Leverhulme awards £65,000

Gold belt end, 6th-7th c., the British MuseumIn July 2005, the Leverhulme Trust awarded Dr Patricia Skinner and Tehmina Bhote a Research Project Grant of just over £65,000.  This is for their three-year project entitled ‘Medieval Cultures in Contact: Merchants, Objects and Cultural Exchange in Southern Italy’. 
The grant will support Tehmina through a three-year fully-funded PhD in medieval history, and has given Dr Skinner a semester’s teaching relief to add to her sabbatical leave (2005). During its course, the project will be tracing the movements of people and objects into and out of the southern Italian peninsula during the early and central middle ages.
(Photograph by Tehmina Bhote by kind permission of the British Museum. 6th-7th c. gold belt-end found in Naples)