BECC-BSECS Postgraduate Fellowship 2021-22

The Birmingham Eighteenth-Century Centre and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies run an annual fellowship.

We are pleased to resume the competition for this fellowship, following a suspension during 2021. The winner of the 2020 fellowship was Dr Kate Gibson (University of Manchester) for her project 'Looked-after Children: Fostering and Adoption in Britain, 1660-1839'

The fellowship is designed to support a doctoral researcher enrolled at a UK university or postdoctoral researcher normally resident in the UK in visiting and using the eighteenth-century resources of the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham.  The extensive eighteenth-century holdings of this collection are detailed on the library page.

Applicants are also encouraged to take advantage of the rich eighteenth-century resources available in Birmingham more widely, including the Library of Birmingham, Birmingham Museum Trust, Soho House, Think Tank and the Assay Office, as well as the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham.

Please submit a research proposal of 500 words, including an explanation of how the use of Birmingham collections will benefit your research, to [email protected]. Each application should also be accompanied by one letter of reference, to the same address, outlining the credentials of the applicant and the merits of the proposed project. The deadline for both applications and letters of recommendation is January 17th 2022.

1. The fellowship of £400 is generously funded jointly by School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The deadline for claiming the fellowship will be Friday 1 July 2022.

2. Candidates will be asked, in addition to their visit, to do three things:

• provide a written report on the research visit
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• write a blogpost of up to 1,000 words for the BECC website
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• return to Birmingham in the following academic year to give a presentation about the research, ideally as part of an existing event or seminar series in the University of Birmingham research programme; this later visit will be supported by additional travel expenses

3. Early Career Researcher: this fellowship is open to any doctoral researcher enrolled at a UK university, or any post-doctoral researcher normally resident in the UK, and within five years of the award of their PhD.  Preferential treatment may be given to applications from doctoral researchers.

4. The fellowship is designed to support research in the eighteenth century, making use of the relevant holdings of the Cadbury Research Library.

Other recent fellows include:

• Tom Rusbridge (PhD, Sheffield and Birmingham), whose work on leather reassess consumption in the long eighteenth century.
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• Tess Somervell (PhD English Faculty, University of Cambridge), whose Postdoctoral Research Project was entitled Risk in Augustan Georgic, came to study the notebooks of Richard Jago, author of one of the most significant eighteenth-century poems in the georgic mode, Edge-Hill.
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• Grace Harvey (PhD student, University of Lincoln, School of English and Journalism), whose thesis is entitled The Politics of Friendship in the 1790s Radical Novel; she came to study letters of Joseph Priestley and the diary and scrapbook of Catherine Hutton, combining her visit with research into materials held in the Library of Birmingham.