Bedford Fellowship

Applications for the 2025-26 fellowship have closed.

Scheme overview

The Bedford Fellowship is a short-term postdoctoral fellowship designed for a researcher with a background in the arts and humanities to make use of and promote the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History in University of Leeds Libraries. The Fellowship allows you to spend time working with this collection on campus at the University of Leeds, and to consult material from the complementary Art and Antiques Market Collections. The scheme is co-delivered by Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Cultural Collections and Galleries, University of Leeds Libraries.

John Bedford assembled his library over a period of 45 years and gifted it in 2019 to the University of Leeds. The focus of the library is 17th-20th century furniture history, particularly British, and its intersection with other subjects, for example, garden design and history, topography, metalwork in relation to furnishings, textiles, interior design, the English home, architecture, and the Grand Tour. The library comprises some 5,500 printed items and extensive archival material, including the research notes of the furniture historians Edward T. Joy and Pauline Agius.

The John Evan Bedford Library includes rare books of ornament, furniture and metalwork pattern books and trade catalogues, Birmingham trade directories (1770-1900) and cabinet-makers’ books of prices, a trade card collection of more than 500 items dating from c.1680-c.1999, a significant cabinet-makers’ archive, and an extensive collection of modern (post-1850) reference works.

It has strengths in the following thematic areas: British, French, and German furniture designers of 17th-20th centuries; the Birmingham metalware trades and traders; London furniture makers and associated trades and traders; early (17th-18th century) drawing books and books of ornament; cottage and country house architecture, and landscape gardening; early scientific manuals and handbooks on building, carpentry, and the industrial arts; 19th century Great Exhibitions in Europe; upholstery, textiles and associated crafts; 17th and 18th-century printers and engravers.

There is a detailed catalogue of the collection which we advise potential applicants to review.

There is an overview of the collection and how it was catalogued.

Previous Bedford Fellows

2026: Frances Varley carried out a project entitled 'Paper Trails: Mapping the Bedford Trade Card Collection', which explored the value of looking at the trade cards in this archive as a collection.

2024: Ruby Rutter conducted a project 'Buying Happiness: Emotion and Design in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Advertising Ephemera'. Ruby looked at the incredible collection of trade cards and advertising ephemera from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bestowed to the university by John Bedford, to identify how these cards incorporated design elements that engaged potential customers emotionally. Her research shed light on the history of fairy lights.

2023: Hannah Kašpar undertook research into trade cards within the Bedford Collection, finding that a high proportion were concerned with the upholstery trade and exploring how design ideas moved across international networks.

2022: The expansive research of Hillary Taylor uncovered the wide-ranging uses of billheads, as well as contributions of Jewish immigrants to the British furniture industry.