British Museum-UoR Joint Development Fund
Thursday, 21 November 2019
A Joint Development Fund established by the British Museum and the University of Reading has awarded its first round of grants.
The fund, where each partner is providing £20,000 per year, will support collaborative research projects between the British Museum and the University.
Seven awards have been made in the first round, ranging from £500 to £10,000. These include funding for a collaborative workshop on Palaeolithic Fire, a PhD placement to assess the research potential of the Lullingstone Villa Archive, funding to enable a UoR academic to co-author a BM exhibition catalogue, and a project to scope the creation of narratives on museum collecting histories for children.
Each of these projects will be jointly led by a researcher from each institution.
The last few months have seen several important milestones in the development of the University’s inter-institutional partnership with the British Museum. In October, we welcomed Dr Pete Bray as our Research Fellow in Archaeological Materials Science. He is based in Archaeology and will be working between the University and the British Museum to develop our scientific collaboration and extend the Department’s expertise in Archaeological Materials Science.
We have also begun a round of exploratory workshops bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines within the University of Reading and the British Museum. These have been very positive and are leading to new relationships and collaborations between the two institutions. In the first year of the partnership, we have submitted joint applications to the AHRC, the Wellcome and the ERC.
Roberta Gilchrist, the Research Dean for Heritage & Creativity, said: “We are delighted with the range of research and exploratory activities put forward for this first round of joint funding. Each of the awards represents a genuinely collaborative project between the University of Reading and the British Museum, and we are looking forward to watching them develop. We are making rapid and positive progress in growing a sustainable partnership, and look forward to continued close working with our colleagues at the British Museum in the years ahead."