The Hero Project

The Hero Project ran from 1 August 2015 - 31 July 2016 and was funded by an AHRC 'Care for the Future' Developmental Research Grant.

In collaboration with the Society and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, it brought together academics from the University of Aberdeen, the University of Birmingham and Durham University. The project team included Dr Abbie Garrington, Dr Berny Sebe, Dr Natasha Danilova and Dr Sarah L. Evans, alongside Robin Baillie and Imogen Gibbon at SNPG. The project sought to think about the way that hero figures are selected, emerge or are shaped through time, and to explore links between the selection of hero figures and the formation of personal, familial, regional and national identity.

The project included:

• an international conference on ‘Heroes’ at the RGS-IBG,

• analysis of the use of the hero term in newspapers from the late nineteenth century to the present,

• analysis of recent YouGov data on British and US hero choices,

• an exhibition on ‘The Heroic Body on Expedition’ at the RGS-IBG, drawing on the Society's Colletions,

• an online exhibition 'No Heroes Any More?' using those digitised collections of the National Galleries of Scotland.

Find out more:

• Visit the project website

• View the 'No Heroes Any More?' online exhibition