I am very grateful to have received the opportunity to take part in the Collaborative Research Internship programme, where I have been working on the Lisel Haas project with David Evans-Powell, Sara Jones and Bertz Associates. Lisel Haas was a German-Jewish emigré photographer who moved to Birmingham with her father in 1938. Having had an extensive career in Germany already, she started out with theatre photography in Birmingham, and slowly moved over to exclusively doing portrait photography in her Moseley home studio.
The main element of this internship has been the research, which I had started during another internship with the same company. While reading through the Haas archive at the Central Library, I have been particularly interested in Haas’s emigré background, her involvement in Birmingham theatres, and her relationship with customers from her theatre days to the 1980s. As part of the Collaborative Research Internship, I have been able to collate and discuss my findings with others. I have also been given the opportunity to network with other people working in the cultural sector and have gained greater insights into arts management.
A memorable day as an intern was when I presented my findings in the archive in a meeting with others on the project who were also showing their findings. What I loved most about it were all the new connections we were able to make, piecing together more information which had been left scrambled in the uncatalogued archive. The feedback I got from my presentation was also a key learning moment as Sara Jones helped me to refine and rename the categories in which I had grouped my research. This refining of the groups is key for the outcome of this project, where my research will be sent to people working in various fields in German, Art History, History and the Arts so that they can easily find their way through it and write essays on key themes.
What I have loved most about this internship was that I was given the opportunity to pursue my own interests within the project, and I will hopefully be contributing to the collection of essays on key themes in the Haas archive. This has allowed me to practice my academic skills outside of University, applying my historical skills to bring more public attention to local history.
Lastly, working with Sara Jones and Bertz Associates has also helped me to develop my German language skills, which I have used to understand and translate some of my findings from the archive.
