RU ready for Research Uncovered?

Students then vote for the lecture topics that they believe should be shared again with a wider student audience, academic staff and Exeter residents. Research Uncovered quickly surpassed the success of FRUNI, receiving more than 1,000 individual votes for over 50 nominated researchers.

The first lecture in the 2014 series will be held at 18:00 on 13 January in the Alumni Auditorium. The lecture will be delivered by Professor David Boughey, Associate Professor in International Business History, on the subject of "Adventurous Capitalists and the Forging of Multinational Enterprise":

At the turn of the twentieth century individuals looking for an exotic investment opportunity would not have been disappointed. Listings of public companies reveal a plethora of British enterprises ‘born global’: early multinationals created with the sole purpose of undertaking business abroad.

Diamond mines, banks, hotels, railways, and bottled-water companies were amongst the thousands of such firms. Once regarded as mere adjuncts to British business activity in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, historians are now recognizing the true significance of these British-based firms operating in places as diverse as India, Peru and Papua New Guinea.

Our tentative steps to understand these companies present a valuable opportunity to engage students in direct research-based education. Such is the dearth of knowledge of these businesses that undergraduates on my International Business History module are able to conduct original research and make a small but significant contribution to reconstructing our collective understanding of these fascinating enterprises.

Full details of Research Uncovered can be found on the Students’ Guild website. The full lecture programme will be updated in due course.