University of Kent (UKC) gets top funding for steamship historyNovember 20, 2002A maritime history project has been awarded the largest single research grant of the 2001-2002 academic year at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC). The Arts & Humanities Research Board is giving £364,780 to 'The Ocean Steamship: A Cultural History of Victorian Maritime Power 1850-1900' for four years' research and two PhD studentships. Since the beginning of the pilot study, Project Director Professor Crosbie Smith, Dr Ian Higginson and Phillip Wolstenholme have been looking at source materials in Liverpool, London, Greenwich, Newcastle, Boston MA and Montreal. The team will seek answers to such questions as who broke the conventions of sail by establishing long-distance steamship lines from the mid-19th century? In what ways were the technologies seen to be trustworthy? What were the new steamship communities like? How did they transform the world by 1900? The Blue Funnel Line of Liverpool, founded in 1865 by Alfred Holt, dominated the sea-lanes between Britain and the Far East. Joseph Conrad, author of Heart of Darkness (the inspiration for the film, Apocalypse Now) advised the Blue Funnel Line on the design of a new sailing vessel to train officers. Thanks to a rich legacy of personal diaries and correspondence, together with technical and business material, the UKC team has recovered many of the practices that set the standards for the world's merchant fleets. Professor Crosbie Smith is Director of the Centre for History and Cultural Studies of Science at UKC. He wrote The Science of Energy: a cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain (1998) and with M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: a biographical study of Lord Kelvin (1989). | |||||||||||||||||||||
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