PhD students awarded bursaries at the Royal Library in Windsor

Congratulations to History PhD candidates, Miranda Reading and Alice Marples, who have both been awarded research bursaries for this summer at the Royal Library in Windsor, as part of the King George III digitisation project. 

In addition, Miranda has also been awarded an Academy Scholarship for the Institute of Ideas 2015 Academy in July, who award a small number of scholarships to current undergraduate or postgraduate research students.

Miranda and Alice will each spend a month in the Royal Archives of the Georgian monarchs, held at Windsor Castle pursuing the answers to their research questions, as part of the anglo-amercian Georgian Papers Programme.

In addition to their own studies they will also assist the Archives staff in the initial stages of planning for digitization of the collections and cataloguing, and participating in academic exchange with colleagues at King’s. Marples will study Sir Hans Sloane and natural history communication networks, while Reading’s work focuses on conservative moral reform in the later 18th and early 19th  centuries.

An additional two fellows from The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, based in Virginia,USA will join Marples and Reading. Advanced graduate history student James Ambuske from the University of Virginia, is hoping to discover more about Scottish migration to America during the period of the American Revolution. Professor Vincent Carretta of the Department of English at the University of Maryland will his work on African and African-American writers of the late 18th century who were presented at court or who were in communication with the royal household.

Patricia Methven, King’s Co-ordinator for the Georgian Papers Programme, said: ‘King George IV founded this university,so you could say our history is Georgian. It makes complete sense that we would honour graduate students with fellowships to help us in our understanding of the Georgian era as well as develop their own knowledge and studies. We look forward to seeing the results of the fellows’ interpretation as well as the digitization project.’