The English Department at Birmingham are excited to announce that Dr Zara Dinnen, in partnership with Dr Tony Venezia (Birkbeck, University of London), and with support from the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, has won an AHRC Collaborative Skills Award. The award will support the running of the summer workshop Researching Contemporary Culture.

Researching Contemporary Culture is a series of three one-day workshops introducing Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers to specific skills for researching the contemporary. The study of contemporary culture is by definition always changing. The digital age brings with it ever-newer methods of cultural consumption, dissemination, and analysis; and poses serious challenges to research skills as they are currently administered to postgraduate students. Researching Contemporary Culture will bring together specialist workshop leaders, speakers, and librarians to address these challenges by offering a targeted research skills enrichment programme of participatory workshops and advice and guidance. Areas the programme will cover include: working with sensitive material under copyright; producing research for open access publications; balancing public engagement and research needs; developing the impact of research through exhibition, curated festivals, and the championing of particular artists/directors/authors' work; using online participatory culture as a research tool; and conducting sustainable research with ephemeral data. The programme will run in July 2014 at the Institute of English Studies, and welcomes Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers working in the field of contemporary culture from around the UK.

Researching Contemporary Culture is a project of the Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar.

Please email contemporaryfictionseminar@gmail.com with any queries, or follow @contemporaryfic.