Doctoral Study with the Science Museums and Archives Consortium

The latest award from the AHRC to SMAC provides nine studentships across three cohorts (for academic years 2024/5, 2025/6, and 2026/7). 

Studentships last for four years, including up to six months’ professional development activity such as training and placements. Students will have their university fees covered, receive a tax-free stipend at current UKRI doctoral rates, and additional financial support from the SMAC organisation their project is associated with (to cover travel costs, training, and professional development). 

Placements may take place at the SMAC organisation or elsewhere, with previous students undertaking work with organisations such as the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, and the Finnish Museum of Photography. 

SMAC projects which are recruiting students will be listed on our Opportunities for Students page.

• Mika Hyman—Mobilising chocolate: plants, pathogens, and prospectors, 1840-1950 (Kew/RGS-IBG/University of Cambridge)
• Shreya Kaund—Mapping fossil colonialism in Asia, c. 1810-1914 (RGS-IBG/University of Warwick)
• Katherine McNab—The organic movement & the public culture of science, 1985-2025 (Science Museum/University of Nottingham)

• Michelle Payne—Reinterpreting Marianne North: life writing, botanical travel and the legacies of empire (Kew/ Royal Holloway, University of London) 
• Solvig Choi—Inside-out and outside-in: Participatory Methods for Science and Technology Collections (National Science and Media Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Odile Lehnan—Celestial Machines: Caroline Herschel, Astronomical Notebooks and the Material Culture of Predigital Communication Systems (Royal Society/ Science Museum/ Durham University) 
• Peter Randall—The “Wandering Tribes”: recovering the lost lives and landscapes of the railway navvies (National Railway Museum/ University of York) 
• Anaïs Walsdorf—Metallic Empire: Science, Energy, and Industrial Imperialism in the John Percy Collection, 1817–89 (Science Museum/ University of Warwick)  
• Rebecca Derine—Where are the Women of Colour? Addressing Gaps and Silences in Science and Industry Museum Collections (Science and Industry Museum/ University of Leeds) 

• Eleanor Stephenson—The Royal Society and Slavery in Jamaica, 1660-1713 (Royal Society/ Cambridge University) 
• Catriona Sharples—Colonial science and military service: The West India Regiments and circum-Atlantic networks of knowledge, c.1815-c.1900 (RGS-IBG/ University of Warwick) 
• Shibani Das—Race, ethnicity and telecommunications in Britain and its empire, 1850-present (BT Archives/ University of Exeter) 
• Dorothea Cox—Curating Climate Change: Collecting and Displaying Ecological Crisis in UK Museums (Science Museum/ University of East Anglia) 
• Will Law—Decolonizing the Master’s Gift: British Rail, decolonisation, and the International Market 1948-1991 (National Railway Museum/ University of Southampton) 
• Catherine Lucas—Nineteenth-century science and the history of sonic possibility (National Science and Media Museum/ UCL) 

• Leena Lindell—Between Worlds: Kenneth Cantile> and Locomotive Engineering in Africa, the Americas and Asia (National Railway Museum / University of York) 
• Surya Bowyer—Collecting the Boundaries of Art in the Science Museum (Science Museum / Birkbeck, University of London) 
• Katherine Vann—Rupununi> Re-collections: Historical Photographs, Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Heritage in Guyana (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew/ Royal Holloway, University of London) 
• Bethany Kidd—Resourcing the New Science: 1660-1760 (Royal Society/ University College London) 
• Megan Furr—British Telegraphic Work and Spaces, 1846-1950 (BT Archives/ University of Exeter) 

• Chloe Shields—Eating on the Go: Cultures of Consumption and the Railway in Britain, 1840–1940 (National Railway Museum/ University of Strathclyde) 
• Natasha Kitcher—Media convergence before convergence: The case of the Electrophone (BT Archives/ Loughborough University) 
• Jayne Knight—A Museum within the Museum: The Kodak Collection at National Science and Media Museum (National Science and Media Museum/ University of Brighton) 
• Alexander Appleton—‘Manchester Goods’: Trading a global commodity (Science and Industry Museum/ University of East Anglia)  
• Osnat Katz—From London to Mars, and Back to London: People, Objects and the History of UK Space Science (Science Museum/ UCL) 
• Francesca Strobino—Investigating Talbot’s Experiments in Photomechanical Printing (National Science and Media Museum/ DeMontfort University) 
• Alice Oates—Instruments of Scientific Governance? Historical Geographies of Halley Bay, 1956-present (Royal Society and Royal Geographical Society with IBG/University of Cambridge)

• Ciaran Johnson—The Railways and the Making of Upland Britain: the Lifecycle of an Envirotechnical Regime (National Railway Museum/ University of Northumbria) 
• Henry Roberts—A History of Audience Thinking at the Science Museum (Science Museum/ University College London) 
• Rosanna Evans—Instrumental learning? Object lessons in recapturing past science teaching (Science Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Rhiannon Lewis—Digitised collections and the social museum: the (re)use of images of objects in the collections of the Science Museum Group (Science Museum / School of Advanced Study, University of London) 
• Edward Wilson—Objects of Electronic Sound and Music in Museums (National Science and Media Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Johanna Rustler—Britain’s Railways in the Great War, 1914-1918 (Science Museum/ University of Aberdeen) 

• Amanda Stevens—Home on the rails: the design, fitting and decoration of train interiors in Britain c.1920-1955, (National Railway Museum / Open University) 
• Georgina Lockton—Science, Technology and road safety in the motor age (Science Museum/ Leicester University) 
• George Tobin—The Art of Earth-building: placing relief models in the culture of modern geography (Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers/ University of Glasgow) 
• Rebecca Kearney—‘False teeth for the masses’: artificial teeth as technologies, prostheses and commodities in Britain, 1848–1948 (Science Museum / University of Kent) 
• Cameron Tailford—Making electronics in interwar Britain: gendered labour in the thermionic valve industry (Science and Industry Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Francesca Elliott—Power-assisted learning? Exhibiting, interpreting and teaching on technology in the twentieth-century industrial city (Science and Industry Museum/ University of Manchester) 
• Sarah Murphy-Young—Constructing and consuming imagined futures: advertising healthcare to publics and professionals in twentieth-century Britain (Science Museum/ University of Leeds 
• Chris Freeman—Beaming the British Empire: the imperial wireless chain, c. 1900–1940 (BT Archives/ Science Museum/ University of Exeter) 

• Elizabeth Adams—Literary cultures, social networks and the railway worker, 1840–1920 (National Railway Museum/ University of Stirling)  
• Aron Sterk—Emanuel Mendes da Costa (1717–1791): multicultural and multinational networks in Georgian London (Royal Society/ Science Museum/ University of Lincoln) 
• Joshua Scarlett—Instruments and their makers: a study of experiment, collaboration and identity in seventeenth-century London (Science Museum/ Royal Society/ University of York) 
• Caroline Avery—Making the pulse: the reception of the stethoscope in nineteenth century Britain, 1817–1870 (Science Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Joy Slappnig—The indigenous map: native information, ethnographic object, artefact of encounter (Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers/ Royal Holloway, University of London) 

• Gemma Almond—Correcting vision in nineteenth-century England: A social, cultural, medical and material history of spectacles (Science Museum/ University of Swansea) 
• Kevin Tracey—Calculating value: using and collecting the tools of early modern mathematics (Science Museum/ University of Swansea) 
• Frances Morgan—Electronic Music Studios in musical, commercial and international perspective (Science Museum/ Royal College of Art) 
• Tom Ritchie—Meccano: The nuts and bolts of science (Science Museum/ University of Kent) 
• Dom Weldon—Mapping the Historical Growth & Cultural Context of the British Fixed Line Network (Science Museum/ BT Archives/ Kings College) 
• Rebecca Smith—The Daily Herald: Popular desires and managing the production of photographs (National Science and Media Museum/ DeMontford University) 
• Sophie Vohra—Railways and Commemoration: Anniversaries, Commemorative Cultures and the Making of Railway History (National Railway Museum/ University of York) 
• Josh Butt—The rise and fall of the Manchester motor industry, 1896–1939 (Science and Industry Museum/ Manchester Metropolitan University) 

• Benjamin Regal—Conserving doped fabric aircraft: historic origins; heritage outcomes (Science Museum/ Imperial College London) 
• Charlotte Connelly—Investigating the flow of electrical ideas through the instruments of their discovery, from 1800–1850 (Science Museum/ University of Cambridge) 
• Paul Coleman—Danger—High Voltage: the rise of megavolt electricity supply in 20th century Britain (Science and Industry Museum/ University of Leeds) 
• Philip Roberts—Magic Lantern Culture in Britain (1850–1920): Exhibition, Reception and Mixed Media Landscapes (National Science and Media Museum/ University of York) 
• Hannah Reeve—Women and the ‘railway family’ (1900–48) (National Railway Museum/ Keele University) 

• Caitlin Doherty—Representations of Flight: The Eighteenth Century Imagination and Modern Collections (Science Museum/ University of Cambridge) 
• Noeme Santana—Building an empire: corporate vision and the global geographies of infrastructure (Science Museum/ Royal Holloway, University of London) 
• Laura Newman—Making germs real: creating, performing and learning about a dangerous invisible thing in the public sphere, c.1860–1930 (Science Museum/ Kings College London) 
• Rachel Boon, Jacob Ward, Alice Haigh—‘Research is the door of tomorrow’: the networks and culture of the Post Office Research Stations, Dollis Hill and Martlesham, c. 1910–1983. A collection of three doctorates (Science Museum/ BT Archives/ University of Manchester/ University College London/ University of Leeds) 
• Thomas Spain—Food Miles: the Imaginings, Politics and Practices of Food Distribution in the UK, 1920–1975 (National Railway Museum/ University of York) 
• Emily Marsden—2016: Media in the First World War (National Science and Media Museum / Durham University) 
• Erin Beeston—Spaces of industrial heritage: a history of uses, perceptions and remaking of the Liverpool Road Station site, Manchester (Science and Industry Museum/ University of Manchester)