New PhD awards with RSC, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Birmingham Cathedral and ConnectFutures

Future PhD candidates are being given the opportunity to help decolonise and digitize the Royal Shakespeare Company’s fine art collection and trace the transatlantic slavery links of three Anglican churches in Birmingham, as part of a new round of the Collaborative Doctoral Awards from the Midlands4Cities.

The four awards – which open for entries on Monday 14 October 2024 – are jointly designed by academics from the Faculty of Arts and Law with other universities and external partner organizations including the RSC, Birmingham Cathedral, ConnectFutures and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Each aims to respond to specific needs in the cultural, creative and heritage sectors, providing the candidate with first-hand experience of the partner organization and the opportunity to improve their employability and skills.

The RSC project will be the first sustained investigation of the organisation’s fine art and sculpture collection in Stratford-upon-Avon, analyzing and digitizing a theater collection of international importance through a decolonial lens. Uncovering hidden stories is also the aim of the neighboring Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s project, making visible the presence of women in the trust’s extensive archival, library and museum collections and telling their stories and significance.

The Birmingham Cathedral project focuses on three local Anglican churches, helping to address and communicate their links to colonialism and slavery, whilst understanding more broadly how slavery and empire contributed to the formation of institutions civics and the Industrial Revolution. And social enterprise, ConnectedFutures, is co-creating a project examining how the arts and culture sector contributes to young people’s resilience against violent or hateful extremism and will involve traveling to its initiatives in the Midlands to interact with young people and teenage boys in their lives non-radicalization.

Look for these and other Collaborative Doctoral Awards at Midlands4Cities website.