Call for Applications | Blue Paper Workshop
From ArtHist.net and the Blue Paper Research Consortium:
Blue Paper Workshop
Moulin du Verger, Puymoyen, France, 3–7 August 2026
Applications due by 15 April 2026
The Blue Paper Research Consortium (BPRC) is pleased to announce a five-day intensive workshop dedicated to the history and manufacture of handmade blue paper. Held at the Moulin du Verger, a working sixteenth-century papermill in the Charente region, near Angoulême, this workshop is a rare opportunity to bridge historical research with material practice. Participants will work alongside a team of specialists to explore pre-industrial papermaking and dyeing methods, drawing on years of interdisciplinary research into Western European blue paper.
This immersive program explores the manufacturing of Western European blue paper and its historical applications in European art. Participants will experiment with traditional techniques, preparing their own reference sheets with various coloring methods.
Objectives
• Discovering traditional Western European papermaking techniques
• Preparing blue dyes from natural colorants
• Identifying papermaking- and dyeing techniques from samples
• Exploring the applications of blue paper by artists in Europe (prints, drawings, pastels, books) before 1800
Cost: 1300 EUR (includes all workshop materials; excludes travel, dinner, and accommodation)
Capacity: Limited to 8 participants to ensure a high-quality learning experience.
Grant Opportunity: Supporting Diversity and Future Professionals
Through the generous support of the Tavolozza Foundation, we are proud to offer six full-tuition grants for the 2026 workshop. The BPRC and the Tavolozza Foundation are committed to ensuring that specialized knowledge in historical paper technology remains accessible to a broad and inclusive community. These grants are intended to support graduate students, junior professionals, and colleagues from under-resourced institutions.
The program aims to
• Expand Access to Specialized Knowledge: Provide emerging scholars and professionals with hands-on training in historical papermaking and dyeing techniques that are rarely accessible through conventional academic programs.
• Bridge the Resource Gap: Provide high-level professional development to those whose institutions may lack the funding for international specialized training.
• Empower Emerging Voices: Support the next generation of paper historians, conservators, and curators by providing direct access to master craftsmen and leading researchers.
• Enrich Scholarly Dialogue: Foster a diverse group of participants whose varied geographic, institutional, and cultural perspectives contribute to a richer exchange of ideas and research.
The grant includes full workshop registration (€1300 value) and daily lunch at the mill. Grant recipients are responsible for travel, accommodation, and dinners. To apply for the grant, please submit:
• Motivation letter explaining how the workshop will benefit your research or professional practice
• Curriculum vitae (maximum 2 pages)
Applications should be sent to Leila Sauvage (leila.sauvage@gmail.com) and Edina Adam (EAdam@getty.edu) by 15 April 2026. Please include ‘Blue Paper Workshop Grant Application’ in the subject line.
In addition to the funded places, two standard registration spots are available at the fee of €1300. Places are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. Please contact Leila Sauvage and Edina Adam.
AHRC Studentship | Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818)
From UCL:
Rediscovering a Woman Collector at the British Library:
New Sources and Perspectives on Sarah Sophia Banks
Supervised by Lucy Brownson, Elizabeth Shepherd, Felicity Myrone, Maddy Smith, and Alice Marples
Applications due by 14 April 2026
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Sarah Sophia Banks, oil on canvas, 49 × 40 inches.
It is intended that interviews will take place in person on Thursday 30 April 2026 at the British Library or UCL, but we will also offer online interviews for those unable to attend in person.
University College London (UCL) and the British Library are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from 1 October 2026 under the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. This research will examine the collecting, knowledge production, and documentary practices of Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), one of the most important antiquarian collectors of her time. It will interrogate Banks’s holdings at the British Library and elsewhere from a critical archival perspective, exploring these dispersed collections—and the taxonomies she devised for them—as maps of the social, intellectual, and imperial networks she inhabited.
This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Lucy Brownson and Prof Elizabeth Shepherd at UCL Department of Information Studies (UCL:DIS), and Felicity Myrone, Maddy Smith and Dr Alice Marples at the British Library. The student will spend time with both UCL:DIS and the British Library and will become part of the wider cohort of AHRC CDP funded PhD students across the UK.
UCL and the British Library are keen to encourage applications from a diverse range of people, from different backgrounds and career stages, and particularly welcome those currently underrepresented in doctoral student cohorts.
The Research Project
Extensive materials collected by the antiquarian collector Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818) were divided at her death and are held across the British Library, Royal Mint, and Prints & Drawings and Coins & Medals departments at the British Museum. Varying institutional interests and practicalities have impacted their visibility, and the focus of scholarship to date has been on the holdings at the Museum and her prints and ephemera in nine albums in the Library (L.R.301.h.3-11). This studentship will explore the significant holdings that are yet to be explored at the British Library, revealing Banks’s own cross-format interdisciplinary knowledge taxonomy in detail for the first time.
Banks wrote catalogues of her own collections and kept notes regarding provenance, many of which have been overlooked to date. This project will use these sources to rediscover the full extent and original arrangement, purpose and source of Banks’s prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts, focusing on those at the British Library. The student will explore Banks’s networks of knowledge, methods of collecting, network of contacts, and her strategies and systems for categorising her visual and textual materials. The project asks larger questions around the role of women collectors, knowledge practices, collecting history and scholarship, the emergence of (male) expertise, disciplinary norms and museological frameworks in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the relative status of visual and textual knowledge. While her brother Joseph Banks’s collections as a whole and Sarah Sophia Banks’s collections beyond the Library have had sustained academic attention, her holdings at the Library remain largely underexplored. This project matches the recent full cataloguing of her collections at the Royal Mint and British Museum, facilitating cross-institutional research, and impacting practically upon reader access to and understanding of these materials and their provenance.
This project calls for an interdisciplinary approach encompassing critical archival studies, museum studies, and feminist historiography to interrogate the research questions outlined below. The successful candidate will be embedded as an archivist and researcher—or, to paraphrase Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2012), archivist-as-researcher—working to catalogue and research Banks’s holdings at the Library. This research-by-doing will enable the student to familiarise themselves with the collection and identify foci for this study, by selecting specific areas of Banks’s collections and reading them as local windows onto global histories of British colonial expansion (Evans, 2021). The student will be encouraged to explore creative ways of tracing and mapping Banks’s dispersed holdings across institutions, their multiple and parallel provenances, and what they can reveal about the social and political worlds through which Banks and her contemporaries moved. Case studies will contextualise and deepen analysis of Banks’s gendered collecting and will bring insights into the longer histories of the curatorial and archival practices that shape dominant paradigms of knowledge organisation today. Ultimately, the student will be encouraged and empowered to devise their own methodological framing and draw out original insights on how Banks and her collections intersect with gender, class, and empire.
Possible Research Questions
• How and when did Sarah Sophia Banks acquire her collections? What do her annotations reveal about her network and collecting practices in the 18th century? How do these names connect with the Banks collections beyond the Library?
• What do Banks’s collections reveal about the imperial, social, cultural and gendered dimensions of her life and the worlds through which she moved?
• What knowledge systems and material ordering practices did she employ? How did she order and construct her unique assemblages? What does this tell us about gendered ways of structuring collections?
• How did her collecting constitute a form of ‘worldmaking’, particularly given her and her family’s social and global networks and perspectives?
• What is the evidence for Banks’s knowledge of other collections (in Britain or abroad)? How did this impact on her own practices?
• How did the nascent professionalism of male collecting and museology in her lifetime affect her collecting?
• Is she quoting from her own (or her brother’s) copies of works in her notes and cross-references? Can we reconstruct her library as a whole? How much survives?
• Can we reconstruct how the collection was physically placed at home, and what does this reveal about its history, value, visibility and use? How might dispersed and mixed-media collections be represented and made visible intra-institutionally?
• What might a history of Banks’s collections reveal about the broader ontologies and taxonomies of knowledge that shape many of our cultural institutions today?
Benefits and Opportunities
The successful candidate will be registered with the Department of Information Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL. UCL is London’s leading multidisciplinary university, ranked 9th in the 2026 QS World University Rankings and rated 2nd in the UK for research power in the Research Excellence Framework 2021. UCL:DIS is an international centre for research and teaching in the fields of archival studies, librarianship, publishing and digital humanities and is host to the Centre for Critical Archives and Records Management Studies (CCARM). The Department, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the UCL Doctoral School all offer complementary programmes for research training and personal development for doctoral students. All doctoral students in UCL:DIS are enrolled on compulsory research methods and training classes in their first year to support their research plan development, writing skills, research ethics and appropriate research methods. These classes and other departmental activities support the research student cohort and individual research development.
At the British Library, the student will become part of a vibrant cohort of collaborative doctoral researchers and benefit from staff-level access to the Library’s collections, resources and in-house training and development opportunities. CDP students also benefit from a dedicated programme of CDP Consortium events delivered in tandem with the other museums, galleries and heritage organisations affiliated with the AHRC CDP scheme, designed to provide CDP researchers with the knowledge, networks and skills to thrive in their future careers.
This collaborative PhD studentship offers the opportunity to combine academic training with practice-based experience and research behind the scenes of a major cultural institution. The project offers a combination of sustained and systematic analysis of a dispersed collection with visual analysis, giving the student a broad knowledge of print history and artists, as well as a wider understanding of recordkeeping practices and systems such as scrapbooking, extra-illustration and commonplace books.
Given staff-level access to relevant holdings, the student will receive training in and gain hands on experience of handling, identifying, researching and cataloguing books, manuscripts, archives, and prints. They will catalogue using specially designed spreadsheets to create records which will then be ingested to the British Library’s main and archives and manuscripts catalogues. We will encourage the student to engage in supervised social media activity reflecting their discoveries. In contributing to blog posts, they will receive support and feedback regarding the use of social media tools and the development of writing skills, in accordance with Library guidelines and practice. They will also be encouraged to work with and potentially shadow colleagues in Conservation, Metadata, Digitisation, Western Heritage and Culture and Learning at the Library, gaining broad understanding of the history of the collections, and how they are being made more accessible through research, cataloguing, digitisation and display projects.
Details of Award
The PhD studentship can be undertaken on a full-time or part-time basis from 1 October 2026.
AHRC CDP doctoral training grants fund studentships for 4 years full-time or part-time equivalent (up to 7 years). AHRC CDP doctoral training grants also make provision of funding for student development activities to help the student extend their wider skills portfolio and improve their career prospects.
The award pays tuition fees up to the value of the full-time home UKRI rate for PhD degrees and UCL has agreed to waive the difference between the UK and overseas fees rate. International candidates will be required to reside in the UK until completion of the PhD. The indicative fee level for Research Council studentships for 2026/27 is £5,151. The award also pays full maintenance for all students, both home and international students. This stipend is tax free, increases slightly each year, and is the equivalent of an annual salary, enabling the student to pay living costs. The indicative UKRI Minimum Doctoral Stipend for 2026/27 is £21,383. An additional London Weighting allowance of £2000/year will be applied for this studentship. In addition, the successful candidate will receive a CDP maintenance payment of £600/year. Further details on UKRI funding for doctoral training can be found on the UKRI website.
In addition, the successful student will be eligible for an additional research allowance courtesy of the British Library, up to £1,000 per financial year or part-time equivalent, for the duration of the project.
Additional information is available here»
Burlington Magazine Scholarship | French 18th-Century Art
The application period closes next Tuesday, from The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine Scholarship | French 18th-Century Fine and Decorative Art
Applications due by 31 March 2026
The Burlington Magazine is pleased to announce its ninth annual scholarship to provide funding over a 12-month period to those engaged in the study of French 18th-century fine and decorative art, enabling them to develop new ideas and research that will contribute to this field of art historical study.
Eligibility
Applicants must be studying, or intending to study, for an MA, PhD, post-doctoral or independent research in the field of French 18th-century fine and decorative arts within the 12-month period the funding is given (i.e. September 2026 – August 2027). The funding is open to UK and international applicants.
Research funded by this scholarship may lead to the submission of articles for publication in the Magazine: as such, the panel are looking for object related research, of the kind that the Burlington publishes.
Support and Duration
£12,000 is awarded to one recipient per year and applies to a 12-month period. Payments are made in Pound Sterling. Payments of £3,000 are normally made on a quarterly basis, with the first payment being disbursed within one month of the recipient being formally notified that they have been awarded the scholarship. Some flexibility in the payment schedule can be made, with prior approval, depending on the recipient’s circumstances. Before payment can be made, the recipient must have formally accepted the grant. Any unspent funds at the end of the grant period must be returned to The Burlington.
Eligible costs
• Travel and subsistence costs
• Book costs related to the research
• Image costs related to the research
• Facility/museum/archive access costs or related fees, such as photocopying
Cost NOT allowed
• Travel or registration costs for conference/meeting/workshop/training attendance, collaborative visits, or any training.
• Computer costs, unless it is a dedicated cost that is essential to the proposal and the importance has been clearly justified within the application.
• Any staff costs, whether personal payments (including salary) to the applicant or to other individuals including overseas collaborators, postgraduate, doctoral students and for other members of staff.
• Membership costs to any association(s)/organisation(s)
• General journal subscription costs
Key Dates
The start date of successful applications should be at the beginning of the academic year (generally September). Earlier start dates will be considered for independent scholars or post-doctoral research. The closing date is Tuesday, 31 March 2026. The successful applicant will be notified by 29 May 2026.
Application Procedure
Applicants must provide
• CV
• Description of project/research (no longer than 2 pages of A4)
• Budget
• Proof of Institution you are attending/will attend – if applicable
Applications can only be submitted via email. All application documents must be submitted in PDF or Word document (.docx) format and emailed to scholarship@burlington.org.uk. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted and asked to provide two references for further review by the Selection Panel. All correspondence should be conducted in English.
Monitoring the Award
Grant recipient(s) will provide two reports:
• The first, to be submitted six (6) months after receiving notification of the grant, is an interim written report to the panel on the status and progress of their research. It should be no less than 2-pages of A4 paper, in English.
• The second is a final report to submitted no later than two months after the grant comes to an end. The written report will consist of no less than 2-pages of A4 paper, in English, summarising the results of the research, as well as the spending allocation of the funds received. The recipient will also provide a copy of the thesis or independent research document or publication when it is completed.
Award Acknowledgement and Logo
We ask all award-holders to acknowledge our support in any publicity, conference or workshop talks, promotional material or publications associated with the research funded by The Burlington Magazine. Logos can be provided upon request.
Enquiries
If you have any enquiries about the submission of your application, please contact us at scholarship@burlington.org.uk.
Previous Recipients
2025 Ane Cornelia Pade (University of Cambridge)
2024 Pierre Marty (University of Toronto)
2023 Geoffrey Ripert (Bard Graduate Center)
2022 Alexander Dencher (Leiden University)
2021 Raha Shahidi (University of Sydney)
2020 Axel Moulinier (École du Louvre / University of Bourgogne)
2019 Aurora Laurenti (University of Turin)
2018 Konrad Niemira (University of Warsaw)
Call for Applications | Debenedetti Prize for 18th-C. Art History
From the Call for Applications:
The Elisa Debenedetti Prize for Research Writing in the
History of 18th-Century Art — Inaugural Award 2026
Sapienza Università di Roma, the Centro di Studi sulla
Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma, and the Fondazione Ernesta Besso
Applications due by 31 October 2026
Elisa Debenedetti (1933–2024), professor of art history at Sapienza Università di Roma, promoted the study and research of 18th-century arts for decades. Author of important contributions, essays, and monographs, she founded and edited the journals Studi sul Neoclassico (1973–80) and Studi sul Settecento Romano (since 1985), essential points of reference and discussion for researchers and scholars.
The Debenedetti family, in agreement with the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art, and Entertainment at Sapienza Università di Roma, the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma and the Fondazione Ernesta Besso, have established a biennial prize for an unpublished long-form study on the arts of the eighteenth century, focused, though not exclusively so, on Roman culture. The prize is open to young scholars of any nationality who are under 40 years of age on the closing date of the call for applications, for independent, research-based, long-form writing (i.e. degree theses, specialisation theses, doctoral theses, etc.) written in Italian, English, French, or Spanish. The prize consists of publication as a monograph by L’ Erma di Bretschneider in Rome, in the series Inchiostri di Storia dell’arte e dell’architettura.
Each application must contain, in PDF format:
• Text and images (low resolution)
• Abstract (maximum 900 words)
• Brief curriculum vitae et studiorum
Applications must be received by 31 October 2026 at the email address premioelisadebenedetti@gmail.com. Confirmation of receipt of applications will be sent.
The jury is composed of a representative of the Debenedetti family, the director of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma, two representatives of Sapienza Università di Roma (SARAS and DSDRA Departments), two representatives of the Fondazione Ernesta Besso, and a representative of a foreign research institution. The jury’s decision is final. The winner will be announced by 30 November 2026. The prize ceremony will take place in Rome in December 2026, and the publication will be released within the following year.
Premio Elisa Debenedetti per uno studio di Storia delle arti del Settecento
Call for Applications | Histories and Futures of Indigenous Print Cultures
From the American Antiquarian Society:
Paper Relations: Histories and Futures of Indigenous Print Cultures
A Summer Seminar in the History of the Book Led by Kathryn Walkiewicz and Kelly Wisecup
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, 21–26 June 2026
Applications due by 3 April 2026
Cherokee Hymns (New Echota, 1833) (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, #226669).
What relationships are necessary to make Indigenous books? What relations are held in paper, bindings, and ink? And what relations are generated by the circulation and use of Indigenous print?
This seminar will examine Indigenous cultures of print between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Our focus on relations extends from collaborations with publishers, patrons, and printers to considering plants, trees, animals, and rags in paper and bindings―as well as the complex connections books have to the archives where they are held. Specific topics will be driven by participants’ interests but may include periodical networks, relations between Black and Indigenous print cultures, environmental histories of the book, Indigenous language revitalization, Tribal nations’ acts of archival creation and activism, and more.
Throughout the seminar, participants will examine both conceptual and methodological questions using AAS’s vast holdings of Indigenous printed materials. Using readings drawn from Indigenous studies and history of the book scholarship, we will consider how this scholarship might be put in conversation with Indigenous peoples’ use of print and the book. Building on influential research that has recovered histories of Indigenous writing and challenged the oral-literacy binary, we will ask how Indigenous books manifest, contest, and make relations with living beings, with other books, and with communities.
Guest speakers for the seminar include Ellen Cushman (Northeastern University), David Aiona Chang (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), and Kimberly Toney (Brown University). Paper Relations coincides with the James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture, which will be given by Phillip Round (University of Iowa) on 24 June 2026.
Participants will be encouraged to think about how to take insights from the seminar into their own classrooms, libraries, and communities, as well as to their networks for mentoring and collegial support. Early career scholars, library and museum professionals, and Tribal staff are especially encouraged to apply.
PHBAC is committed to creating an environment that welcomes all people and meets their access needs. The AAS library and classroom facilities are wheelchair accessible. Other accommodations may be available upon advance request. Participants are encouraged to indicate any accessibility needs in their applications.
Tuition for the five-day seminar is $1000. This includes meals throughout the week and a guided field trip to the Hassanamesit Woods in Grafton, Massachusetts. Two tuition scholarships to attend the seminar are generously funded by the Bibliographical Society of America. Additional scholarships are available for students and scholars specializing in Indigenous studies, including community members or staff affiliated with Tribal organizations. See the application form for more information about scholarships to attend the seminar. The cost of housing is not included in the tuition fee. Participants will have the option of staying in dormitory housing on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute campus (within easy walking distance of AAS) for approximately $80 per night.
For questions about the seminar, please contact John J. Garcia, AAS director of scholarly programs and partnerships, at jgarcia@mwa.org. Applications can be submitted here»
Kathryn Walkiewicz (enrolled citizen, Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ) is an associate professor of literature and faculty director for the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Walkiewicz is the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and co-editor of The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). Their research and teaching interests include Native American and Indigenous studies, print culture, early American literature and culture, nineteenth-century American studies, Southern studies, speculative fiction, and horror. Walkiewicz held an AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship in 2021 and was elected to AAS membership in 2022.
Kelly Wisecup is the Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where she is also an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Her research brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. She is the author of Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2021) and is principal investigator for the Ojibwe Muzzeniegun Digital Edition Project, a project to create a collaborative digital edition of the nineteenth-century literary magazine made by the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her family. Wisecup was a Peterson Fellow at AAS in 2014–15 and was elected to membership in the Society in 2022.
9th Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
From Master Drawings:
Ninth Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
Submissions due by 15 November 2026
George Romney, Lady Seated at a Table (recto); pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash (NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 11.66.3).
Master Drawings is now accepting submissions for the 9th Annual Ricciardi Prize of $5000. The award is given for the best new and unpublished article on a drawing topic (of any period) by a scholar under the age of 40. Candidates are also eligible for a $1000 runner-up prize and publication. Prize winners are eligible for reimbursement of costs associated with obtaining image publication permissions. They will be invited to present their research at a symposium held during Master Drawings Week in New York (January 2027). Information about essay requirements and how to apply can be found here. Information about past winners and finalists is available here.
The average length is between 2500 and 3750 words, with five to twenty illustrations. Submissions should be no longer than 7500 words and have no more than 75 footnotes. All submissions must be in article form, following the format of the journal. Please refer to our Submission Guidelines for additional information. We will not consider submissions of seminar papers, dissertation chapters, or other written material that has not been adapted into the format of a journal article. Written material that has been previously published, or is scheduled for future publication, will not be eligible. Articles may be submitted in any language. Please be sure to include a 100-word abstract outlining the scope of your article with your submission.
Call for Applications | Painted Wall Preservation Scholarship
Interior of the Hersey-Whitten House, which was constructed in the late-18th or early-19th century in the village of Center Tuftonboro, New Hampshire. Originally built for the Copp family, it was once a dance hall and inn. Learn more from The Center for Painted Wall Preservation»
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From the scholarship announcement:
The Center for Painted Wall Preservation Scholarship
Applications due by 30 April 2026
The Center for Painted Wall Preservation (pwpcenter.org) invites undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, and artisans, whether established or in training, to apply for this scholarship, which aims to develop educational projects that further our mission through documentation, conservation, and preservation—where art, history, craft, and science meet.
This year’s scholarship of $2000 will be awarded to the individual whose proposal for an educational, scholarly project is deemed best designed to further the stated mission of our organization—to further the study, understanding, and appreciation of paint-decorated plaster walls and associated interior colorized items of the 18th and early 19th centuries in New England and New York, and to educate the public about this unique and vulnerable cultural heritage. Interested parties may apply for an Application Process Summary and Application Form by contacting info@pwpcenter.org with ‘Scholarship Fund’ in the subject line. Applications will be accepted from 1 January until midnight, 30 April 2026.
The Center for Painted Wall Preservation is a nationally recognized 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Organization.
Funding | Burlington Bursaries for Researching Drawings
From ArtHist.net:
The Burlington Magazine’s Travel Bursaries for Researching European Drawings
Applications due by 1 February 2026
We are delighted to announce a new initiative: The Burlington Magazine Travel Bursaries, generously funded by the Rick Mather David Scrase Foundation. These bursaries are designed to support emerging art historians undertaking research on old master drawings. The awards will fund travel to major collections worldwide to study works of Western art on paper from the Renaissance to 1900.
Typical awards will range from £2,000 to 2,500 for travel within Europe and £3,000–3,500 for intercontinental travel. Applications are welcomed from postgraduate and curatorial researchers worldwide. The deadline for applications is Sunday, 1 February 2026. Further details and application guidelines can be found at The Burlington website.
Attingham Courses in 2026
Attingham offerings for 2026:
The Study Programme | Sweden: Stockholm and Its Hinterland
Led by David Adshead with Beatrice Goddard, 8–14 June 2026
Applications due by 30 January 2026
The Hall of Mirrors, Gustav III’s Pavilion at Haga Park. The Royal Palaces, Sweden (Photograph: ©Jens Markus Lindhe).
This intensive seven-day course will study the patronage of successive Swedish royal dynasties and that of the nobility and wealthy merchant class, in Stockholm’s palaces and the castles and country houses of its hinterland—Svealand, the nation’s historic core. With earlier outliers, it will focus on the arts and architecture of the mid 17th to early 19th centuries, encompassing the Baroque, Rococo, neo-Classical and ‘Empire’ styles.
For more than a hundred years, from the accession of Gustavus Adolphus in 1611 to its loss of territory at the end of the Great Northern War in 1721, Sweden was a European military superpower and enjoyed an ‘Age of Greatness’, its fortunes reflected in the richness of buildings, interiors, and collections of fine and decorative arts, particularly those of the monarchy. A new political compact with power-sharing between government and parliament—the so-called ‘Age of Liberty’—subsequently encouraged a flowering of the arts and sciences and the further influence of all things French. During the following ‘Gustavian Age’, led by the energetic but latterly autocratic, Gustav III, Sweden’s elegant interpretation of neo-Classicism reached its apogee.
In Stockholm, visits will be made to the Riddarhuset, Riddarholmskyrkan, the Royal Palace, and Gustav III’s Museum of Antiquities. Outside Stockholm, in addition to a number of private houses, visits will include, Tullgarns Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Svartsjö Palace, the English landscape park at Haga, Rosersberg Palace, Svindersvik a summer residence, Gripsholm Castle, the manor house at Grönsöo, and Skokloster Castle. For the last two nights we will be staying in the town of Mariefred on the south-west tip of Lake Mälaren.
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The 73rd Summer School
Led by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, with Sabrina Silva, 27 June — 12 July 2026
Applications due by 30 January 2026
Buscot Park, Faringdon, Oxfordshire, 1780–83.
The 73rd Attingham Summer School, a 16-day residential course will visit country houses in Sussex, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. From West Dean, our first base, we will study, amongst other houses and gardens: Petworth House, where the patronage of great British artists such as Turner and Flaxman enrich its Baroque interiors; Parham, a fine Elizabethan house in an unrivalled setting; and Standen, an Arts and Crafts reinterpretation of the country house.
In the Midlands, a series of related houses will be examined: Hardwick Hall, unique amongst Elizabethan houses for its survival of late 16th-century decoration and contents; Bolsover Castle, a Jacobean masque setting frozen in stone; and Chatsworth, where the collections and gardens of the Cavendishes and Dukes of Devonshire span more than four centuries. Other highlights include Robert Adam’s crisp neo-Classical interior and Fishing Pavilion at Kedleston Hall.
The final part of the course will focus on the rich estates and collections of Oxfordshire. Our itinerary will include Broughton Castle, a moated and fortified manor house with a chapel first consecrated for Christian worship in 1331, and Buscot Park, with its superb collection with works by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Rubens, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and furniture by Robert Adam and Thomas Hope. While at Buscot we will have the opportunity to explore one of the country’s finest water gardens, designed by Harold Peto in 1904 and extended from 1911–13, and a surviving country house theatre created in 1936 for the 2nd Lord Faringdon. We will also visit the much more modest 17th-century stone-built, Kelmscott Manor, the beloved country home of William Morris and his family, and the place that he described as ‘Heaven on Earth’.
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Royal Collection Studies
Led by Helen Jacobsen, with Beatrice Goddard, 6–15 September 2026
Applications due by 15 February 2026
James Roberts, The Pavilion Breakfast Room at Buckingham Palace (known by 1873 as the Queen’s Luncheon Room), 1850, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic, paper: 26 × 38 cm (RCIN 919918).
The Royal Collection is one of the world’s leading collections of fine and decorative art, with over one million works from six continents, many of them masterpieces. Working in partnership with The Royal Collection Trust, this ten-day residential course offers participants the opportunity to study the magnificent holdings of paintings, furniture, metalwork, porcelain, jewellery, sculpture, arms and armour, books, and works on paper and to examine the architecture and interiors of the palaces which house them. Based near Windsor, the course also examines the history of the collection and the key roles played by monarchs and their consorts over the centuries. Combining a mixture of lectures and tutorials, visits to both the occupied and unoccupied palaces in and around London and close-up object study, Royal Collection Studies aims to give experienced professionals in the heritage sector a deeper understanding of this remarkable collection.
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From College Library to Country House
Led by Andrew Moore, with Rita Grudzien, 7–11 September 2026
Applications due by 15 February 2026
This course is conceived from the perspective of the British aristocracy and gentry whose education centred upon preparing them to run their country estate, including the house and collections, and argues for the importance of the library and the book collection in this process. Too often in country house studies the architecture, interior design, and art collections have held sway; this course aims to foreground the College book collections at the disposal of tutors and the subsequent development of the country house library. Libraries reveal not only the intellectual or recreational interests of past generations, but also how books manifest taste, fashion, and opportunities for display. Book historians and tutors well known in their respective fields will conduct the course, attending to a broad variety of subjects including book binding, the development of the idea of rare books and of book collections, library portraiture, and questions of spatial analysis and mobility—all in the context of the collections housed in some of the oldest and most complete book rooms in Britain.
Library at Holkham Hall.
This intensive residential five-day course is based in the exceptional surroundings of St Catharine’s College, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Directed by Dr Andrew Moore, the programme plans to visit a series of iconic libraries. These include the historic private library of Houghton Hall, created by Robert Walpole, and Holkham Hall, home to one of the greatest private manuscript and printed book collections in Britain, housed today in three of the country’s most important country house library rooms. The course will also visit the library designed by James Gibbs for Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, and the Braybrooke library rooms at Audley End, of considerable interest for being reconstituted from dressing rooms into the 3rd Lord Braybrooke’s library, incorporating the inherited Neville family books. The library at Audley End functioned as an informal family sitting room, with the adjacent study (the South Library) still displayed as it looked in the early 19th century.
The course includes the Old Libraries of St John’s College and Queens’ College; the Wren Library, Trinity; the Perne Library at Peterhouse; the Parker Library at Corpus Christi; and the Founder’s Library at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Additional seminars will take place in the context of the historic book collections in the Cambridge University Library designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960). St Catharine’s College will host a seminar on the medical book collection of John Addenbrooke (1680–1719), founder of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.
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Note (added 14 January 2026) — From Attingham’s Instagram account (6 January 2026) . . .
We are thrilled to congratulate Annabel Westman on being awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours “for services to heritage, particularly to The Attingham Trust and historic textiles.” Annabel’s time as Director of the Attingham Summer School (1993–2005) and Executive Director of The Attingham Trust (2005–2021) helped shape Attingham into the vibrant, welcoming, and extraordinary community it is today. Alongside this, her distinguished career as a textile historian and consultant has enriched the understanding and restoration of historic interiors worldwide. This honour is richly deserved, and we are so proud to celebrate Annabel and all she continues to give to the field.
Walpole Library Fellowship and Travel Grants for 2026–27
From the Lewis Walpole Library:
Lewis Walpole Library Visiting Fellowships and Travel Grants, 2026–2027
Applications due by 1 November 2025
Applications are invited for 2026–2027 Lewis Walpole Library Visiting Fellowships (four weeks) and Travel Grants (two weeks). The Lewis Walpole Library is a department of Yale University Library with collections that focus on all aspects of British life in the long eighteenth century.
Fellowship and Travel Grant awards include round trip travel from the recipient’s home institution and the library, a per diem allowance, reimbursement for car rental or local travel expenses between the library’s Farmington campus and the main Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut, and accommodation in the Timothy Root House, an eighteenth-century residence adjacent to the main library building.
Applicants must fill out an application form, submit a statement describing the project and its dependence on the Lewis Walpole Library’s collections as well as the project’s importance to the field, a list of specific Lewis Walpole Library collection materials to be consulted, a CV of no more than 3 pages, and two confidential letters of recommendation. The application deadline is November 1. The fellowship or travel grant must be taken between 1 June 2026 and 31 May 2027. Full details, expectations, and a link to the application can be found here.
Questions? Email walpole@yale.edu. Come join our community of scholars!
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