Book description
Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a
time when governments are being forced to make swingeing savings in
public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money
funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value,
philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research
deliver 'value for money' and 'public benefit'? Such questions have
become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of
the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the
disciplines and the prominence of discussions about 'economic impact'
and 'knowledge transfer'. In this book a group of distinguished
humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research
of international importance, reflect on the public value of their
discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their
essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently
thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from
theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.
Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at
the University of Warwick, a Fellow of the British Academy and a
Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His books include Shakespeare
and Ovid (1993); John Clare: A Biography (2003) - winner of the 2004
Hawthornden Prize and the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial prize for
biography; The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); and Soul of the Age: The
Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2009). He was the editor of
the Arden edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (1995).
