Lawforms was a project focusing on the study of legal documents in Persian and other languages associated with early modern South Asia. Such documents take a variety of forms, from royal grants to interpersonal contracts of sale and pawn, to more peripheral materials such as tax account books and private letters. They give us access into the lives of people who encountered such documents and offer windows into a lost world. Lawforms was funded by the European Research Council and led by the University of Exeter.

England’s Immigrants 1330-1550 is a major research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has run between February 2012 and February 2015. We are exploring the extensive archival evidence about the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to make their lives and livelihoods in England in the era of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses. The project contributes creatively to the longer-term history of immigration to England, and helps to provide a deep historical and cultural context to contemporary debates over ethnicity, multiculturalism and national identity.