Dr Mark Philp, Leverhulme Research Project Grant and John Fell OUP Award

The University of Oxford has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant and John Fell OUP Research Fund Main Award for the project, William Godwins Diary: reconstructing a social and political culture 1788-1836, to be directed by Dr Mark Philp working in close cooperation with the Bodleian Library and the Oxford Text Archive.

The diary, the centrepiece of the Abinger Manuscript Collection in the Bodleian Library, which was purchased by the Bodleian Library with the generous assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, provides a record of William Godwins social circles, intellectual preoccupations, reading and writing that spans some fifty years and traces his evolving relations with radicalism, romanticism and Londons cultural and political life. The project will digitise William Godwins diary, supply a transcription of it, and provide a full scholarly apparatus for researchers and students to search the diary, to decipher the cryptic entries in it, and to identify the people and the works listed. The outcome will be a web-based scholarly edition of the diary that will provide extensive search facilities and supporting material. In the course of the project an interdisciplinary network of scholars will be created with the aim of building a vibrant virtual scholarly community in which further substantive projects will develop.

Dr Mark Philp is CUF University Lecturer in Politics and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College and is a former Head of the Department of Politics and International Relations.