PhD Studentship: Creating a Feminist Archival Praxis to Reveal Histories of Women in the UK Advertising Industry

Through the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE), we are offering a fully funded PhD studentship with the University of East Anglia and the History of Advertising Trust.

Through this project you will:

• Develop your research with UEA media scholars and archive professionals
• Gain critical knowledge and skills in academic and archival settings
• Have unique access to archive collections relating to the production and distribution of UK advertising materials
• Explore, identify and shape a project exploring ‘invisible’ women within those collections

You will use your research to:

• Reclaim these women’s stories
• Offer new insights to the UK advertising industry
• Promote / disseminate your research heritage

We are looking for a researcher with a background in film or media studies, with experience of archival research. The successful applicant will have their fees paid and receive a stipend to cover living expenses. We offer funding on a full or part-time basis.

This studentship extends UEA’s current feminist-informed approach to archives to an untouched area within archive scholarship: women in the UK advertising industry. Advertising sits on the fringes of mainstream film/media history; while debates exist around the effectiveness and ideological impact of individual advertisements and campaigns, studies of advertising history tend to focus more on how women are represented within advertising materials rather than the place and experience of women within that industry. A potent creative sector, advertising has been portrayed historically via dominant patriarchal figures or approaches, leaving it ripe for reinterpretation and reassessment.

The project emerges from ongoing UEA-led archive research projects (Women in Focus: Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata & Cataloguing; Empowering Archivists: Applying New Tools & Approaches for Better Representation of Women in Audio-Visual Collections) and the History of Advertising Trust’s emphasis on women in their UK advertising collections, including the 2024 AdWomen exhibition.

Key objectives for the project include:

• Developing a feminist approach to the history of women within the UK advertising industry between the 1950s and the 1980s (a key period for women entering the workforce)
• Exploring how the traces of these women can be found, categorized, and celebrated within archive systems that tend to invisibilise the presence of women
• Positioning the archive holdings and findings within existing histories of British advertising and media
• Addressing how a lack of historical evidence can be exacerbated by both archive and industry practices around selection, accession, cataloguing and/or digitization
• Engaging with debates around archiving and cataloguing practice in order to help HAT locate and best represent minority voices across its collections
• Working with HAT to ensure relevant archival materials are digitised, detailed catalogue metadata created, and case studies made available to view

Informal enquiries about this collaborative project can be sent to Professor Keith M. Johnston, keith.johnston@uea.ac.uk.

For further details please visit: https://www.uea.ac.uk/course/phd-doctorate/phd-creating-a-feminist-archival-praxis-to-reveal-histories-of-women-in-the-uk-advertising-industry-johnston25mlcahrc

Funding Details

Additional Funding Information

The studentship is subject to UKRI eligibility criteria and will cover home or EU fees and stipend at UKRI rates for a maximum of four years full-time, or eight years part-time study, subject to institutional regulations. For the current academic year 2024-25, the stipend rate is £19,837 non London). This includes enhanced stipend to cover additional travel costs relating to the project. Please note: this funding amount typically increases with inflation each academic year.

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