Partnership and Collaboration

Partnership

Bath Spa University works in partnership with businesses and other organisations on research and collaborative projects in enterprise, creativity and culture.

Working with organisations like the BBC, National Trust, City of Bath World Heritage Site and Bath Festivals, we work together to create innovative solutions to the day-to-day challenges our partners face.

Our Research Centres and Groups offer affiliate membership to individual creative and cultural sector practitioners and organisations that want to work with our expert researchers and engage with us in collaboration. 

Many of our projects are developed with a range of partners and are cross-disciplinary. Right now we are working with researchers and practitioners in Heritage, Literary Studies and Dance, working with a dance company and the National Trust to create an original site-specific dance project based on the difficult first marriage of the novelist Thomas Hardy. Presented at his Dorset home Max Gate in May 2013, it will involve academic experts and both undergraduate and postgraduate students, working together with professional dancers and heritage practitioners.

A similar partnership project funded by the AHRC showcased collaboration between Dr. Elizabeth Wright, playwright and Senior Lecturer in English at Bath Spa University, and Emma Gersch’s theatre company, Moving Stories. Based on the novel by Susan Sellers, Wright’s new play Vanessa and Virginia captured the complexity and beauty of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell. With kind permission from Henrietta Garnett and Charleston House, the production featured an original moving backdrop inspired by the paintings of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and was awarded an AHRC funding grant for knowledge transfer that included the employment of a recent graduate. The project marks an imaginative leap in straddling academic and practice-based spheres – having opened in September 2010 at the 21st Annual International Contemporary Woolf Conference, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille III, where it was received with great acclaim by an audience of Woolf scholars from all over the world, it was then performed at a series of conferences and events in the UK and abroad throughout 2011.

International Collaboration

Researchers at Bath Spa University are working with colleagues at Universities around the world on shared research projects covering our areas of expertise in our key research fields.

The Contemporary Writing Research Centre is working with researchers at Queensland University of Technology to develop a joint PhD programme in transmedia writing.

The Research Centre for Urban History & Culture is part of network on Gender in the European Town: the making of the modern town which explores how our modern cities have developed and shaped our contemporary understanding of towns and the way they work in cultural, spatial and gendered ways. 

Contact the Research & Graduate Affairs office if you are interested in working with researchers at Bath Spa University.