A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today.This book offers a response to the culture of metrics, mass digitisation, and accountability (as opposed to responsibility, or citizenship) that has developed in higher education world wide, as exemplified by the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF), and the increasing bureaucracy that limits the time available for teaching, research, and even conversation and collaboration. Ironically, these are problems that will be solved only by academicsfinding the time to talk and to work together. The essays collected here both critique the culture of speed in the neoliberal university and provide examples of what can be achieved by slowing down, by reclaiming research and research priorities, and by working collaboratively across the disciplines to improve conditions. They are informed both by recent research in medieval studies and by the problematic culture of twenty-first century higher education. The contributions offer very personal approaches to the academic culture of the present moment. Some tackle issues of academic freedom head-on; others more obliquely; but they all have been written as declarations of theacademic freedom that comes with slow thinking, slow reading, slow writing and slow looking and the demonstrations of its benefits. CATHERINE E. KARKOV is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Leeds. Contributors: Lara Eggleton, Karen Jolly, Chris Jones, James Paz, Andrew Prescott, Heather Pulliam

Slow CollaborationsIntroduction: A Slow and Ongoing Collaboration - Catherine E. KarkovResearch as Folly, or, How to Productively 'Ruin' Your Research - Lara EggletonSlow WordsTranslating The Order of the World in My Own Time - James PazRelining The Grave: A Slow Reading of MS Bodley 343, fol. 170r - Chris JonesSlow LookingRethinking Slow Looking: Encounters with Clonmacnoise - Heather PulliamThinking about Stone: An Elemental Encounter with the Ruthwell Cross - Catherine E. KarkovSlow ManuscriptsLetter by Letter: Manuscript Transcription and Historical Imagination - Karen Louise JollySlow Digitisation and the Battle of the Books - Andrew Prescott