King’s College London Royal Archives Summer Fellowships 2019 – apply now!

Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

King’s College London is the lead academic partner for the Georgian Papers Programme, a collaboration with the Royal Archives and Royal Library to shed new light on the Georgian period. The Programme is promoting and developing a research programme in support of the digitisation of some 400,000 pages of original archives, only 15% of which have been published to date. Applications are welcome from scholars in any field who hope to find relevant material in the archive, and we also welcome applications with a focus on digital humanities approaches to the material.

Fellows will undertake their own research. Fellows will also be invited by staff of the Georgian Papers Programme to share their insights into the collection and join with fellows from other schemes at a number of events as part of a growing academic cohort.

The successful applicants will have full-day access to the Royal Archives but should be aware of the need for ample forward planning to allow for security clearance, the identification and retrieval of material of relevance from vaults (catalogues presently available are limited) and the occasional closures of the Castle.

King’s College London is a recognised hub for the interdisciplinary study of the eighteenth century drawing on a range of expertise in the field of literature, cultural and intellectual history, science and medicine, music, languages, philosophy and religion, naval and military history. Alongside the Georgian Papers Programme there are scholarly research centres including the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s, which runs a highly successful MA in 18th Century Studies with the British Museum. The Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. Finally, King’s Digital Laboratory, the King’s Department of Digital Humanities and the Archival Service equally have a track record of ground breaking research and delivery in the fields of digital access and data interpretation.

Two awards of £500 each are available in 2019 to support travel and subsistence. The closing date for applications for the Fellowships is 10 June 2019.

 Expectations of the successful fellow

Fellows will be joining a community of more than 40 other scholars who have now held fellowships of various kinds over the past three years of the Programme (for the full list see (https://georgianpapersprogramme.com/fellowships/full_list_fellows/). In addition we have a network of more than 400 following the project in the King’s Friends Network. As cataloguing and research are proceeding in parallel, the findings of our fellows are of vital importance to the Archives team, and to the Digital Humanists creating metadata and overseeing transcription for searchability. We would therefore expect the successful candidate to:

1. present their research project at one of the GPP coffee mornings held at King’s College London or Windsor in which our researchers share their objectives and plans with the GPP community
2. consider presenting their research once more advanced at a GPP panel at suitable conferences/ workshops
3. share the knowledge they gain of the archive with the Royal Archives team involved in cataloguing and describing it
4. alert the academic directors to any potentially significant findings that might be of interest to other researchers
5. consider writing a blog or curate a virtual exhibition about their research for publication on the GPP website
6. share any full transcriptions of documents that they make in the course of their research with the GPP team to contribute to the transcription of the archive
7. acknowledge the fellowship in any future publications drawing on the research it enabled, and inform the GPP of their appearance.
8. abide by the standard rules of access and reuse associated with access to the Royal Archives, including security procedures for access to the Research

How to apply:

To apply please send a CV and a short 500 word summary of your project to the academic liaison Angel O’Donnell at: angel-luke.o’donnell@kcl.ac.uk, and with subject line King’s Summer Fellowships.

Likewise, please do contact Angel O’Donnell if you have any queries about the fellowship scheme.