Where Art and Science Meet: Art and Design at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award)
Award Description
The Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, is delighted to offer one AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This Award offers you the opportunity to pursue a fully funded PhD in art history, natural history and museology.
This research project is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and as such will significantly enhance our knowledge of its disciplinary and institutional history, and the role of art and design in giving those ideas material expression. Oxford University Museum of Natural History has one of the most important surviving, and under-researched, museum and university interior schemes in Britain. Its ambitious decoration includes 28 portrait statues and busts, which collectively represent a pantheon to the forefathers of natural science; decorative sculpture and ironwork illustrating the natural world; columns representative of the geology of the UK; bespoke furniture and furnishings; and murals in the geology lecture room.
Despite increasing academic interest in museums, few studies have focused on university museums. This doctoral project therefore presents a significant opportunity to consider the role of a museum and its fine art and decorative scheme in the development of scientific disciplines and university education. The project will firstly document the origins and evolution of the interior scheme. The works, both individually and collectively, raise complex questions regarding the location and function of art and design in science and education, including the role of sculpture in the construction of the scientific canon; relations between the natural world and human creativity; disciplinary interconnections and boundaries; and the communication of intellectual endeavour through the visual arts. The research is therefore inherently intra-disciplinary, and will engage with a range of related academic and curatorial discourses, including geology, botany, zoology, sculpture studies, the history of collections, museology and institutional history.
The collaborative nature of the project will enable the successful student to pursue doctoral research in Art History and its intersections with the History of Science and Museology, while gaining first-hand experience within a museum setting. The student will have access to the extensive collections and archives at OUMNH, and related material at the Ashmolean and the Bodleian Libraries. They will work closely with supervisors to determine the focus of the research, establish precise research questions and methodologies, and identify relevant source material. As well as furthering our understanding of the intersections of art, design and science, museology and academia, this project will contribute to the museum’s redevelopment plans by creating new ways for engaging a range of audiences in the histories of the arts and of science.
The closing date for applications is 5pm on Friday 24 March 2017
For more information please click "Further Official Information" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/postgraduate/funding/Where-Art-and-Science-Meet-Art-and-Design-at-Oxford-University-Museum-of-Natural-History.aspx