Dr Hazel Wilkinson – Junior Research Fellow in English at Fitzwilliam College – was amongst six winners from across the University of a Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement with Research Award. The new awards have been set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. Dr Wilkinson received a trophy and a personal cash prize of £1,000 presented by the Vice-Chancellor for her public engagement initiative Journal.Lists.

Journal.Lists is a free email subscription service that delivers instalments of historical periodicals, diaries, letters, and novels to subscribers’ inboxes on the date they were originally written or published. Journal.Lists has over 3000 subscribers, who are reading daily issues of the original Spectator (1711–12), instalments of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1821), Dickens’s novels, monthly poems from John Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar (1827), and the diaries and letters of Boswell, Byron, Swift, the Shelleys, and more.

Journal.Lists encourages readers to engage with unfamiliar texts in manageable chunks, or to experience favourite texts in new ways. Its Twitter community allows readers to discuss the experience of reconnecting with the original circumstances of composition or publication, and to think about the quotidian nature of reading and writing. Journal.Lists has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s “Open Book”. It is a collaboration between Dr Hazel Wilkinson and Dr Will Bowers of the University of Oxford.