This project is the first major investigation of environmental catastrophe in Romantic writing. Until recently, approaches to Romanticism have often focused on how it addresses the rejuvenating power of localised nature, rather than examining its concern with larger-scale and potentially disruptive natural phenomena. This has not only had regrettable consequences for our understanding of the period's literature, but also meant that later environmental discourse has tended to draw on a narrow version of Romantic ecology. My fellowship will challenge the critical tendency to understand Romantic and post-Romantic nature writing as largely apolitical and concerned with individual and local experience. It is particularly concerned with how catastrophe was experienced and represented by communities, and how it put pressure on ideas of community. The project will make an innovative contribution not only to literary scholarship on the period, transforming our understanding of Romantic ecologies and their legacy, but also to the cultural history of climate change, and the field of disaster studies. As distinct from terms like 'disaster', catastrophe - from the Greek meaning an overturning, a sudden turn, a conclusion - indicates a major shift in the state of things that may well be destructive, but is not necessarily so. The environmental catastrophes addressed by this project include the heat death of the universe in Lord Byron's 'Darkness', the destruction of humanity 'by deluge' in Book Five of William Wordsworth's The Prelude, the geological separation of the British Isles from mainland Europe in Charlotte Smith's 'Beachy Head', and the joyous apocalypse at the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The project has four key research questions: (1) How did these writers understand the connection between political and environmental catastrophe in a global context? (2) How did catastrophe provoke Romantic writers to imagine new forms of community? (3) How is catastrophe registered in textual ambivalence and formal innovation? (4) What roles have Romantic-period representations of catastrophe played in the genealogy of present-day environmental writing? My Fellowship is timed for a crucial stage in the project and is split into two phases. Phase one addresses the bicentenary of the period from 1815-18, during which the world experienced severe weather disruption and subsistence crises, largely as a result of the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815. My focus in this phase will be on the completion of a short book entitled 1816: Community, Climate Change and British Romanticism. Phase two ranges critically across the cultural history of environmental catastrophe during the period and its later impacts. It will result in two articles, a commissioned book chapter, and a book proposal. Phase two also involves significant collaborative and leadership activities. I will co-produce a gallery displays and an ambitious outreach programme with the Wordsworth Trust around the topic of Romanticism, weather, and climate. I will also organise a conference entitled Climates of Writing, and work in partnership with the climate-change charity Cape Farewell to curate a related programme of cultural activities in Leeds, including a creative writing project and competition for young people. Apart from generating new insights into an important aspect of Romantic literature, the research will shed light on the relationship between writing, politics, and catastrophe across historical periods. The various outcomes of the project will be valuable to a wide range of international researchers: Romanticists; specialists in ecocriticism or the environmental humanities; cultural historians; and scholars working in the area of disaster studies. It will also benefit the organisations outside academia previously listed, as well as members of the public who attend and contribute to project events.

The Places of Poetry will create a distinctive digital map of England and Wales, onto which crowd-sourced poems of place, heritage and identity will be pinned in the course of a public campaign in the late-spring and summer of 2019. The project aims to prompt reflection on national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place. The project thus combines a model from the past - the early seventeenth-century epic of national description, Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion - with a commitment to the value of creative practice in the present day. Poly-Olbion has been the subject of an editorial and critical project led by the PI on this application, Andrew McRae. That project also involved some public-facing work, supported further by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which helped to demonstrate the power today of both Drayton's work and the distinctive county maps published with the poem, by the engraver William Hole. Meanwhile, the poet Paul Farley (Co-I on this project), has spent a number of years working on a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of Poly-Olbion (due for publication with Faber in 2019). This led to the collaboration at the heart of 'The Places of Poetry'. The new map of England and Wales will draw heavily upon the iconography of Hole's original works, but will be amended as necessary and lightly updated. Since Drayton and Hole only covered England and Wales, The Places of Poetry will also limit itself to these two British nations. The map will be overlaid upon Ordnance Survey data, with functions enabling users not only to zoom in and out, but also to slide between the two maps. Users will be encouraged to pin poems to particular places. The map will be pre-populated with a selection of historic (out of copyright) pieces; however, the project's central aim is to generate original work. The project website, with the map as its central and defining image, will aim to introduce users to the poetry of place, heritage and identity, and will provide materials designed to coach them through their own compositions. After a period of preparatory work, The Places of Poetry will be promoted through the course of an intensive campaign in the summer of 2019. This will include: a launch event, BBC radio programmes, a national writing-workshops tour, a short film, and social media activity. The project involves strategic collaborations with The Poetry Society and The Ordnance Survey. Although the project is technically freestanding, a positive response to the present application will trigger further applications (already in advanced states) to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council, for a parallel package of work that would significantly enhance the reach and value of the project. This will be centred on activities with major regional arts and heritage partners, and involving a programme of poets-in-residence. It will focus on particular user-communities (e.g. age, location, background), and different kinds of heritage (e.g. pre-historic, Roman, agricultural, industrial, religious, natural). The website will remain open for contributions for ten weeks. Towards the end of this period, the PI will write a reflective article about the project. As a legacy, there may be opportunities for commercial development, while the site will remain in existence after the project closes, as an archive of the poetry of place, heritage and identity in the summer of 2019.

The People of 1381 will produce the most detailed and comprehensive interpretation to date of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, one of the most dramatic moments in English history. By creating a comprehensive database of the thousands of people and places caught up in the rising, the project will enable for the first time the development of a holistic overview of the revolt. This will shed light on the complex economic and social relations of the revolt and help us understand the role of violence and insurgency in pre-modern politics. The records of the revolt offer a remarkable opportunity to explore the lives, aspirations and frustrations of those usually hidden from view so that we can understand their political motivations and the way in which they viewed government and politics. The English 1381 Revolt forms part of a wider upsurge in European political unrest and revolt in the later middle ages. The People of 1381 by providing the first comprehensive analysis of the participants of a medieval European revolt will assist in understanding the nature and significance of insurgency in later medieval Europe more generally. The People of 1381 is a methodologically innovative project. Drawing on the exceptionally detailed archival records of the prosecutions arising from the 1381 revolt, we will create a database providing the first overview of events, places and people in the rising. By linking this to other databases, such as the Medieval Soldier database and records of the Poll Taxes, we will identify patterns of involvement in the rising. The creation of a database will enable us to explore in considerable detail such questions as: who was involved in the rising; what were the strategies and method of protest; and what motives, discourses and identities were articulated. The use of Geographic Information Systems will allow us to dynamically map the development and structure of the rising, so that we can identify differing community levels of protest and see how these fitted together into a revolt that threatened at one stage to topple the government. By exploring the textuality of the records generated by the rising, we will enhance understanding of the political and cultural impact of the revolt and the way it shaped popular polity and the political community. By recreating the biographies of thousands of people who became caught up in the rising of 1381 and by reconstructing the role of different places, we will offer a new type of 'history from below' for medieval studies. We will examine the lives of hundreds of people usually hidden from view and understand their political motivations and the way in which they related to government. Our emphasis on the importance of exploring the lives of forgotten social groups and people give our impact activities a particular relevance and vibrancy. We will use the people of 1381 to develop a new and exciting approach to the Middle Ages for those who might previously have believed this to be an inaccessible period of history. At the heart of the preoccupations of those involved in the rising of 1381 were ideas of community and how communities should be protected and nurtured. Correspondingly, we believe that the study of the rising of 1381 can help foster a modern sense of community and engagement with the past, and the impact activities associated with The People of 1381 will help foster such community histories.

Encountering cute animals, from bunnies to kittens, monkeys to hedgehogs, is an everyday experience for most of us. They appear on tea towels, cakes and videos gone viral on social media. The cute animal might even be our pet. The simple, benign nature of cuteness means it goes unexamined, especially in the context of the environmental crisis where the aesthetic is likely to appear irrelevant, if not irreverent. This project overturns such thinking by asking: Can cuteness prompt care-giving behaviour for environments? What power dynamics exist in the 'cutification' of animals? What fate for 'uncute' species? Exploring these questions, the project brings to light the role of cuteness in environmental culture in order to advance creative practice and critical thought in literary environmental fields. This focus enables impactful activity through collaborative creating and testing of communication material for conservation campaigns. It will also allow me to establish an ecopoetic community of young writers via ecopoetry workshops and an international competition that includes mentoring as its prize. Ecopoetry often recounts 'awe-struck' rather than 'aww-struck' reactions to nature. 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' may seem worthier, weightier subject matter than nature, doe-eyed and furry. Environmental concerns are typically associated with in-depth knowledge and seriousness. It is no surprise, then, to find ecopoetry and the broader field of the environmental humanities overlooking cuteness, especially given its associations with sentimentality and anthropocentrism. In contrast, the emerging field of cute studies has dedicated itself to exploring the aesthetic of cuteness. However, little attention has been paid to how this aesthetic presents itself in environmentally-focused subjects. Joining the dots between these creative and critical disciplines, the project engages with care ethics, speciesism, conservation and extinction narratives. David Attenborough states that 'no one will protect what they don't care about'. Cuteness is, I argue, profoundly implicated in his maxim given its capacity to trigger care-giving responses in viewers. A major concern of this project is the role of cuteness in raising awareness of species extinction. Key to the project are partnerships with the Oxford University Natural History Museum, the Severn Rivers Trust, the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust and the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust. I will maximise the opportunities for impact here through a series of collaborations, one of which will influence and seek to improve strategies used in nature conservation communication. My work with young people - namely, my creation of ecopoetry workshops with the Trusts and the competition with the Young Poets Network - will develop the 'next generation' of ecopoets, supporting young people and setting new agendas for creative practice. The interdisciplinary connections I will forge between ecopoetic practice, cute studies and the environmental humanities will shape agendas in creative practice and critical thought and form a clear pathway for my development as a leader. The Fellowship will have a transformative effect on my career by enabling me to reach selected communities of emerging and established academics with the aim of fostering new networks. My recent activities with non-academic institutions have been unavoidably short-term; this project's engagement with partners over 14 months will significantly enhance my research capabilities and, for the first time, allow me the opportunity to demonstrate research impact. Having experience in teaching adult writers, my project's aim to inspire creativity in young people will develop my skill-set and determine an exciting new audience for me to work with in the future. The project's doctoral training workshop and one-day symposium will allow me to provide intellectual leadership in areas in which I have an excellent track-record.

We are in a biodiversity crisis. A million species of plants and animals are threatened with global extinction, and wildlife populations across much of the planet have been dramatically reduced, perhaps by as much as a half in recent decades. This is of profound concern because biodiversity underpins human existence. Biodiversity provides the foundation of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life. Increasing numbers of people, organisations and governments recognise the need to reverse the perilous state of our ecological inheritance. However, while there is unprecedented willingness to act, what we do not know is what will work most effectively to renew biodiversity and ensure continued delivery of its benefits. The Renewing biodiversity through a people-in-nature approach (RENEW) programme will develop solutions to the renewal of biodiversity. We will work, with a sense of urgency, to reshape understanding and action on biodiversity renewal across scales, creating knowledge at the cutting edge of global debates and policy development, and influencing national institutions, communities and individuals. We know that understanding of, and action on, renewal must take a step change and we will focus on the agency of people in nature, both as part of the problem and as the solution. We focus on a set of challenges: how popular support for biodiversity renewal can be harnessed; how populations that are disengaged, disadvantaged, or disconnected from nature can benefit from inclusion in solutions development; how renewal activities can be designed and delivered by diverse sets of land-managers and interest groups; and how biodiversity renewal can most effectively be embedded in finance and business activities (as has occurred with carbon accounting and climate change). This sits alongside the scientific and technical development necessary to underpin solutions options. Biodiversity renewal is a complex and whole system problem. The solutions require the creation of a new kind of inclusive and diverse research community, one that transcends traditional boundaries between the disciplines needed to tackle the environmental crises of the Anthropocene. Solutions also need to address the inequalities and lack of diversity found in current renewal practices. RENEW has therefore prioritised partnership building, to allow us to combine research with experiment, learning, sharing, outreach and impact, across relevant organisations and wider communities. Our approach means that practical impact is guaranteed. With the National Trust as co-owners of RENEW, we will have significant reach through their membership, outreach programs and public voice. Alongside other key partners in RENEW, our links are responsible for or have influence over much of the UK landscape in which biodiversity renewal activities need to occur. We will use the many landscape-scale nature activities currently underway (or planned in the near future) to develop learning, as if they were 'real time' experiments. The UK is one of the most biodiversity depleted countries in the world. Our ways of working in RENEW, the knowledge we develop, and the solutions we propose, will be of international importance. The lessons we learn will enable future biodiversity researchers and practitioners around the world to do better science, and deliver fairer outcomes.