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A YEAR OF SIAH Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) is celebrating its first birthday. Professor Nicky Marsh, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, gave us an insight into its successes over the last 12 months and how enterprise activity has played a pivotal role.
“SIAH was launched in October 2020 in order to raise the visibility of our Arts and Humanities researchers and to enable them to lead on large research and enterprise projects,” explained Nicky. “We started with four priority questions to guide our mission – what does it mean to be well, how does technology make us, how do we weather uncertainty, what does it mean to rebuild and recover? Within SIAH we aim to align our critical and creative methodologies with the Government’s ‘grand challenges’, focusing contemporary research across the University and beyond.” In its first year, SIAH began to answer these four questions by assembling crossdisciplinary expertise in research, enterprise and knowledge exchange. Within SIAH there are two Co-Directors, Stephanie Jones and Jo Sofaer. Stephanie is responsible for project incubation and also leads on the Environmental Humanities; she works closely with SIAH theme leads Shelley Cobb (Wellbeing and Culture) and Seth Giddens (Science and Technology). Jo leads on Enterprise and Knowledge Exchange. Her work in running network events and developing external partnerships is supported by two Research Fellows in Creative Engagement, Adam Procter and Dan Ashton.
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Capability for Collections “In order to allow us to offer cutting-edge facilities to our researchers and partners, renewal of our digital infrastructure was a priority in SIAH’s first year,” said Nicky. “We collaborated with colleagues from theLibrary to win a prestigious £710,000 AHRC Capability for Collections grant that allowed us to overhaul and renew our digital estate. We increased capabilities in digitisation and investigation of portable material culture and paper-based archives. We have furthered our competencies in digitisation and investigation of landscapes and the built environment, whilst also improving data handling, visualisation and engagement.” Public policy Understanding the role that Arts and Humanities research plays in shaping cultural policy, especially in the post-COVID context, became a pressing theme in first year of SIAH. The Institute hosted a series of webinars called RESET2020 , which explored the policy challenges faced by the cultural and heritage sectors. Nicky said: “For the webinar series we partnered with politicians, civil servants and regulators, including Andy Haldane from the Bank of England and Louise Smith from the
Professor Nicky Marsh, Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
