Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, from the Department of Hispanic Studies, has just received a Leverhulme Trust International Networks grant to build an international network on ‘War and Nation: Identity and the Process of State-Building in South America (1800-1840)’.

Beginning in 2008, the celebrations of Spanish American independence led to a flurry of historical work challenging nationalist assumptions that current countries have existed since times immemorial. Until the 1840s, the Latin American countries we know today did not exist in their present form. Very little historiographical attention has been paid to both transnational and civil wars that took place across South America after final independence in 1825, and in no case have they been seen in a comparative way.

The new network seeks to move forward with this line of enquiry and interrogate how war became a catalyst for identity, fuelling the development of identities that would eventually become national in these newly created states. To be able to really understand and explain how the new states that emerged from Colonialism, it is necessary to work outside the constraints of the nations we know today, as they did not exist as such until much later.

The network will produce historical scholarship useful to Latin American specialists interested in the region and period, as well as to the wider literature on nationalism, and aims to produce an online resource that will make the analysis produced accessible to the wider public. The network will also engage with popular understandings of the nation around key public celebrations in the upcoming years, particularly in the popular media.

For more details on the Leverhulme Trust International Network grant scheme, please see the page here: www.leverhulme.ac.uk/funding/grant-schemes/international-networks

Last week we received the sad news that our colleague and friend Isabel (Izzy) Noble, Gulbenkian Box Office Manager, had died.

Her funeral will be at 17.20 this Friday (10 July) at Barham Crematorium. There will be a wake at The Jackdaw pub, which is about a mile away from the Crematorium.

Colleagues and friends are welcome to attend and Izzy’s son has asked that all attending wear colourful clothes. Any donations are to Pilgrim’s Hospice with family flowers only.

Liz Moran,
Director of Gulbenkian

Learning and Development are holding their Annual Event for New Staff on Friday this week, the 10th July. Staff who have joined the University during the past academic year have been invited to attend.

The event builds on the information from the termly Staff Induction & Information Fair and is a way for the Executive Group to share information about the University’s plans for the future.

If you have received an invitation to this event and have not yet replied to say that you can attend, can you please email ldev@kent.ac.uk to book before Wednesday 8th July, so that we can confirm your place.

The expected launch date of the Government’s Tax-free Childcare Scheme was autumn 2015, but this has now been delayed until early 2017. Details of the delay can be found on the Government’s website.

In early 2017, the Government is launching a new tax-free childcare scheme that will provide parents with a new way to save on their childcare costs.* Staff at the University of Kent are currently able to save on their childcare costs through the Busy Bees Benefits Childcare Vouchers, and the Oaks’ Workplace Nursery Salary Sacrifice Scheme. For staff participating in Busy Bees vouchers and/or the Oaks’ scheme, the new Government initiative will provide another option which they might like to consider. If staff decide to stay in their existing scheme, they can do so.

However the Government has stated that, once their scheme launches in 2017, no one will be able to join any childcare voucher scheme other than their new tax-free childcare scheme. This means that staff won’t be able to join the Busy Bees Benefits Childcare Vouchers scheme after 2017. It also means that those already receiving these vouchers won’t be able to opt out, and then opt back in after the new scheme is launched.

The Oaks’ Workplace Nursery Salary Sacrifice Scheme will not be affected: it will continue, and qualifying staff will still be able to join the scheme.

No couple will be able to be part of both Busy Bees Benefits Childcare Vouchers and the new government scheme. Your partner can’t be in a childcare voucher scheme if you are in the government scheme, and you cannot have one child in a childcare voucher scheme and another in the government scheme.

The University wants parents to have the time and opportunity to opt into the scheme that benefits them, and so has put together information which will allow staff to compare the different schemes, and the savings they could make. Which scheme is right for you will depend on your circumstances and what childcare you might need over the coming years. The “Changes to tax-free childcare/ Information for parents” guide, can be found here.

The launch date of the Government’s tax-free childcare scheme is not yet known, but it is recommended that parents act now, if they would like to join the Busy Bees Benefits Childcare Vouchers Scheme. Kent staff can join the Busy Bees Childcare Voucher scheme via the Staff Finance website.

*This tax-free childcare scheme is a separate initiative to the increase in free childcare for working parents – see website for details.

Dr Anna Strhan, from the Department of Religious Studies, and Dr David Garbin, from the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), are co-organising a symposium entitled ‘Religion and the Global City’, to be held on Friday 11 September 2015, with funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the Department of Religious Studies, and SSPSSR.

This symposium adopts a non-reductive stance in exploring city dynamics of religious presence in global contexts. How to religious groups make space and ‘take place’ in the global city? What kind of spatial models, morphologies and ‘religeopolitics’ do they produce and adopt? To what extent does religion contribute to the ‘hyper-diversity’ of multicultural cityscapes? What kind of religious centralities and peripheries are produced or reproduced on global cities?

The day will consist of four sessions on ‘Power, Visibility, and the Politics of Space’, ‘Centralities, Peripheries, and Religious Reterritorialisation’, ‘Religious Media, Publics, and Global Cultural Flows’, and ‘Global Migration, Everyday Multiculturalism, and Religious Place-making’. Phil Hubbard (Kent), Paul-François Tremlett (Open University), Jeremy Carrette (Department of Religious Studies, Kent), and John Eade (University of Roehampton) will be discussants for the event.

The event is free, but spaces are limited. To book, please email the event organisers, David Garbin (D.Garbin@kent.ac.uk) and Anna Strhan (A.H.B.Strhan@kent.ac.uk).

The workshop will follow on from the British Association for the Study of Relgions’ Annual Conference, ‘Religion in the Local and Global’ earlier the same week.

For the full programme of the symposium, please see the page here: http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/thrs/events/index.html?eid=13555&view_by=month&date=20150902&category=&tag=religious