Call for Applications for 2025. Visiting Researcher Stipends at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. Deadline: 5pm GMT Friday 31st January 2025
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, UK, is both a public museum and a rich research resource for scholars of moving image history. The museum is named after the renowned filmmaker Bill Douglas and was founded on the extraordinary collection of material he put together with his friend Peter Jewell. In the twenty-eight years since its opening, the museum has received donations from many sources and now has over 90,000 artefacts on the long history of the moving image from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Since 2017 we have offered funded stipends to visit us in Exeter and consult our collections, generously funded by the philanthropic funds. We are again able to offer stipends for 2025 for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to enable research using the collections at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum with support from Research England's Higher Education Museums, Galleries and Collections Fund, in addition to our philanthropic funding.
We are inviting applications for two categories of award:
UK stipends - available to academics, postgraduate students and other researchers based in the UK, and are worth up to £600 each.
International Stipends – available to scholars and other researchers from outside the UK and are worth up to £1750 each.
The monies are to be used for travel and accommodation costs incurred while visiting the Museum to undertake significant research that will be enhanced by access to its collections. Proposed research should contribute to publications or other demonstrable outcomes, such as films or artworks. Successful applicants will be required to write a blog post for the museum’s website about their research following their visit. You will find details of previous years’ stipends and the blogs that stipend holders contributed at http://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/research/research-at-the-bill-douglas-cinema-museum/stipends-at-the-bill-douglas-cinema-museum/ Ideally the monies should be spent by the end of July 2025.
The museum’s collections are very varied and have the potential to enrich research in histories of film, media and visual culture, cultural and social history, audience and fan studies, media production history, women’s screen history, histories and issues of representation, and technological and labour histories of cinema. The collections have particular strengths in ‘pre-cinema’ optical media, cinema ephemera and material culture and we also hold some production papers relating to key British independent filmmakers: Bill Douglas, Don Boyd, James Mackay and Gavrik Losey. Recent acquisitions include: Interview tapes with leading filmmakers by journalists Trevor Johnston and Nigel Floyd; a very large collection of publicity material for predominantly art house films from the 1960s-90s from the Cambridge Arts Cinema, The Pamela Davies Collection of photographs related to the career of one of the British film industry’s leading continuity supervisors, an amazing collection of scrapbooks on filmmakers and national cinemas compiled by Michael Fritz over 60 years; the Townly Cooke Collection of silent film stills and ephemera, and a large collection of scripts from the Rank Library.
We are particularly keen to receive applications on the holdings outlined above or for the study of areas of distinctive strength in the collections, such as the following:
Optical Toys
Magic lanterns
Panoramas and Dioramas, including the research papers of Ralph Hyde
Early Cinema 1895-1914 (please note that a separate one-off UK stipend in Pre and early cinema will be offered in the spring).
Charlie Chaplin
Silent Cinema, especially in the UK
Sheet Music
Star ephemera
Cinemagoing
Film and material culture, including fan material such as scrapbooks
Fiction about film
Film Press-books and campaign material
The films of Bill Douglas
Independent cinema in Britain since the 1970s
Women’s roles in film culture, including production and criticism.
However there are many other possibilities as the collection covers many areas of moving image culture.
To apply:
Please email [email protected] with a one page CV covering key academic achievements or publications or previous research and a proposal of up to 1,000 words outlining:
1) Your planned use of the museum’s collections, using the catalogue to highlight the material you wish to consult on your visit.
2) The expected outcomes from the research and its contribution to the field of study, including publication plans (or films, artworks etc).
3) An outline of the expected costings of your visit, with the amount requested for the award.
The deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 31st January 2025. Applicants will be informed of the decision of the assessment panel within three weeks. Ideally we would like applicants to undertake their research before the end of July 2025.