The UCL Research Institute for Collections (RIC) is inviting applications for the 2025 RIC Fellowships. In addition to the Special Collections Visiting Fellowship and Liberating the Collections Fellowship we are delighted to announce the new Museums Collections Fellowship.

The RIC Fellowships offer opportunities to visit UCL to conduct research using the UCL holdings of archives, rare books, records, and museums collections.

Liberating the Collections Fellowship
The Liberating the Collections Fellowship is intended to unearth underrepresented voices and find new ways of engaging with collection stories and presenting them to wider society. As a Fellow, you will help us gain perspectives on our collections beyond the structural narratives that currently prevail.

Special Collections Visiting Fellowship
The Special Collections Visiting Fellowship offers an opportunity to visit UCL to conduct research on a topic centred on the UCL holdings of archives, rare books, and records. The aims of the Fellowship are to facilitate new research into UCL Special Collections and to raise awareness of the collections amongst the research community and the general public.

Museum Collections Visiting Fellowship
New for 2025 is the RIC Museum Collections Visiting Fellowship which offers an opportunity to visit UCL to conduct research on a topic centred on the collections of UCL Art Museum, Grant Museum of Zoology, Pathology Museum, Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology and UCL Science Collections.

The successful candidates will spend up to six weeks, or the part-time equivalent, at UCL researching the collections.

Projects can start from July 2025 onwards. Fellows should aim to finish their project by the end of 2025.

The closing date for applications is Monday 6th January 2025.

For more information please click on the individual fellowship links or click here for an overview.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Adrian Chapman has been appointed as our first Special Collections Visiting Fellow. The Fellowship programme is an opportunity for external researchers to visit UCL to conduct research on a topic centred on the Special Collections holdings. Its aims are to raise awareness of our collections and to facilitate new research into our archives, records and rare books.

Adrian holds a PhD from UCL, and currently teaches at Florida State University. He has published extensively on psychiatry and the counterculture of the 1960s.

He will be spending six weeks with us in summer working on his project ‘Underground Psychiatry: R. D. Laing, Radical Psychiatry and the Underground Press’. Drawing on our unrivalled collection of Little Magazines and alternative press publications, Adrian will examine how the underground press circulated, contested and appropriated Laing’s ideas in the 1960s.

Adrian will participate in the programme of workshops, talks and lectures run by the Special Collections Department. The events will be advertised on the Special Collections website and on our Twitter feed.

We are pleased to invite applications for a Special Collections Visiting Fellowship, which offers a researcher the opportunity to visit UCL to conduct research on our fascinating collections. Its aims are to raise awareness of the collections amongst the research community, to facilitate new research into UCL Special Collections, and to disseminate the research outcomes to academic and non-academic audiences.

UCL Special Collections holds one of the foremost university collections of manuscripts, archives and rare books in the UK. They include fine collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books as well as highly important 19th and 20th century collections of personal papers, archival material, and literature, covering a vast range of subject areas. The core strengths of our collections are:

• Language, literature and poetry and 20th and 21st century small-press publishing
• Politics and social policy, especially 19th and 20th century reform movements
• History of science, especially medical sciences and genetics
• Mathematics
• History of the medieval and early modern book
• Latin American history and economics
• Hebraica and Judaica
• History of education, especially 20th century
• History of London, especially 19th and 20th century
• Speech sciences and conversational data

The successful candidate will spend up to six weeks, or the part-time equivalent, at UCL researching the collections. The Visiting Fellow will receive a grant of £3,500 to cover travel, accommodation and living expenses. The deadline for applications is 10 am on 1 February 2019.

See our website for further details and an application form.