Centre – OCMCH Annual Report 2022/23

The Centre has published its Annual Report for 2022-23 – an acknowledgement and celebration of our achievements over the past twelve months. OCMCH Director, Professor William Gibson, had the following to say about the Centre’s work over the last year,

The academic year 2022/23 has been a highly productive one for the Centre. Staff have participated in over fifty events and the recovery from COVID has meant that we have recorded over a hundred in-person uses of our collections.

Three specific examples of our work deserve special mention as they have potential to really enhance our activities. First, our small publishing venture, OCMCH Publications, saw the production of two new books, Clive Field’s Methodism in Great Britain and Ireland: A Select Bibliography of Published Local Histories and Philip Tovey’s History of the Local Ministry Pathway in the Diocese of Oxford. Future plans include a second volume by Clive Field and collection of essays from the 2022 Methodist Heritage conference.

Secondly, engagement with the wider world on the internet is growing significantly. British Methodist Buildings has been visited by more than three quarters of a million people and our other Digital Collections page has had half a million visitors. Our Twitter page has had 111,750 views.

A really exciting venture is an expansion of our ArtUK partnership to include the new Bloomberg Connects programme. This means that the Centre’s art collections will be electronically accessible in the same way that other major art collections are. They will be on the same platform as pictures from the Tate, Guggenheim, the Uffizi, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre. Daniel Reed and Tom Dobson have worked extremely hard to organise this development and we are sure it will expose our collections to a worldwide audience.

Our events this year have been better attended that ever before. We had a major conference on Evelyn Dunbar, a Christian Scientist and the only salaried woman war artist in the Second World War, which attracted over eighty delegates including representatives from the Ashmolean and the Imperial War Museum. Our annual Colloquium, focusing on new research and publications in ecclesiastical history, was also well attended and attracted very positive feedback.

Looking forward to 2023-4, we have just received back from the Oxford Digitisation Centre 3,500 images from the Curnock glass slides. These are fragile photographic images from the early twentieth century and almost certainly contain some ‘lost’ manuscripts of early Methodism. It is a great relief to have these images secure for the future, and to begin the exciting process of identifying each item. We also have plans to work with the Old Rectory at Epworth and John Wesley’s New Room in Bristol in making their work more widely available, and we are supporting a new Westminster College Heritage project.

We are also organising a conference in November, entitled ‘Church for Change’, which will explore the history of the Methodist Church’s commitment to social justice in light of the ‘Justice Seeking Church’ report to the 2023 Methodist Conference.

You can download a digital version of the full Annual Report, here.