Deadline: May 31, 2019

http://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/

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 80,000 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 Fund we are delighted to again be able to offer a small number of stipends for 2019-2020 to enable research using the collections at The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. 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 £500 each.

International Stipends – available to scholars and other 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, 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/ The monies must be spent by April 30th 2020.

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 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 The Pamela Davies Collection of photographs related to the career of one of the British film industry’s leading continuity supervisors and The Townly Cooke Collection of silent film stills and ephemera. 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, including the research papers of Ralph Hyde
• Early Cinema 1895-1914
• Charlie Chaplin
• Silent Cinema, especially in the UK
• Sheet Music
• Star ephemera
• Cinemagoing
• Film and material culture
• Fiction about film
• Film Press-books and campaign material
• The films of Bill Douglas
• Independent cinema in Britain since the 1970s.

To apply:

Please email bdc@exeter.ac.uk 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

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 31 May 2019. Applicants will be informed of the decision of the assessment panel within one month and will be expected to undertake their research before the end of April 2020.