The University of Westminster (a member of the Techne consortium) and the Science Museum Group (SMG) are delighted to announce a call for applicants for a fully funded collaborative doctorial studentship from September 2024, under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme funded by Techne.
This PhD will be the first to focus on the user experience of combining photography and train technologies in Britain between the 1880s-1930s by bringing the photography and transport collections of the SMG’s National Science and Media Museum in Bradford (NSMM) and National Railway Museum (NRM) in York into conversation with one other.
The successful applicant will have the opportunity to be embedded with the SMG and access the same levels of training, support, and expertise as members of staff, thus developing core heritage skills alongside academic capabilities. The project will be supervised by Dr Sara Dominici (Senior Lecturer in Photography Studies and Visual Culture), Professor Pippa Catterrall (Professor of History and Policy) and Dr Alison Hesse (Lecturer in Museum and Gallery Studies) at Westminster, and, at the SMG, by Dr Oliver Betts (Head of Research) at the NRM in York and Dr Ruth Quinn (Curator of Photography and Photography Technology) at the NSMM in Bradford.
This inter-museum approach supports the SMG’s ambitious programme to understand and reimagine its collections by allowing for a relatable, human story to be told about how cameras and trains shaped people’s leisure experiences. Its collections-based approach expands the potential for public outputs, and the major redesign work of the NRM’s Vision2025 and of the NSMM’s photography displays offers a great opportunity to research and present these collections’ stories to the public through new displays, talks, and online content.
Context
The PhD will investigate how the interaction of camera technologies and rail travel influenced people’s leisure practices and, consequently, their understanding and use of the British countryside and its heritage between the 1880s and 1930s.
From the early 1880s, a growing number of middle-class photographers used cameras in their leisure time. By the 1900s, cameras had become almost ubiquitous amongst tourists (Dominici 2018), a class whose profile broadened significantly during the interwar years (Walton 2002). Despite the competition from road transport in the 1920s and 1930s, the train remained central to tourists’ experiences.
Fundamentally, the railway did not simply facilitate their movements but, as Schivelbusch (1977) demonstrated, it fostered a sense of detachment from one’s surroundings. Because photography was central to the lives of this growing number of tourists, it follows that camera practices also intersected with how people conceptualised their experiences.
However, while studies of photography and technologies of mobility, including railways, abound (Lyden 2003, Nead 2007, Solnit 2003), they have largely focused on famous photographers’ attempts at capturing movement, or on the visual language triggered by different forms of transport, overlooking the role of popular, yet predominant, photographic practices in shaping transport users’ engagement with their world.
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