Research at The National Archives is going from strength to strength! We have more good news to report as The Thames Consortium, comprised of The National Maritime Museum, The National Portrait Gallery and The National Archives has been awarded six Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDPs) per year for the next three years to support doctoral students.
Page of the order book of the Sequestration Committee includes an entry relating to the case of Lady Mary Bankes, who was attempting to secure the return of family estates on behalf of her children while at the same time attempting to defend Corfe Castle from falling into the hands of Parliament (SP 20/1, vol 3, 22 September 1645)
The CDP studentships are distributed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to sustain and promote high-quality research and skills in the sector. Maintaining the skills base in the arts and humanities is vital, and The National Archives will now be able to extend more opportunities for interdisciplinary research, knowledge exchange and training. We are really pleased to be involved and are thrilled that students will have access to a museum, an art gallery and an archive through which to explore their themes.
Two proposals for studentships were selected from The National Archives. The first project will focus on the strategies used by and on behalf of war widows and orphans in the north of England to obtain relief and safeguard their property during the 1640s and 1650s. It will be based on extensive archival research among county archives in northern England as well as the State Papers collection in The National Archives, specifically the papers of the Sequestration committee (SP 20 – only recently catalogued thanks to funding from Friends of The National Archives) as this series provides a unique insight into the effects of the Civil War on women and children. The student will examine the language used in the petitions of high and low status women for military pensions, and their efforts at securing the arrears of pay of their deceased husbands. The thesis will be supervised by Dr Andrew Hopper (Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester) and Dr Katy Mair (The National Archives).
The other project selected from The National Archives is entitled ‘Uncertainty of Damage Functions in Preventive Conservation’ and will be supervised by Kostas Ntanos (Head of Conservation Research at the National Archives) and Dr. Matija Strlic (Centre for Sustainable Heritage, UCL). This studentship will focus on damage functions used to predict the future state of a heritage object or a collection in certain environmental conditions. The student will work to develop a damage function for discolouration of particularly unstable paper types. The work will address questions about the reliability of climate management tools, environmental standards and help to improve the quality of collection care.
If you are interested in applying, there will be more information available in the following weeks.