co-convenor of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology special interest group on Bible, again comprising academics and church leaders, that runs annual meetings and symposiums, also aiding innovation around Bible and practice pedagogy. An upcoming symposium in December 2025 to celebrate the five hundred year anniversary of Tyndale's New Testament has led to partnering with The Tyndale Society around the impact of biblical language in culture.
British Hearth Tax
Dr. Andrew Wareham is the lead researcher on Hearth Tax Digital, a British Academy research project. The project publishes previously unpublished Restoration Hearth Tax records, in tandem with research in the Digital Humanities on Hearth Tax Digital, in partnership with the Centre for Information Modelling at the University of Graz. The Project has attracted media attention form organisations such as the BBC, Who Do You Think You Are?, Country Life, and Andrew organises public engagement events across the UK, in partnership with local organisations. Free access to records on around 320,000 households in 2025 will rise to c. 395,000 by late 2026, representing around one in three households in Restoration Britain.
Diverse Victorians
Dr. Mary L. Shannon and Dr. Alex Bubb are leading research into “Diverse Victorians” to uncover the culturally diverse nature of Victorian society, and to use their findings to generate inclusive practice across the school, higher education, and museum sectors. The research involves two areas of diversity in nineteenth-century Britain: racial diversity and linguistic diversity. The first area is focussed on Billy Waters, a celebrated African-American busker who performed on the streets of Regency London, and his Victorian legacies; the second area on translation and multilingualism in the Victorian era, and involves AVaTAR (the Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships).
Mary’s biography Billy Waters Is Dancing: Or, How A Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale, 2024) attempts for the first time to disentangle William Waters the man from Billy Waters the cultural phenomenon. Mary is collaborating with Dr Ben Marsh (University of Kent), musician Angeline Morrison, and artist Selena Scott to turn research for her book into a series of educational resources for KS3 and KS4 aimed at supporting teachers to diversify the History and English Literature curricula. Designed and created by a collaborative team of historians, artists, and musicians, Billy Waters: Songs from the Shadows is a set of brand-new FREE educational resources consisting of a graphic novel and a sonic resource intended for students aged 11-16. The resources and accompanying lesson plans and curriculum maps can be downloaded here.
AVaTAR (the Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships) is a collection of more than one hundred nineteenth-century books, discovered by Alex in second-hand bookshops over the past eight years. The books are all translations of literary, religious, and philosophical texts from Asia (for example the Quran, the Ramayana, the Confucian Analects), and testify to the great curiosity and serious interest with which Victorian readers approached these texts. Alex has extensively researched the lives of these previous owners, which include a Liverpool printer who read the Bustan of Sadi, and an East End schoolgirl who read the Quran. Alex has curated exhibitions of the books and organizes workshops in which participants can examine them more closely. Furthermore, the AVaTAR website showcases the books through a searchable catalogue and features close-up images of the marginalia inside them. The website also features a blog and has an associated Instagram account. It is designed in part as a teaching tool, that will enable university lecturers to decolonize and diversify their teaching of nineteenth-century literature and history.