The Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania

• The Eccles Institute & Hay Festival Global Writer’s Award grants up to £20,000 annually to two writers from the UK and Latin America for a yet-to-be-published book relating to the Americas. The prize also grants a residency of up to a year at the British Library and access to curatorial expertise within the Library's world-class Americas collections. 

Critically acclaimed books published with the support of the Writer’s Award include:

• Naomi Wood – Mrs. Hemingway (2014)
• Olivia Laing – The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016)
• Bob Stanley – Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop (2022)
• Rachel Hewitt – In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (2023) 

The Eccles Institute runs an exciting programme of fellowships and awards each year, welcoming around 35 academics, creatives, and independent researchers to the Library to explore our Americas collections.

Fellowship schemes include:

• The Visiting Fellowship Programme offers short-term stipends aimed at supporting 3–4 weeks of research at the Library. Applications close on 19 December 2025 for 2026-27 Fellows.
• The Creative Fellowship Programme is a year-long residency for artists working with specific collections and utilising innovative approaches to creative research and public engagement. Applications open in April each year.
• The Fulbright-British Library Eccles Institute Scholar Award in Library and Information Studies is a three-month opportunity for a professional or academic to explore the theory and practice of librarianship in the Americas with the Library.

As well as enhanced curatorial support to discover the collections, Eccles Fellows are invited to present stories and ideas from their work at a range of research seminars, public events and digital platforms hosted by the Library. 

We support doctoral-level research on the Americas and Oceania in two main ways. In partnership with universities, we co-supervise PhDs including those funded through the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDPs) and Doctoral Training Partnerships. Current and recent topics include: 

• Creative engagement with the histories and legacies of transatlantic enslavement
• The interplay between American food systems and the creation of British culinary culture since 1945
• North American Indigenous languages in the British Library’s collections, post-1850
• Black American magazines and the short story.

We also host PhD placements, which enable researchers to gain professional experience on a topic related to their PhD through three-month projects. Recent topics have included:

• Surveying printed books and journals from the Pacific Islands
• Researching Afro-Brazilian published material in the Library’s collections
• Comix in the Rund Collection.

Calls for applications occur on an annual basis. Find more information on the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme.

The Eccles Institute welcomes proposals from universities and cultural institutions for research collaborations that seek to deepen knowledge and understanding of the British Library’s Americas and Oceania collections. We encourage projects that promote innovative forms of engagement, interpretation and dissemination.

Please visit our Research Collaboration page for more information on how to propose a research project with the British Library. If you would like to discuss a project informally, please send a brief outline to eccles-institute@bl.uk.