Call for Applications for Visiting Researcher Stipends at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University 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 years since its opening, the museum has received donations from many sources and now has over 75,000 artefacts on the long history of the moving image from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Thanks to the support of the Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell Trust we are able to offer stipends to enable research using the collections at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. We are inviting applications for two categories of award: UK stipends are available to academics, postgraduate students and researchers based in the UK, and are worth up to £500 each. International Stipends are for scholars and researchers from outside the UK and are worth up to £1500 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 publication or other demonstrable outcomes. Successful applicants will be required to write a blog post for the museum’s website about their research following their visit. The monies must be spent by December 31st 2017.
The museum’s collections are very diverse, 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, and technological and labour histories of cinema. The collections have particular strengths in ‘Pre-cinema’ optical media, cinema ephemera and we also hold some production papers relating to key British independent filmmakers: Bill Douglas, Don Boyd, James Mackay and Gavrik Losey. We are particularly keen to receive applications for the study of areas of distinctive strength in the collections, such as the following:
Optical Toys
Magic lanterns
Panoramas and Dioramas
Early Cinema 1895-1914
Charlie Chaplin
Sheet Music
Star ephemera
Fiction about film
Film Press-books and campaign material
The films of Bill Douglas, and independent cinema in Britain since the 1970s.
To apply please email [email protected] with a one page CV covering key academic achievements or publications and a proposal of up to 1,000 words outlining:
1) Your planned use of the museum’s collections
2) The expected outcomes from the research and its contribution to the field of study including publication plans.
3) An outline of the expected costings of your visit.
The deadline for applications is 10 February 2017. Applicants will be informed of the decision of the assessment panel within one month and will be expected to undertake their research during 2017.