The Threadbare Thirties: Research for a Costume Design for Kaufman and Hart\u27s You Can\u27t Take it With You

Just as a playwright crafts his abstract ideas for a story into a play with his use of concrete language, a costume designer must craft abstract thoughts and images of color, style, and texture into concrete items of clothing. This product helps to give the audience insight into the characters from the moment they first appear on stage. In order to manufacture such a product, the designer must choose a process

Open Research Pilot case studies: sharing all research outputs and future sustainability of data repositories

In this final blog from the researchers involved in the Open Research Pilot, the Jefferis group discuss their participation. During this time, their open interests have been focused particularly on how to share all outputs from the research process, and on issues around sustainability of data repositories into the future

Open Research Pilot case studies: research integrity and reproducibility

This is the third blog in our series marking the end of the Open Research Pilot (a two-year initiative involving University of Cambridge research groups, University Research Support, and Wellcome Trust’s Open Research Team). Professor David Savage tells the Research Support Team how he is concerned with how to improve and ensure research integrity and reproducibility

Open Research Pilot case studies: sharing image data

January 2017 saw the launch of the Open Research Pilot Project. This two-year initiative comprised four volunteer University of Cambridge research groups, University Research Support, and Wellcome Trust’s Open Research Team. The aims of the project were to perceive what is needed for researchers to make openly available, and be rewarded for, all outputs of the research process (e.g. along with traditional publications, other outputs include negative results, protocols, source code)

Open Research Pilot case studies: promoting greater openness in research

In the second blog in our series marking the end of the Open Research Pilot (a two-year initiative involving University of Cambridge research groups, University Research Support, and Wellcome Trust’s Open Research Team), Dr Laurent Gatto tells us about his group’s involvement with the project. His particular Open interests during this time have been how to influence the research community in general towards greater openness

Open Research Pilot project: reflections from the Research Support Team

In the fifth blog in the series from the end of the Open Research Pilot, the project’s latest Research Support team, Georgina Cronin, Dr Debbie Hansen and Dr Lauren Cadwallader, reflect on their individual contributions and thoughts about the pilot. The team’s knowledge and skills include those related to open access and research data management as well as general research librarian and scholarly communication support

Evaluating a Sensorimotor Intervention in Children who have Experienced Complex Trauma: A Pilot Study

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a sensorimotor intervention with children who have experienced complex trauma. In the United States, millions of children are exposed to traumatic events each year, and thousands develop subsequent psychological disorders (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008). Researchers and clinicians are now categorizing these disorders as traumatic stress-related disorders or Developmental Trauma Disorder (Courtois & Ford, 2009), particularly when there is an interpersonal component (e.g. abuse or neglect by caregivers). Unfortunately, there is a dearth of evidence-based information available on effective treatment for complex trauma in children (Malchiodi, 2008). This study focused on incorporating principles from the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (Perry, 2009, 2006) as well as a sensory integration intervention into an effective treatment for children. Both interventions focused on increasing attunement to the self and to others while providing the brain with the stimulation that it needs to develop. The intervention took place at the Residential Treatment Center (RTC) at The Baby Fold in Normal, Illinois. The RTC is an inpatient treatment center for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems, which are typically related to early, chronic traumatic experiences. The intervention took place in the form of specialized activity groups. We hypothesized a decrease in the frequency of problematic behaviors and an increase in positive, pro-social behaviors for children receiving the treatment compared to a control group that did not receive the specialized activity groups. As predicted, our results indicated a significant decrease in some problematic behaviors in the treatment group, but there was no change in positive behaviors

Memory on the move: transnational travel in post-1989 German literature

Contemporary German literature after 1989 has become increasingly transnational and transcultural, given its numerous portrayals of travel, particularly in exploring traumatic family pasts. The transitional years of 1989/90, known as the Wende, have arguably resulted in greater mobility and Germans' turn to the future as a unified country. However, authors of the second generation, or those born at the end of or just after WWII, are going back in historical time, as they revisit the war and post-war periods via modes of travel in their post-1989 literary works. The sweeping changes across Germany and Europe after 1989, the public debates about how to remember WWII and the more recent divided German past, and the gradual passing away of the first generation who survived WWII explain the surfeit of memory literature and novels that examine family memory. Using Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, I argue in this dissertation that second-generation authors employ modes of travel in their post-1989 works in order to negotiate critical empathy to parents' traumatic pasts and revisit intergenerational conflicts of the Cold War period. Critical empathy here means emotional proximity and an attempt to understand parents' traumatic wartime experiences while maintaining critical distance in order to avoid over-identification or an overly emotionalized investigation of the family past. Critical empathy is negotiated through the authors' depictions of geographical proximity and distance to places pertinent to the family past. I trace how critical empathy unfolds across and beyond German borders in Barbara Honigmann’s Eine Liebe aus Nichts (1991), Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe (1999), Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s Anatolin (2008), and Eugen Ruge’s In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (2011). Given the over forty-year division between East and West Germany, two differing trajectories for dealing with atrocities of the Second World War had to be reconciled. The initial euphoria of reunification and its renewed engagements with the past ultimately delegitimized the GDR, folding it into a Western historical narrative of triumph in which capitalism defeated communism. In the meantime, however, many scholars have countered this hegemonic view with more nuance that takes into account the antifascist state's problems, yet exposes its complexity and texture as a legitimate cultural and political project. Moreover, the celebratory narrative and tone of reunification at large is countered with what scholars see as a profound loss, disappointment, and disorientation in works of art after the GDR disappeared. That is, rather than necessarily longing for its return, artists and writers have invited reflection on the effects of a vanished framework for interpreting history and the world. The authors explored in this dissertation each negotiate in their own ways and to varying degrees the role that the formerly divided Germany plays in their respective portrayals of family pasts that are constituted by multiple spatial displacements. The larger stakes of this dissertation therefore lie in the new possibilities for GDR memory and postmemory that emerge in the process of negotiating critical empathy through travel in contemporary German literature. Itinerant engagements with the GDR past in these texts published around the turn of the twenty-first century enable attunements to present vulnerabilities that transcend Germany and German culture alone. Furthermore, protagonists in transit negotiate non-traumatic ties to traumatic family pasts. I therefore show how the open-ended, itinerant literary works investigated here allow reflection on the (GDR, war, or family) past beyond modes of trauma and loss to perhaps move contemporary German culture out of the post-1989 era and open it up to complex transnational and transcultural constellations of the twenty-first century