The Davy Notebooks Project | Collaboration

We are undertaking a national conversation about the future of English alongside our colleagues in the Institute for English Studies and the School of Advanced Study, building resources with our communities to share.

Our project for the next three years has several aims:

• to move from defending to ‘thinking forwards’;
• to understand how the subject is already changing, with so much imaginative and creative thinking about teaching and skills happening, and to collect and share best practice;
• to support our commitment to English as a levelling up subject, with excellence in all kinds (and size) of school, college and university department;
• to explore opportunities for collaboration and new ways of working.

Thinking Forwards will begin with Collaboration. We’ll collect examples of innovative practice, teaching, and research, in schools and universities, so that we can see and help shape a narrative about English Studies and its contribution to change. Our Skills for the Future of English project will feed into these conversations.

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Collaboration

Do you want to know why scientists want to work with us? Or community leaders? Or Arts organisations? Do you also want to know how to build a collaborative project, and the challenges and opportunities? If so, then join us for the lunchtime slot (13:00 - 14:00) on the final Friday of each month.

The Davy Notebooks Project, Fri 28 November 2025

The Davy Notebooks Project is a crowdsourced initiative to transcribe and study the notebooks of Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), revealing him as both a pioneering chemist and a poet, and showing how his ideas emerged through collaboration with friends, colleagues, and fellow experimenters. Volunteers worked together and with the project team to decipher words and identify historical and geographical references, while the team partnered with the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Wordsworth Trust, STEM Learning, and Zooniverse to create this resource: https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/davy.

Sharon Ruston is Professor of Romanticism at Lancaster University and Principal Investigator of the Davy Notebooks Project.

Find out more about Thinking Forwards

Explore the other Thinking Forwards: collaboration talks