Applications open for research on Society Collections

Are you interested in undertaking in-depth research using the Society’s Collections?

Applications are now open for a studentship to start in autumn 2026, as part of our Collaborative Doctoral Awards programme. Over the last twenty years, we have hosted 22 students at the Society, undertaking theoretically rigorous, novel and empirically rich doctoral research on the historic materials we hold so that they are protected for future generations.

We are delighted to invite applications for the latest project funded by the scheme, in partnership with the University of Westminster.

Project title: Collaborative Research as Pedagogical Method: Reinterpreting Photographic Collections at the RGS-IBG.

The Society holds hundreds of thousands of colonial era photographic images, which are largely underused.

This Collaborative Doctoral Award brings together archival, visual, and material culture methods, including the practical challenges of working with living collections and will be centred around one of the Society’s most significant photographic collections: the work of Elizabeth Wilhelmina Ness (1881–1962).

Ness was an accomplished photographer who travelled extensively across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and South and Central America. She was the first Western woman to travel Lake Kivu in Africa and later published an account of her travels, Ten Thousand Miles in Two Continents in 1929.

In 1930, she became the first woman to sit on the Council of the Royal Geographical Society and went on to serve as President of the National Council of Women of Great Britain during the Second World War.

The chosen doctoral researcher will use Ness’s material to develop an innovative and critical investigation of this photographic heritage – one that contains its fair share of unsettling insights – whilst bringing the archive into active dialogue with undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Westminster.

Ness’s images offer a rich opportunity to explore how colonial era photography can inform contemporary interdisciplinary teaching. Examining this collection from multiple perspectives will naturally grow more diverse narratives and support new understandings of colonial era records.

The deadline for applications is 30 April 2026.

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