Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The african clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, is widely used for scientific research purposes and is maintained in large numbers in laboratories worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of these animals have contributed to an enormous range of scientific research in genetics, developmental, cell and molecular biology since the 1940s. They are famous for their role in early pregnancy testing work, were the first vertebrate animal to be cloned and yet little work has ever examined what the most appropriate care and housing might be for them. This, however, is vital to ensure the best possible conditions for ensuring their (often 15+ years-long) laboratory lives are optimally healthy and happy. Since happy, healthy animals also make the best scientific subjects, it is of paramount importance that this neglected area of animal welfare is addressed. Over the decades so-called 'best practice' (BP) husbandry guidelines have been developed that identify key parameters for appropriate care but little consensus exists on what exactly are the best ways of maintaining these animals. Some sources, for example, suggest tanks should have a water depth of 5cm, other say 'no more than 50cm'; a huge difference to a frog a few cm long. Some authors suggest group housing of up to 10 individuals, others say 100 in a group is fine. Truthfully we have no evidence that either is appropriate. BP guidelines identify that enrichment objects, e.g. providing a plastic tube as a refuge to hide in, should be provided, as for other lab animals. Some keepers suggest this achieves no benefit, however, but others find it reduces bites amongst tank-mates. A major reason why there is little data in this area is that, until now, there has been no easy way to measure whether particular housing conditions, or the presence of enrichment object, is associated with more or less stress. Amphibians have a 'stress hormone' similar to that released by mammals but it is hard to get samples from them which yield hormones for analysis. Whilst a human can be asked to chew a cotton-bud for saliva, or a monkey trained to urinate into a cup for a sample, frogs are rather less amenable. The few studies that have analysed frog stress have had to resort to taking blood samples, which involve a needle at least, or urine samples, which involve squeezing the animal or rubbing the delicate skin. All of these are likely to be stressful and therefore impact on the stress measures the researchers are trying to assess. Our research has developed a genuinely non-invasive technique for measuring the frog stress hormone, corticosterone. We have already shown it works for a smaller, close relative of Xenopus laevis, and been able to measure the hormone and associated behaviours it shows under more or less stressful conditions. This is the first time this has been done for an amphibian. Our proposed work will develop the technique so we can measure the stress hormone in Xenopus under different housing conditions. We will then be able to establish, conclusively, which conditions produce the least stress to these animals and recommend these to Xenopus keepers in laboratories worldwide. We will also establish a comprehensive, detailed description of all the behaviours shown by each sex in this species (also currently lacking). Once identified we will measure which behaviours, their frequencies and durations, are associated with different stress hormone measurements. In this way, a Behavioural Stress Score (as has been used for cats, and we have developed for horses) can be created which aligns certain levels of behaviour with certain levels of stress. This can be used to regularly monitor behaviour and therefore welfare, without the need for costly biochemical analysis of hormone samples every time. Taken together, the work we propose will significantly improve the welfare of this neglected lab species by comprehensively refining their husbandry recommendations and leading to great reductions in animal use.

This project will cast a new light on the ways in which Victorian novelists represented women and material culture during the period 1850-1900, a time when there were important changes to the married women's property laws. This study will assess the cultural impact of these reforms by showing how novelists responded in their representations of the female condition. Evidence suggests that Victorian women often developed complex relationships to the material world; unable to act as independent property owners in relation to real estate, many women forged bonds to the portable property (items such as jewellery, furniture and ornaments) that they felt they owned. However, because of the laws of coverture, where a husband legally owned and controlled his wife's property, Victorian wives often did not actually own the things they called their own. This research will examine the complexity of the anomalous situation in which many Victorian women found themselves, demonstrating that the objects represented in novels are often significant in relation to women's culture and property law. \n The project will focus in particular on the work of three major novelists, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Henry James, among the most influential and reflective writers of the Victorian period. Although their narrative styles are very different, each writer was drawn to the topic of women's troubled encounters with society, law, and the material world, and each represents women and personal property in surprisingly similar ways. These writers were acutely aware that things could function for women as valued (if not always obviously valuable) portable property. Although Dickens, Eliot and James explore the figure of the 'things woman' (a term coined by the historian R.J. Morris to denote the woman who displays a strong attachment to objects), and consider the possibility of radical female alternatives to patriarchal systems of property transmission, they also suggest the inevitable, even desirable, failure of such alternatives. Each writer indicates that the settlement of ownership rights on women could potentially subvert traditional notions of gender identity. This study will address the question of how these novelists responded to new notions of women as legal subjects with new rights as property owners. \n This study, then, will examine a number of important issues related to our understanding of the Victorian period: it will explore the roles played by the 'things' of Victorian culture, the equivocal social and legal position faced by many women of the period, and the ways in which Victorian realist novelists represented 'things'. The introductory section will engage with theories relevant to the representation of 'things' in realist fiction, as well as considering a range of property theories. The project will go on to outline the main developments in the literary culture between 1850 and 1900 in terms of novelists' responses to the figure of the female owner of portable property. These discussions will be supplemented by evidence from a range of historical documents (such as letters, autobiographies, and legal and journalistic reports). The other sections of the project focus on the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Henry James, analysing key works such as Great Expectations (1861), Middlemarch (1872), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (among other novels), in terms of each author's exploration of women and portable property, the possibility of female alternatives to patriarchal systems of property transmission, the ideology of renunciation, and the perceived threats to feminine identity posed by property ownership.\n

Mobility of Objects across Boundaries (MOB) is a research network which reconsiders the history of objects across Western Europe AD 1000-1700. It brings together art historians, historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, digital humanists and museum curators to examine selected objects from this period and understand the impact and consequences of mobility of objects to larger historical transformations 1000-1700. The network is significant because during this period major transformations took place in material culture. Quite simply, more objects were manufactured and used than ever before and many objects travelled across geographic, political, religious, linguistic, class and cultural boundaries. There are several key problems to our current study of material culture 1000-1700. Firstly, what remains unclear to academics is exactly why these changes in material culture occurred and how the movement of objects may have resulted in these bigger historical transformations. Secondly, each academic discipline tends to work separately on objects from this period. In order to solve these problems, MOB will start with the objects themselves to focus on their mobility. It will use new categories to examine objects from the period 1000-1700: thresholds and boundaries, framing and translation. Key objects from an under-explored collection housed by the Grosvenor Museum in Chester, will be the starting point: a shoe, a pilgrim badge, a chest, a hare tile and a key. These objects were produced in multiples and thus central to the everyday lives of individuals 1000-1700, but they were also extremely mobile. For example, shoes allowed people to move across thresholds, from public into private spaces, from secular to religious spaces. Chests moved possessions across urban streets and into the domestic sphere, while pilgrim badges were worn on the body but travelled with those who wore them. The tile of three hares modeled on a Chinese motif from Dunhuang reveals how images could travel and be translated in different ways, while keys reveal the way in which objects were stored or locked up, harnessing mobility. The network will allow a group of international interdisciplinary scholars to examine these objects and share their different disciplinary approaches as well as to establish future directions for studies involving the mobility of material culture. In order to make the findings of the network available to everyone with an interest in objects from 1000-1700, MOB will use the expertise of the Digital Humanities Research Centre at the University of Chester (https://dhchester.org/) to connect the Grosvenor museum objects examined by the network to Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu), one of the most important cultural heritage digital initiatives worldwide, and which participates with more than 3,500 cultural institutions and contains more than 45 million items. This will allow anyone to compare the objects from the Grosvenor collection to hundreds of similar objects contained in thousands of different collections across Europe. In addition, the objects examined by MOB will be featured in short films, hosted on the Open Arts Web Archive (Open University) (http://www.openartsarchive.org/), accessible to the public and which can be used as teaching tools in schools. The films will provide an interactive link to a major series of OU projects on multiple platforms, from BBC film series to OpenLearn teaching.