'Victorian Diversities' will expand and enhance knowledge of Victorian literature by recuperating nineteenth-century writers of colour and by exploring new methodologies for reading the literature of race and empire. It will also consider ways in which we can bring this knowledge to the wider public to demonstrate Britain's long history of multiculturalism and to exemplify the global nature of Victorian literatures. To achieve this, the Network brings together experts from different disciplines, professions, and locations; this international interdisciplinary conversation works towards denaturalising whiteness and problematising the centrality of white experience and white cultural productions within historical literary fields. The Network is vital because there is a lack of knowledge about historical writers of colour, and because current approaches to race and empire in Victorian studies are fragmented and marginalised. Victorian Diversities will provide a platform for participants to explore the issue of diversifying Victorian studies and will challenge dominant perceptions of the Victorian period. To achieve this, the Network includes members from a range of commonwealth countries and a variety of academic disciplines, such as Literary Studies, Historical Studies, Periodical Studies, Romanticism, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Transnational and Transimperial Studies, Periodical Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Settler Colonial Studies. While the Principle-Investigator and Co-Investigator reside in the UK, Victorian Diversities demonstrates its commitment to global perspectives by partnering with the Hyderabad IIT in India. As such, the Network will have notable impact on the research and teaching of Victorian studies internationally while making significant contributions to the knowledge and understanding of British multicultural literary history. The Network membership also includes secondary school teachers and key organisations outside academia similarly working to diversify the arts and education; these include The Black Curriculum, the Black Cultural Archives, and Speaking Volumes. All members of the network will have the opportunity to meet via a series of online reading groups, two hybrid workshops, and a final public-facing event to showcase the Network's findings. The reading group will facilitate a regular and ongoing dialogue between network members. Each month, a member will introduce a text by a historical writer of colour which participants will meet online to discuss. The PI will produce an accessible infogram based on the discussion. These resources will be made available via our dedicated website. The Network members will also come together at 2 hybrid workshops: 'Re-Indigenizing Victorian Studies' (University of Kent); and 'Victorian Studies Beyond Britain' (IIT Hyderabad). The workshops will explore critical methodologies and share practices for diversifying Victorian studies in different countries, disciplines, and professions. Participants include invited local and international speakers and subsidised Phd/early career researchers. In addition, the hybrid format ensures that scholars at all levels and in all locations can participate. The Investigators will co-edit a Special Issue of the journal Transmotion, and they will present and publish an article in 'English'. Our final event, 'Checking Out Me History: A Celebration of Diversity' (Kingston University), will include an afternoon workshop for local schools and a public-facing evening event of readings and performances. Organised in collaboration with Speaking Volumes, an organisation that specialises in promoting marginalised writers in innovative ways, this event will show the continued value of reading and hearing diverse literary voices as part of the development of inclusive contemporary society. This globalising of the long nineteenth century is long overdue and Victorian Diversities aims to be a driving force to achieve it.

Antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals are released into rivers from multiple manufacturing sites at concentrations high enough to select for antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Such mixtures of antibiotics may select for new combinations of resistance genes, which is particularly concerning as this will further limit antibiotic treatment options. In addition, bacteria from treating manufacturing waste or domestic sewage and raw sewage entering rivers will mingle, facilitating horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of resistance genes carried on plasmids. However, the antibiotics will be diluted while being transported downstream, and some will be quickly degraded, and resistant bacteria may not survive so the question is how long is resistance selected and how long does it survive? Is resistance transmitted to other bacteria before they are lost? How far are resistant bacteria transport and what is the exposure of humans or livestock? In order to ask these questions, evaluate mitigation strategies and develop evidence-based global environmental standards, we will pursue a unique combined experimental and mathematical modelling programme including the following streams: (1) Measure concentrations of antibiotics and heavy metals, water chemistry, water levels and flow rates, water sediment exchange, abundance and diversity of antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. (2) Quantify transmission of resistance genes in bench-scale reactors. (3) Study selection in the river samples in bench-scale reactors under realistic, controlled conditions. (4) Study the risk of infection by resistant bacteria in tissue culture and Zebrafish laboratory models and the antibiotic dose required for treatment. (5) Build and test a mathematical model of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) dynamics on the small scale of a water sample, including degradation of antibiotics, growth and death of sensitive and resistant bacteria, selection of resistance as a function of antibiotic concentration, HGT of resistance. (6) Build and test a model of water flow for the river network; this will be on the large scale of rivers. (7) Combine the small-scale AMR dynamics and large-scale transport models into a model that can calculate the dilution of the compounds and track how long the chemicals and bacteria have been in the river water, sediments and floodplains and how far they spread to downstream populations and ecosystems. The combined model can evaluate whether interventions such as separate treatment of antibiotic manufacturing waste and domestic sewage would be effective in reducing resistance levels before putting this into practice. The environmental AMR pathways will be examined across two river systems. The Musi (Hyderabad) is more polluted with antibiotics than the Adyar (Chennai). Both are polluted by sewage. Their pollution flows to people via irrigation, drinking water production and spiritual cleansing. These rivers have phases of low flow with concentrated industrial waste and sewage and limited bacterial spread and high flows in the monsoon season, flooding communities with resistant bacteria. (8) Analyse the human health risks based on the predictions of the combined model and the experimental study in (4) and other information. The risk analysis will include the level of uncertainty in those risks and will contribute to the development of international environmental standards. These will be the two main outcomes to improve human, animal and environmental health, specifically (i) quantitative evidence for resistance (co)selection and transfer under in situ conditions in a more and less polluted river system and (ii) a truly novel combined AMR dynamics and transport modelling framework that can be used globally as a tool to track AMRflows.