The Annual Fund supports five projects across the College of Humanities

These projects include a language exchange scheme, a postgraduate conference, a student-led magazine, a photography and blog competition, and an installation commemorating the centenary of the First World War.

The Fund will support the Tandem Language Exchange which enables students to find a ‘Tandem Partner’ to meet up with and practice each other’s language. The scheme is open to all students and aims to bring together the vibrant international community. It allows home students to meet international students, facilitating better understanding of cultural difference, and fostering friendship through language exchanges and cultural events. The scheme is run by students for students with the support of the Foreign Language Centre resource assistants.

The Annual Fund will help to finance a postgraduate medical humanities conference which will take place at the University of Exeter on 24th and 25th July 2014. Led by the Centre for Medical History, the event aims to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines including English, History, Film, Classics and Art History. The conference will provide a forum for postgraduate scholars to exchange ideas, share their research and discuss their work with senior academics in the field.

Jess Monaghan and Sarah Jones, PhD students and co-organisers of the conference, remark, "We're delighted to have received such generous support from the Annual Fund. We hope this important and uniquely interdisciplinary event will help to establish Exeter as a focal point for postgraduate research in the exciting field of the medical humanities. The funding will ensure that the conference can run for at least the next three years, allowing us to establish an event that will benefit students for many years to come."

Exetera is a student run magazine founded in 2011 with a focus on high quality writing and innovative visual design. One themed edition is produced each term around topics such as politics, science and international affairs. Around 30-50 students are involved in the production of each magazine in a variety of different roles including writers, editors, designers, illustrators, makeup artists, stylists, photographers and publicists.

In 2013, the College of Humanities and the Global Employability Team hosted photography and blog competitions for Study Abroad students with the aim of further engaging students in the process and experience. The support of the Annual Fund will allow the competitions to be rolled out across the whole University allowing all of those who study or work abroad as part of their degree to enter. The photographs and blogs give visual and written feedback from students about their experience which will help to inform others in the future. The photographs from the 2013 Study Abroad photo competition are available to view on their Facebook page and for further details about the winners, read the news story on the College of Humanities webpages.

Iain Gordon, Study Abroad Administrator and the lead on this project, comments, “Further to the success and appreciation of the Study Abroad Photography Competition and the Work Abroad Blog Competition, we thought it would be a great idea to run them both again. The Annual Fund provided a fantastic source of funding, which now means that those competitions can be rolled out to the whole University.”

The final successful application from the College is for a multi-media installation commemorating the centenary of the Great War. Titled The Long Goodbye, the project proposes to “re-voice” the war narrative through a large-scale installation of love letters to those who left their homes to serve. This includes not only the army, navy and air force, but also munitions workers, nurses, chaplains and ambulance corps workers. The installation will combine reproduced archival material such as postcards, diary pages, medical reports, and photographs, with a contemporary response in the form of poetry or prose. Organised by eXegesis, a collective of University of Exeter scholars, visual artists, and writers, the project follows on from their previous successful interactive project, The Wall of Miracles. The unique collection of original nature poetry was printed onto handmade cards the size of luggage tags and then displayed near Reed Hall during May 2013.

The Annual Fund raises unrestricted funds from alumni, parents, staff and friends of the University. To find out more about the projects it supports, visit the Alumni Giving pages of the website. Applications to the Annual Fund can be made at any point in the year and money is awarded on a termly basis.