My Undergraduate Research Scholarship involved working with Dr Emily Wingfield and Dr Nicholas Hardy from the English Literature department on preparatory research for their finalist module ‘From Cover to Cover: Histories of the Book’. It is a new module running for the first time next year and I will be part of the cohort of students taking it.
The module will involve students learning about book history and then using that knowledge to pick a text from the university collection and analyse it; my job as part of the scholarship was to create a catalogue of particular texts of interest for the students to pick from. If you have ever been in the university collections: The Cadbury Research Library, Shakespeare Institute, Winterbourne or The Barber, you’ll know that they are rather…. extensive. There are millions of documents within the various collections, so my job of handpicking roughly ten texts representative of each time period from medieval to modern day was no mean feat.
I spent the majority of my time within The Cadbury Research Library, combing through the collections and liaising with lecturers that specialised in specific fields and the librarians, who were invaluable in tackling the mammoth task. I must admit that being told to research book history, a field I had never tackled before, from antiquity to modern day, did somewhat intimidate me. The scheme allows for completely independent research, which at the beginning of the project I saw as a curse but by the end of the scheme was a massive blessing. The entire research area was new and although my academic leads where there for support when necessary and other academics in the department were more than willing to help out it has been a truly liberating experience to be able to pick areas that interest me and pursue my own newly found passions.
The project has opened my mind to the possibility of postgraduate research and granted an insight into what my lecturers do outside of teaching. It has been amazing to talk to them about their passions and their own research and use their experience to help develop my own research. Although the time flies, it is also a great opportunity to dedicate a chunk of time to one objective. Being a second year, I have yet to start my dissertation and as it looms on the horizon it has given me confidence knowing that I can and will be able to dedicate an extended period of time to an area of study that I am passionate about.
The scheme is not just about research, it offers many networking and skills-based seminars and opportunities. The one I found particularly useful was the progressing to post-graduate study session. Before the scheme I was unsure whether a masters was something that would suit me, but the scheme has shown that independent research, though daunting at first is an amazing and very rewarding task which as lead me to applying for a postgraduate in a similar subject area as my scholarship scheme.
I am ever grateful to Emily and Nick for choosing me to carry out the research, completing the scheme has enabled me to carry out something I never otherwise would have done, and I hope that it will lead to new and exciting things in the future!
Amber Osborne, BA English
Find out more on the ‘From Cover to Cover’ blog.