[Commlist] call for PhD candidates on The City in the Box, the Box in the City: The Role of the Television Archive in Cities of Culture

REMINDER – APPLICATION DEADLINE APPROACHING (8/2/19)

The City in the Box, the Box in the City: The Role of the Television 
Archive in Cities of Culture
Collaborative Doctoral Project between the Centre for Television 
History, Heritage and Memory Research, the Media Archive for Central 
England, and Illuminations.

Supervisors: Dr Helen Wheatley (Warwick); Dr Clare Watson (MACE), 
Professor John Wyver (Illuminations/Westminster University)

PLEASE SHARE WIDELY

We are seeking an outstanding candidate for the following Collaborative 
Doctoral Award (CDA) project, based jointly at the University of 
Warwick, the Media Archive of Central England, and the television 
production company, Illuminations, to begin in October 2019. This award 
is a 3-year PhD scholarship covering fees (£4,347 in 2018/19) and 
stipend (£15,040 in 2018/19). It is worth noting that this is a 
University of Warwick funded scholarship and is entirely separate from 
the AHRC scholarship competition.

This CDA PhD focuses on the important relationship between the 
television archive and Cities of Culture. This connects to, but is 
separate from, the Ghost Town project 
(https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/ghosttown) which comes out of the 
ongoing research of scholars in the Centre for Television History, 
Heritage and Memory Research at the University of Warwick. The 
supervisory team outlined above will offer the researcher a valuable 
combination of skills and opportunities. This project offers an exciting 
chance for someone to develop a new body of scholarship that evaluates 
television’s role in City of Culture years, whilst being introduced to 
media archiving, curation, and production by leading experts in this 
field and learning how to take media history research beyond the 
academic library and the classroom. This CDA is particularly exciting as 
it will begin in the build-up to Coventry’s City of Culture year (2021), 
and will therefore be based on a live piece of research which reaches 
beyond the academy in a number of interesting ways.

The aims of the PhD are to:
1. Analyse and evaluate of the role that archive television (both 
programming made from the television archive and rebroadcast/screened 
archive television) has played in the current and previous City of 
Culture years (looking at the cases of Derry, Hull and Coventry). This 
aspect of the work (supervised at the University of Warwick) combines 
programme analysis with interviews with archivists, broadcasters, 
previous city of culture teams, and audience research. By the end of the 
three year research period, the researcher will have produced a PhD 
thesis on this.
2. Work with the Media Archive of Central England to explore 
opportunities for utilising/highlighting their archival holdings in 
Coventry in 2021. This work will adopt their previous ‘Full Circle’ 
approach to working with communities in relation to the archive[1]. The 
researcher will look at the extant assets of MACE that relate to 
Coventry, develop outreach opportunities with diverse groups in the city 
on behalf of the archive, and facilitate the uncovering of items of 
archival interest in the community with a view to lodging them back in 
the archive. This researcher will also work with the team at MACE to 
establish what the legacy of Coventry 2021 might be in relation to 
ongoing public access to archive programming made in and about the city. 
In this aspect of the work, the researcher will also work alongside the 
team working on the ongoing Ghost Town project.
3. Put the researcher’s knowledge of the city’s history and its archival 
presence into practice by contributing to the production of 
Illuminations’ lyrical documentary about Coventry Cathedral for 
broadcast in 2021. Illuminations are the second partner on this CDA and 
the researcher would have the exciting opportunity to work with 
Professor John Wyver on this, whose professional profile straddles the 
worlds of broadcasting history and television production.

We are looking for someone with experience and/or interest in some or 
all of the following areas:

Broadcasting/media history
The history of the British twentieth century
Archives and archiving, particularly audio-visual or related to 
broadcasting/media
Questions of cultural value particularly in relation to cities of 
culture and/or screen heritage
Media production (especially using archives)
Urban studies

We are interested in receiving applications from candidates with an MA 
in one of these areas or an undergraduate degree plus relevant 
professional experience.

Applications should be made via the University of Warwick standard 
application process: 
https://postgrad.warwick.ac.uk/SWIFT.web/skins/pgapp/login.aspx

Essential guidance on filling out the application MUST be followed and 
can be downloaded here: 
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/prospective/mphilandphd/phdapps/cdaguidance

You can contact Helen Wheatley ((Helen.Wheatley /at/ warwick.ac.uk)) or Clare 
Watson ((CWatson /at/ lincoln.ac.uk)) for further information about this PhD 
opportunity, or to discuss your personal statement in advance of the 
application.

The timetable for the application process is as follows:
Application deadline: By the end of 8/2/19
Successful candidates will be informed: By the end of 12/2/19
Interview date: 1/3/19
The PhD will commence on: 30/9/19

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