The National Archives seeks proposals from university partners for collaborative doctoral studentships to start in October 2015

The National Archives seeks proposals from university partners for collaborative doctoral studentships to start in October 2015.
The National Archives is a member of the Thames Consortium, supporting (in total across the Consortium) six new collaborative research studentships each year via the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme. Students are jointly supervised by a member of staff and an academic based in the partner university. Applications for studentships starting in October 2015 are now open.
The National Archives is the official archive and publisher for the UK government, and for England and Wales.  We are the guardians of some of our most iconic national documents, dating back over 1,000 years. The National Archives' collection of over 11 million historical government and public records is one of the largest in the world. From Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, our collection includes paper and parchment, electronic records and websites, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.  Our 21st-century role is to collect and secure the future of the government record, both digital and physical, to preserve it for generations to come, and to make it as accessible and available as possible.
We are interested in proposals for collaborative doctoral studentships on any aspect of our collections, but especially the following subjects and themes:
Historical
• the mechanics of the central government machine (13th-17th centuries) • land ownership, transfer and inheritance in the medieval and early modern periods • common law, politics and power in medieval and early modern England and Wales • early modern letter writing, literature and record keeping • developments in early modern science, technology, art and material culture • legacies of Empire • British foreign policy in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries • transatlantic relations during the Cold War • popular radicalism in the 18th and 19th centuries • attitudes to vagrancy and poverty in the 19th century • surgeons at sea: Royal Navy medical officers' journals • the social impact of the First World War
Heritage science
• sustainable stewardship: targeting wider collection management issues in order to provide solutions for sustainable stewardship of The National Archive's collections and exploring the potential of modeling and technology to provide evidence for decision-making • managing material change: for example, understanding materials, degradation processes and the relationship of materials to their environments, to enable The National Archives to predict the long-term stability of its holdings
Digital
• challenges in identifying and managing sensitive historical digital records • challenges in identifying and linking individuals across multiple series of digital records • archival digital collections as historical big data: challenges in understanding, exploring and visualising large digital collections • challenges in documenting and managing the context, provenance and integrity of the historical digital record during digital transfer from creating bodies to archives
Please send enquiries relating to studentships to the Research Team research@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk
More information is available here:
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