De Montfort University
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British women collected and creatively engaged with ideas of Empire through embroidery. Working closely with the collections of the Royal School of Needlework (RSN), and particularly Georgina Annie Grove’s collecting of a millennium of global textiles, this M4C CDA will investigate the relationship between embroidery and Empire.
De Montfort University
This project will explore MirrorPix’s newspaper photography archive to uncover the local press’s visual depiction of South Asian experiences in 1970s Midlands. Working with communities to revisit stories from the past, it will reinvisage perceptions of South-Asian heritage and how archival metadata and language shape local archival history.
Birmingham City University
The CDA is a unique opportunity for a practice-based researcher to work in the context of a live national partnership project supported by an internationally recognized, cross institutional supervisory team within the context of the UK’s leading socially engaged public photography programme.Based at the Open Eye Gallery, with access to two additional national collections housed at museums across Aberdeenshire local authority, Scotland and Armagh local authority, Northern Ireland, this CDA invites candidates to think through the challenges faced by small-to-medium art organisations in how they use and build meaningful and accessible collections through socially engaged processes.
Birmingham City University
The first sustained investigation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Fine Art and Sculpture” collection in Stratford-upon-Avon, this project analyses an internationally significant theatre collection through a decolonial lens. By exploring the archive’s colonial connections and how these might be understood, it will develop a critical and historical approach to the RSC’s holdings. Its final outputs include work towards the digitisation of the collection.
Coventry University
What would, or could, a thriving, just and sustainable ecology for artist livelihoods look like? This project will work with Creative United, its artist infrastructure and Artist Advisory Groups to imagine, evidence and design policy to bring forward such possibilities.
Coventry University
The Coventry Muslim History project is a collaboration between Coventry University and the Coventry Muslim Forum. The project will focus on uncovering the history of Islam and Muslims in Coventry setting it within Coventry’s wider history. It will explore the experiences and journeys of Muslims in Coventry and the West Midlands, as they made this city their home.
Coventry University
This research project investigates the impact of South Asian dance on complex contemporary narratives, such as the decolonial agenda and the urgent climate crisis. Akademi are the partnering organisation who work with South Asian dance and have a focus on pressing environmental challenges.
De Montfort University
There is a rising market for British led-research informed biopic feature films, this collaborative project aims to respond to this opportunity. This is a practice-led collaborative PhD project designed to develop unexplored archival materials into a ready-to-shoot feature biopic screenplay, about the Nobel Prize winning British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. With a specific focus, the screenplay will be developed particularly aiming at the Asian market. In line with the AHRC’s latest funding strategies, this project will not only generate original research outputs, but also societal and economic impact.
Nottingham Trent University
This project will explore environmental and ecological issues relating to space exploration and establishing habitats beyond the earth. Ambitions to expand human activity in low-earth orbit, on the Lunar surface, and on Mars have escalated significantly in recent years, with: • geological sample and return missions to the Lunar surface and Mars intensifying • night sky pollution producing new inequalities on Earth • future space exploration threatened by a substantial increase in orbiting objects and debris • national and commercial space agencies stepping-up plans to establish low earth orbit, lunar, and Mars habitations.
Nottingham Trent University
This project will focus on two areas. Firstly, it will produce a searchable catalogue to allow other researchers to access the archives, opening up the project to an international audience. Secondly, this project will uncover hidden stories attentive to questions of race, class, sexuality, and gender by highlighting relevant parts of the club’s history and producing a public-facing output that tells these stories.
University of Birmingham
Challenging negative stereotypes about teenage boys, you will research youth agency and cultural participation in their non-radicalisation to violent and/or hateful extremism. Working with ConnectFutures and their youth beneficiaries across the Midlands, you will explore teen masculinities and cultures to co-produce cultural tools and resources to support youth resiliency.
University of Birmingham
This project explores the relationship between industrialist benefactors with business interests in slavery and colonialism, and the Anglican Church in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Birmingham, focussing on Birmingham Cathedral, St Martin in the Bullring, and St Paul’s in the Jewellery Quarter.
University of Birmingham
The project is for a doctoral student to make visible the presence of women in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT)’s extensive archive, library and museum collections. What ‘hidden’ women’s stories will you extract from the holdings of female writers, scholars, activists and theatre practitioners. Whose narrative(s) will you tell?
University of Leicester
This project will explore Dartmoor National Park's well-preserved prehistoric monumental landscape, investigating early farming communities' attitudes towards stone. Using novel geoarchaeological approaches, it will uncover how monuments were sourced, quarried, moved, and modified, informing future landscape management and contributing to current debates on heritage conservation, climate impact, and global mobility.
University of Leicester
How do you collect art that is ahead of its time? Over 1950-1989, the Arts Council Collection committee acquired artworks by artists who became important to other national collecting institutions often only much later. This project explores the committee’s support for avant-garde movements and for equity of representation.
University of Nottingham
You will work on medieval documents held by West Yorkshire Archive Services and North Yorkshire County Record Office, analysing the place-names they preserve, and using those names to gain an understanding of the historical environment of selected areas of Yorkshire, and its relationship with the present-day environment.
University of Nottingham
This research project will provide a new history of post-WWII British geography, constructed through studying the lived experience and academic atmosphere of the annual conferences of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG). The student will have unrivalled access to the Institute’s archives and will also be embedded in the team which organises the annual conferences today.
University of Nottingham
UK archives preserve thousands of medieval music books and their fragments. But who made them, and for whom? Working with experts at the University of Nottingham and Oxford’s Bodleian Library, this project leverages the latest digital technologies to develop innovative localisation techniques, to benefit archives, heritage organisations, and their audiences.
University of Warwick
This project examines how the people of early modern Warwickshire viewed and represented themselves in relation to their neighbours, the county community, wider political nation, and emerging global connections. It builds upon new research by historians, anthropologists and literary scholars to investigate the construction, representation, interpretation, and definition of local ‘belonging’ between c.1500 and 1750. For this purpose, the student will look for signs of – likely overlapping and competing -- markers of identity at the levels of individuals, families, guilds, parishes, boroughs, manors and county.
University of Warwick
This research project will explore Franco-British exchange at key English Heritage sites during the period from the start of the French Revolution to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and transform our understanding of how people, ideas, texts, and material objects from France and its colonies were circulating in Britain.
University of Warwick
This project explores how the Society selected, edited and disseminated historical materials, and how these sources and their editorial framing impacted the understanding of travel and travel writing during the expansion, and break up, of the British Empire. It also examines how the Society adjusted to changing circumstances in the era of decolonisation. In this way, the project contributes to ongoing conversations within the Hakluyt Society about its institutional past and publishing remit, as well as broader efforts to ‘decolonise’, and develop more critical understanding of, ‘imperial’ institutions, as well as about the continuing significance of the colonial legacies embedded in travel writing and its history.
University of Leicester
Founded in rural Cambridgeshire in 1989, Wysing Art Centre provides alternative environments and structures for artistic research, experimentation, discovery and production. Examining Wysing’s organisational identities and curatorial practice as a central case study, this project investigates the changing relationship between contemporary art and rural places over the last 35 years.
Birmingham City University
This project examines the activities and impact of the Birmingham Film & Video Workshop (BFVW), an influential West Midlands film organisation which operated between 1979-1989 under the leadership of Roger Shannon.