I’m thrilled to have been awarded the Stephen Herbert Award to carry out research at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. My research will focus on raree shows and peepshows. I will look at objects including telescopic and perspective views, and the Replica nineteenth century travelling peepshow: Sergeant Bell's royal raree show. I plan to use this research to inspire one or more new installations.
We are very pleased to announce The Stephen Herbert Award, which will enable a researcher to come to the museum to consult our early cinema or optical media holdings. The award is named after the much loved and hugely influential film historian Stephen Herbert, who very sadly died last year. The award has been kindly gifted to us in Stephen’s name by his partner Mo Heard and we welcome applications that focus on the areas that particularly excited Stephen; the optical media that preceded cinema, such as magic lanterns, illusions, stereoscopes, and animated toys, and the first couple of decades of cinema history in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Material collected by Stephen has been donated to the museum recently, such as his work on magic mirrors and the pioneer Wordsworth Donisthorpe. Applicants could consult these items, or any of the other extensive holdings at the museum from a variety of donors on moving images from the 17th century up to around 1918. Go to www.bdcmuseum.org.uk for more information on our collections.
