What is it?
TaPRA Fellowship is a new initiative created and funded by TaPRA in partnership with an arts organization, library, museum, or other interested partner.
Who is it for?
The TaPRA fellow will be an ECR (within eight years of being awarded a PhD) who has yet to find secure full-time employment. The fellowship will fund a discrete research project, offer training and mentoring through the research process to the submission and completion of an article length piece for publication.
The 2016-17 fellowship was a collaboration with The Garrick Club Library in London. The winner worked with a small archive on early twentieth-century actress Florence Buckton (1893-1963).
Tracy Cattel about her experience as a TaPRA Fellow:
‘It was a great honour and a great excitement to win the inaugural TaPRA Fellowship, and to represent TaPRA at the partner organisation because TaPRA was such an important and enriching source of support to me during my posgraduate studies. The task of my Fellowship has been to catalogue the personal archive of the actress Florence Buckton, so that the Club Library can have an online index of the materials to enable the archive to be released for future researchers. The Garrick also required a display of selected materials from the archive, to tie in with a wider in-house display on the 1920s as a decade of theatre, and an article for it’s members’ magazine. This has provided a chance that I would never have had in the course of my professional or academic work to learn the language of archiving and prepare a substantial catalogue using hierarchical structures to sort the materials alongside the Garrick’s librarian, who has recently joined them from the British Library, and a dedicated archives assistant, from both of whom I have learned an immense amount. It has also provided me with my first opportunity to curate a display, informed by the intimate knowledge I’ve been able to obtain of the materials in the archive and their subject, and I will benefit from further opportunities presented by the Fellowship through the chance which it provides to give a conference paper once the research is concluded, and the publication of an article in an peer-reviewed academic journal.’
TBC
PhD candidate in Drama in the University of Exeter/NIAS joint-doctoral programme, for her essay ‘“Flash mob Mumbai”: performing a “politics of forgetting” in the semi-public spaces of globalising India’.
Professor Tompkins felt that ‘This paper analyses how we might think about understanding ‘social media performance’ in the highly-charged city context of Mumbai, a city where attempts to use social media have in the past backfired. The author situates the recent tensions of this geographical/social context well and intriguingly looks to both the potentials and the ironies raised by social media performance. The paper has relevance to contemporary performance informed by technology well beyond its exploration in Mumbai.’
Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick, 27-29 August 2025
Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick.