AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDP) – CDP4 Cohort 2026/27. Call for HEI Partners/Academic Supervisors.
Research theme: Rediscovering a Woman Collector at the British Library: New Sources and Perspectives on Sarah Sophia Banks
British Library Co-Supervisors:
- Felicity Myrone (Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings)
Maddy Smith (Lead Curator, Printed Heritage 1600-1900) - Dr Alice Marples (Research and Postgraduate Development Manager)
Context and summary
Extensive materials collected by Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), one of the most important antiquarian collectors of her time, 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 only 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’ 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 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.
Research areas
Banks organises her collections by subject and chronologically, notes the date and often the source of each item, quotes and cross-references other texts and authorities in inserted notes, and writes catalogues of her own collections. Research questions on these rich sources could include:
- 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 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, and what does this reveal about its history, value, visibility and use?
Banks’s social networks and intellectual enterprise have received scholarly attention from literary and art historical scholars. The project would complement existing scholarship by, for example, Edward Besly, 2023; Jan Bondeson, 2001; R.J. Eaglen, 2008; Catherine Eagleton, 2013, 2014; Arlene Leis, 2013, 2014; Anthony Pincott, 2004; Gillian Russell, 2015, 2018, 2020; and Kacie L. Wills and Frica Y. Hayes, 2020, 2024. But these and other scholars have focussed on the few ‘known’ print albums at the Library, mentioning in passing, or ignoring our wider holdings altogether. The project would extend this research to our wider Banks collections, connecting their collecting histories to broader social themes, issues of gender and historical knowledge and, specifically for the Library, our efforts to improve the visibility of our works on paper.
The student’s cataloguing will reveal Banks’s collections to all, with meaningful impact at the British Library and beyond. The history of collections has come to the fore of decolonial debates and activism in recent years and these issues are of important consideration in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Academic sector. There is now a rich scholarly and critical literature which the student will be encouraged to engage with, contributing to conversations both within and beyond the Library. Work on Joseph Banks is well developed and demonstrates the global connections of the family. His links to the slave trade are acknowledged by recent work at the British Library and at other institutions (including, for example, the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). Following guidelines recently established by IDCoP, the Inclusive Description Community of Practice at the Library, the student will investigate Sarah Sophia Banks’s provenance network, recuperating a female collector’s collecting against the wider context of empire and social privilege which she inhabits.
Overall, the project offers varied and hands-on, practical experience of identifying, securing, describing and researching prints, drawings, ephemera, books and manuscripts.
Benefits and training opportunities for the CDP student
This project will allow the student to combine their academic training with research in the context of a national library and major cultural institution. The project offers a combination of sustained and systematic analysis of a dispersed collection with visual analysis, giving them a broad knowledge of print history and artists as well as a wider understanding of systems such as scrapbooking, extra-illustration and commonplace books.
The Library offers wide-ranging vocational training which could be utilised in career development. The student will be given staff-level access to the relevant holdings and trained and given hands on experience of handling and identifying and cataloguing prints, books and manuscripts. They will be encouraged to work with and potentially work-shadow colleagues in Conservation, Digitisation, Printed Heritage, Western Heritage and Culture and Learning, gaining understanding of the history of our collections and how they are being made more accessible though current research, cataloguing, digitisation and display projects. We would encourage the student to engage in supervised social media activity - they could, for example, guest host the BL twitter account or write blogs for Untold Lives. They will receive support and feedback regarding the use of social media tools and the development of writing skills, in accordance with departmental guidelines and practice.
Application deadline
Friday 28 November 2025, 5pm
Application guidance
Further information and details of how to apply.
Contact for queries
British Library Research Development Office – Postgraduate inbox
pgr@bl.uk
and
Felicity Myrone, Lead Curator Western Prints and Drawings
Felicity.myrone@bl.uk