Dr Christine MacLeod, Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol, has received an award of £13,625, under the Arts and Humanties Research Board (AHRB)'s Research Leave scheme for 2004/5. 

The award will allow her to complete her book, Heroes of invention: celebrating the industrial culture of nineteenth-century Britain.

Heroes of invention offers a new perspective on the British industrial revolution.  It demonstrates how inventors, previously distrusted as 'projectors' and monopolists, became national heroes, and it explores the implications of this for various nineteenth-century debates.  These include the reform and defence of the patent system, the thesis that mid-Victorian Britain witnessed a 'decline of the industrial spirit', and the historiography of the industrial revolution. 

It also argues that the heroic inventor became the icon of the rising industrial classes, personifying their claim that it was the ingenuity of its 'industrious' citizens, not aristocratic military prowess, that made Great Britain great

The AHRB funds postgraduate training and research in the arts and humanities, from design and dance to archaeology and English literature.  Each year it provides approximately £70 million to support research in the arts and humanities.  In any one year, the AHRB makes approximately 600 research awards and almost 2,000 postgraduate awards.  Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded.  Arts and humanities researchers constitute nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector.