Creating the AHRC: An Arts and Humanities Research Council for the United Kingdom in the Twenty-first Century
James Herbert
Abstract
This is an account of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from among the Research Councils of the United Kingdom in 2005. It focuses on the campaign carried forward from the 1997 Dearing Report to the 2004 Higher Education Act to establish a public agency investing in humanities and arts research that would be equivalent to those funding natural and social science research. Built on interviews with leading participants, regional and national press coverage, and analysis of influential national studies, this book shows how engagement with contemporary issues — t ... More
This is an account of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from among the Research Councils of the United Kingdom in 2005. It focuses on the campaign carried forward from the 1997 Dearing Report to the 2004 Higher Education Act to establish a public agency investing in humanities and arts research that would be equivalent to those funding natural and social science research. Built on interviews with leading participants, regional and national press coverage, and analysis of influential national studies, this book shows how engagement with contemporary issues — the knowledge economy, devolution, and the expansion of higher education — as well as a long tradition of scholarly excellence, led to the fashioning of a new model funding agency: an agency that addressed frontier issues in the arts and humanities such as increasing the scale of research, substantive collaboration with scientific fields, and explicit consideration of the results of research.
Keywords:
AHRC,
Dearing Report,
Higher Education Act,
humanities research,
arts research,
knowledge economy,
devolution
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780197264294 |
| Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: January 2012 |
DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197264294.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
James Herbert, author
formerly Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge
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