The RSN is co-supervising a fully funded Collaborative Doctoral Award alongside De Montfort University. The project, entitled ‘Embroidering Empire: Women, Textiles, and Colonial Collecting, 1872-1950’, will be joint supervised by RSN Curator Dr Isabella Rosner, and Dr Serena Dyer, Dr Emily Baines, and Dr Laura Beltran-Rubio of De Montfort University.

This project will investigate the relationship between embroidery and Empire. It interrogates the role of embroidery in mediating understandings of and creative engagements with Empire. The RSN’s Grove Book, a volume filled with hundreds of textiles collected from all corners of the world, will form the central starting point for the project. Collected by Georgina Annie Grove, the wife of a brigadier-general who served in British India, this volume represents a millennium of textile history, which Grove placed in conversation with snippets of contemporary domestic interior magazines.

This example of women’s colonial collecting will be contextualised against textiles given to the RSN by Queen Mary of Teck and British and Indian textiles connected to Queen Victoria’s jubilees and role as Empress of India. The examination of these objects will help to untangle the complicated relationship between women and textile collecting and production in the British Empire.

The successful PhD student will spend approximately 12 weeks per year working at the RSN to catalogue and research within our collections. Applicants should have completed an MA and have a background in material culture, fashion or textile history, gender history, or colonial histories. An interest in museums and curatorial work would also be an advantage.

Individuals with a material culture or fashion and textile history background do not need to have knowledge of colonial histories; similarly, applicants with a background in gender or colonial history do not need to have knowledge of material culture or fashion and textile history. No specialist knowledge of embroidery is required.

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