Tag: Centre

The Centre has published its Annual Report for 2023-24 – 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 final annual report of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History is a moment to reflect on the achievements of the Centre over the last seventeen years and its predecessors over
thirty years. The Centre was formed in 2007 when the lease on the Harcourt Hill Campus was reviewed at a break point. The existing Wesley Centre which offered distance learning degrees in theology was dissolved due to the problems arising from funding from the Westminster College Oxford Trust and HEFCE. In its place a research centre was formed whose mission was to support and develop Methodist related research activities and to engage with wider academic life. It was also to care for and make available the collections of books, archives and art.

At that time the opportunities to develop such activities were few and the initial years of the Centre saw the creation of the Methodist Studies seminars, the journal Wesley and Methodist Studies, and later the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, the Ashgate (and later Routledge) Methodist Studies series as well as establishing the annual Ecclesiastical History Colloquium, John Wesley Lecture, and other seminars and events. Publishing through the Centre’s KDP publications has also shown that Methodism and religion have an appeal in print. The system of visiting fellows brought scholars from a broad range of academic interests to Oxford, and conferences in the UK and USA were also opportunities to engage with wider academic activities to promote the Centre. Over the last seventeen years over fifty academics have held fellowships and bursaries which has supported their research and publications. During this time we have benefitted from opportunities to collaborate with, among others, the Dr Williams Library and the University of Hull, as well as institutions further afield, such as Brigham Young University and Point Loma Nazarene University.

Recent years, and especially the COVID lockdowns, have turned our focus to digital activities, so that ventures like British Methodist Buildings, Methodist Portrait Prints, ArtUK and Bloomberg Connects have brought millions more people to the Centre and its collections. These are the unseen consumers of the Centre’s work.

I want to thank and acknowledge the outstanding contributions to the Centre from its key staff: Dr Peter Forsaith, Dr Daniel Reed and Dr Tom Dobson. They have worked tirelessly in the service of the Centre and its research activities. Without their commitment and energy the Centre would not have reached so many people.

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

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.

The Centre has published its Annual report for 2021-22 – 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,

2021-22 has been another productive year for the Centre. The Coronavirus Pandemic has continued to have an impact on our working practices; and on the types of outputs we are able to achieve. In spite of this, 2021-22 has also been an extremely successful year for the Centre. We have been able to host, organise, and attend both online and in-person events; return to primarily working on-campus; and engage with others as part of work with individuals and visiting groups. We have been able to welcome readers back to our Reading Room, and also to visit other archives and heritage sites as part of our wider work and research.

The Centre continues to work with an increasing number of external partners, ranging in involvement from The Methodist Church and The Westminster Society; to The Manchester Wesley Research Centre and Wesley House, Cambridge; and newer partnerships, such as with The Methodist Insurance Company, and Southlands College (University of Roehampton). We have continued to work with, and to support, our collection owners, working closely with the Avec Consultancy Trust regarding the development of their archive; with the Methodist Philatelic Society over the deposit of their collection, and financing of a new bursary; and, as ever, with the Wesley Historical Society, with a focus on the growth and development of their collections and space allocation, particularly at this time of transition for the Society.

Digitisation and online engagement continued to play an extensive, and growing, role in our work this past year – with almost 2,000 additional items now available online, and over 1 million views have now been achieved across our online collections.

This Report serves to illustrate much of the hard work completed by the Centre this past year, and also the impressive impact this is having – particularly in an increasingly digital field.

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

 

The annual reunion of the Westminster Society in September 2016 concluded with the usual service in the chapel at Harcourt Hill. This year’s event was made special by inclusion of a commemoration of the award of the Victoria Cross to Donald Simpson Bell, who attended Westminster College in London between 1909 and 1911. When he left Westminster he became a teacher near Leeds and then a professional football player for Bradford Park F.C. He enlisted in Alexandra Princess of Wales’s Yorkshire Regiment (later the Green Howards) and fought in the Great War. He won the VC. in a heroic action at Contalmaison on the Somme in July 1916 but died in a similarly heroic action five days later.

Attending the reunion service were representatives of the Professional Football Association, as well as members of the Yorkshire Regiment, the Green Howards, and the local OTC.