Gertrude Menough, Clematis Lodge Collage Album, c. 1895. Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.
I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been awarded a Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, which I’ll be taking in August 2017. The award will facilitate research for my postdoctoral research project, which is provisionally titled, Crafting the Self: Assemblage & Identity, 1770-1900. As I’ve noted previously, the project will provide a history of ‘assemblage’ produced in Britain, North America, and British India between 1770 and 1900, highlighting its pervasiveness across an array of artistic, literary, and cultural practices, and its enactment in disparate geographic locations. The project will accordingly examine a broad variety of assemblages made by men, women, and children across the Atlantic world and Britain’s colonies in order to understand the universality of assemblage during this period.
Primarily, the Winterthur Short-Term Research Fellowship will facilitate research on the Winterthur’s collection of ‘collage albums’. Also known as ‘scrapbook houses’, collage albums comprise imagined interior spaces arranged from carefully clipped images of interior furnishings. My research will examine the collage albums in relation to women’s self-fashioning in the mid-late nineteenth century, arguing that their production both expressed and reflected women’s creative and domestic identities during this period.
As the project develops, I’ll post more information about my motivations, methodologies, and the specifics of what I’ll be examining in each of my six case studies. For now, however, I’m concentrating on revising my doctoral thesis for publication, a process that I’m also keen to write about on the blog. Stay tuned for posts on going from PhD to published, and if there are specifics of this journey that you’d like me to discuss, get in touch with me via my twitter handle, @Freya_Gowrley.
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