Dr Rebecca Mitchell, Reader in Victorian Literature and Culture in the Department of English Literature, has been awarded an AHRC grant for new research that will unite UK and US collections of Pre-Raphaelite work.
The grant will support the creation of the Pre-Raphaelites Online Network that will bring together UK and US art galleries and museums, leading literary and historical scholars that specialise in this subject, and the three nineteenth-century research centres of the UK the Central Online Victorian Educator (COVE) Collective (a scholar-driven open-access platform that publishes peer-reviewed Victorian material).
This will enable the research team - which features Dr Mitchell as Principal Investigator, alongside Dr Ana Vadillo from Birkbeck College, Dr Paul Young from the University of Exeter, and Professor Dino Felluga from Purdue University – to explore transatlantic Pre-Raphaelitism in new ways to encourage public engagement.
Dr Mitchell said: “We’re looking forward to bringing together curators, art historians and literary scholars to create freely accessible research into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Through the online platform we’ll be able to go beyond simply digitising the material by providing peer-reviewed, copy-edited and proofed content.”
The project will involve collaboration with several Museums and University-based research centres – including the Midlands-based Nineteenth-Century Centre at The University of Birmingham and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (which houses more than 3,000 works of Pre-Raphaelite art work), the Watts Gallery (London), the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington), and the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven) .
The grant will begin in February 2019, and the project will take place within the coming 12 months.