Doctoral Studentship for ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections’

Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections is a research project based at the British Museum in collaboration with UCLDH. The project started in October 2016 and will run for three years until 30 September 2019. The objective of Enlightenment Architectures is to understand the intellectual structures of Sloane’s own manuscript catalogues of his collections and with them the origins of the Enlightenment disciplines and information management practices they helped to shape. The project will employ a pioneering interdisciplinary combination of curatorial, traditional humanities and Digital Humanities research to examine Sloane’s catalogues which reveal the way in which he and his contemporaries collected, organised and classified the world, through their descriptions, cross-references and codes.

The project has received generous funding from the Leverhulme Trust. Included in the grant is a three year fully funded doctoral research studentship. As explained on the UCL Application Portal:

The aim of the studentship will be to use Sloane’s catalogues as a test bed on which to conduct research on how digital interrogation, inferencing and analysis techniques can allow new knowledge to be created about the information architectures of manuscript catalogues such as those of Sloane. The proposed research must also have a strong critical and analytical dimension so that it can be set within our wider framework of academic inquiry that is concerned with understanding how collections and their documentation together formed a cornerstone of the “laboratories” of the emergent Enlightenment.

Initial applications are now being taken, with a closing date of 31st May 2017. Read more about the studentship and how to apply