UCL Special Collections Visiting Fellowship
The successful candidate will spend up to six weeks, or the part-time equivalent, at UCL researching the collections. The Fellowship must be taken up between July and December 2019. The aims of the Fellowship are to raise awareness of the collections amongst the research community, to facilitate new research into UCL Special Collections, and to disseminate the research outcomes to academic and non-academic audiences.
The Visiting Fellow will receive:
- A grant of £3,500 to cover travel, accommodation and living expenses
- Work space in the South Junction Reading Room on the UCL Bloomsbury campus
- Mediated access to the collections
- Access to staff with specialist knowledge of the collection in question when available
The Visiting Fellow will be responsible for providing any additional equipment that they need to complete their project, such as laptops and software, themselves. Applicants should specify any additional resource requirements in their application.
The Fellow will be required to provide, as a minimum:
- A blog post of at least 500 words on the SCAR blog
- A research output in the form of a recorded lecture, a conference paper, a publication or a scholarly digital resource. Any published outputs must be open access.
- A short report for publication by UCL describing the research experience
- A staff briefing about the collections used
- Acknowledgement of the grant in any resulting publications
UCL Special Collections
UCL Special Collections holds one of the foremost university collections of manuscripts, archives and rare books in the UK. They include fine collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books as well as highly important 19th and 20th century collections of personal papers, archival material, and literature, covering a vast range of subject areas.
The core subject strengths of the collections are:
- Language, literature and poetry and 20th and 21st century small-press publishing
- Politics and social policy, especially 19th and 20th century reform movements
- History of science, especially medical sciences and genetics
- Mathematics
- History of the medieval and early modern book
- Latin American history and economics
- Hebraica and Judaica
- History of education, especially 20th century
- History of London, especially 19th and 20th century
- Speech sciences and conversational data
For details of our collections, please see:
- UCL Special Collections: Selected items from the collections are highlighted in Treasures from UCL by Gillian Furlong (London: UCL Press, 2015), which is freely available online.
- UCL Institute of Education Special Collections and Archives
Eligibility and Selection Criteria
The Fellowship is open to researchers external to UCL in any discipline at all levels from PhD onwards. Fellows need to ensure that they are eligible to work in the UK before making arrangements.
The Selection Committee will consider applications according to the following criteria:
- The demonstrated need to consult specific items or collections within UCL Special Collections. Preference will be given to proposals that relate to the core subject strengths of the collections
- The potential of the project to increase public understanding of the materials consulted, through publication or public dissemination, or to develop innovative research methods for the study of these materials
- The feasibility of the proposed research project
To apply
The deadline for applications is 10am on 1 February 2019. Applicants should send the following documents to the e-mail address below:
- A completed application form
- A research proposal (1,000 words maximum) that specifies the timescale, the items or collections that will be used and how the research will be disseminated. Applicants should indicate how the proposed study advances their own research goals and satisfies the aims of the Fellowship.
- A curriculum vitae including a list of publications or other research outputs
- Two letters of support from referees. Applicants should ask the referees to comment on their professional knowledge of the applicant and the contribution the proposed research would make to scholarship.
Notification of the award will be made by late March 2019.
Applicants are encouraged to contact UCL Special Collections before submitting a formal application to discuss the level of access to the collections that their proposed research project would require.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/ucl-special-collections-visiting-fellowship