03 April 2017
PhD Opportunities in the Americas Collections
As a research library, we regularly create opportunities for students to work more closely with our collections. There are currently two collaborative AHRC funded PhD places being advertised in the Americas: the first working with Caribbean collections, and the second with political ephemeral materials from the USA.
Future Pasts: British-Caribbean Popular Culture and the Politics of History, 1948-1998 is a collaborative PhD with the Institute of the Americas at University College London. This project explores the articulation of ‘reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures’ (Scott, 2004) by the British Caribbean community in post-World War II/post-Windrush Britain. Engaging with recent scholarship on the Black Atlantic, urban cultures, and ‘Black globality’, the project will analyse the cultural forms that evolved within the British Caribbean community in the last half of the twentieth century.
The project offers a unique opportunity to draw on significant but underused resources in the British Library collections. These resources include, for example, newspapers, periodicals and journals such as The Voice, South London Press, Race Today, Pan-Africa, Caribbean News, West Indian World, and West Indian Gazette; the publications of Bogle L’Ouverture Publishing, Hansib Publications and New Beacon Press; the papers of significant artists and writers (such as Andrew Salkey); and the Sound Archive, which includes interviews with migrants, carnival music and performances, and recordings and interviews from Black underground radio stations from the 1980s and 1990s. The project also offers the potential to work with new materials such as the interviews and poetry from the ongoing Black British Poetry CDP project.
The succesful applicant would be co-supervised by Dr Kate Quinn at UCL and Dr Elizabeth Cooper, Curator for the Library's Latin American and Caribbean collections. The closing date for applications is 5.00pm on Friday 14 April 2017. To find out more visit the Institute of the Americas webpage.
American Political Pamphlets 1920-1945 is offered in collaboration with the University of Sussex. Together with access to the British Library's extensive holdings of American political pamphlets, the researcher will also benefit from access to the extensive collection of US political pamphlets at the Marx Memorial Library, a partner of the project. The project aims to study and contextualise the writing, printing, distribution and dissemination of political pamphlets produced in the years preceding and during the Second World War.
The Library's collection of American pamphlets from the interwar period contains publications by different anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and pacifist societies. These include the Socialist Party of America, the Young People's Socialist League, the American League Against War and Fascism, the Jewish People's Committee, the War Resisters League, the World Peace Foundation, as well as anti-imperialist societies such as the United Aid for Peoples of African Descent, among many others.
The succesful applicant will be co-supervised by Dr Sue Currell at the University of Sussex, and Dr Mercedes Aguirre, Lead Curator Americas at the British Library. The closing date for applications is 1 June 2017. To find out more visit the University of Sussex webpage.