I am pleased to say that we have been given permission by the AHRC to extend the ‘Electrifying the country house‘ project by another two months; instead of ending at the beginning of May, we will now be continuing until July. This is largely because we have already worked hard to produce more outputs than we originally expected, original and innovative outputs which we did not anticipate such as Electrified the musical, and our short film Lotherton Electrified. In addition, I will be giving an extra public talk in June at Nostell Priory – a National Trust property near Wakefield, a town just outside Leeds – and presenting a paper on our work at an additional international conference in Canada at the end of June.
The question that remains is of course: what next for the ‘Electrifying the country house‘ project? We are currently working on putting together proposals for a couple of different follow-on projects, one of which would build on the significance of the British aristocracy in promoting and disseminating new technologies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – as revealed in Domesticating Electricity. Whilst the current project has focused solely on impact – working to apply the results of existing research for the benefit of collaborative partner organisations – this new project would generate new knowledge as well as impact and engagement activities and outputs.
As part of the process of writing this proposal, we have employed a postgraduate intern to support us, and she will be writing a couple of guest blog posts about her work over the next few weeks. On the subject of guest writers, watch out also for some blog posts from other colleagues over the next couple of months addressing some of the themes of the project – such as the marketing, reception and use of electricity, technology and gender and electricity as power – in different national contexts and periods. Indeed, if you‘ve seen something that interests you on this blog that relates to your own research and would like to write something to be published here, please do get in touch with me; it would be great to hear from a variety of voices as we enter the final stages of the project.