Welcoming our Brotherton and Bedford Fellows

In collaboration with Special Collections at the University of Leeds, we are delighted to announce the Brotherton and Bedford Fellows for 2022.

To coincide with a completion of a major redevelopment of facilities at the Brotherton Research Centre, generously supported by the John Victor Bedford Will Trust, we have appointed Dr Hillary Taylor as the Bedford Fellow. Dr Taylor, currently an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, will explore the education and labour involved in carpentry and building work in England during the long 18th century. Her project is entitled "Cultures of Wood- and Building-Work in England", and will draw on the extensive collection of carpentry manuals, trade cards and trade labels in the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History.

Our two Brotherton Fellows are Dr Anna Reeve, currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LAHRI, and Dr Elizabeth West, who has recently completed her PhD at the University of Reading.

Dr Reeve's project - "Ways of seeing the ancient world: Irene Manton’s collection of antiquities" - will connect papers in the Irene Manton Archive with objects at the Peter Scott Gallery in Lancaster, where many of the antiquities owned by Manton are held. Her research will trace the histories of these objects, and investigate their place in Manton’s theories of art in relation to science.

Dr West will be using the Norah Smallwood Papers to contextualise Smallwood’s achievements as a major figure in twentieth century British publishing at a time when the progression of women in such traditionally male-dominated professions was rare. She will explore in particular Smallwood's correspondence with colleagues and authors including Dirk Bogarde, Iris Murdoch and Sylvia Townsend Warner.