Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions Fellowship Updates

Perspectives on Research is a series of blog posts commissioned as part of the Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and coordinated by the V&A.

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We launched the Early Career Research Fellowships in Cultural and Heritage Institutions programme in March 2024 at the V&A. Generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), eight early career research fellows are currently part-way through research projects, each hosted by an Independent Research Organisation (IRO). The V&A is acting as the Cohort Coordination and Development team for this fellowship scheme.

In this post we hear from each of the eight Early Career Research Fellows with updates on their fellowship work.

Future Ecologies of Art – Marleen Boschen, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 

Four months into my fellowship with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew I’m excited to share a few initial updates. My research is looking at how botanical organisations can foster and better support artistic research and practice with a particular focus on social justice and the climate crisis. I’ve so far focussed on gaining a better understanding of Kew’s collections, how artists might have accessed these, as well as building relationships with the public programming teams. I’ve also started conducting studio visits with artists who are currently working with Kew, or have done so in the past including Sokari Douglas Camp, Shiraz Bayjoo and Cristina Ochoa.  

Accessible Pasts, Equitable Futures – Ann-Marie Foster, Imperial War Museum

In February 2024 I began my part-time fellowship at Imperial War Museums, leading the Accessible Pasts, Equitable Futures project. The project is creating interventions to increase access for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent collections users. 

The first year of the project was spent researching what IWM’s disabled users need. This has included running focus groups, surveys, and establishing staff-focused groups. Their contributions have fed into an action plan developed in collaboration with the Collections Access and Research team, which is being implemented over the course of this year. In May 2025 I launched a new digital volunteer programme to create access information for IWM’s digital heritage collections, from alt-text to audio descriptions, which is upskilling digital volunteers, while we learn from them in turn.  

This work has led to some spin-off funding from the EDI Caucus where, in my non-fellowship time I am co-leading the project ‘Divergent Minds in the Archive’, which brings neurodivergent archive users and professionals together to address access barriers.  

You can get in touch with me about either project at apef@iwm.org.uk – I’d be delighted to hear from you.  

Reanimating Tibetan Heritage: Transforming collections, Empowering communities – Thupten Kelsang, Victoria and Albert Museum

I started my fellowship at the V&A in August 2024, and since then, the Reanimating Tibetan Heritage projecthas rapidly expanded in scope and structure, responding to interest by institutional stakeholders and developments in the field. The current project partners include the British Museum, Wellcome Collection, National Trust, Ashmolean, National Museums Liverpool, Horniman, Pitt Rivers Museum, Museum of Art and Anthropology (Cambridge), National Army Museum, and Royal Geographical Society. The underlying intent in bringing together these diverse institutions together (with institutional curators as well as conservators) is to create a better understanding of the shared ethical and critical challenges in caring for Tibetan collections at various GLAM institutions, think about how to address colonial provenance, and collaboratively develop better and consistent practice(s) as a result. For instance, the participating conservators (twenty-two) have raised over a hundred questions about the care and storage of Tibetan objects, such as care implications for consecrated/sacred objects, interventive treatments, scientific testing, and storage of human remains. The curators of the participating institutions raised several shared concerns around the Tibetan collection (such as terminology and nomenclature, gaps in knowledge and provenance information, and restitution). They endorsed the need to create a sustained space for reflections and discussions to tackle the Tibetan context in museums, which is exceptionally complex, contested, and politically sensitive. I am currently exploring how to sustain these discussions beyond the fellowship, potentially through creating a research network such as Subject Specialists Network (SSN).

I have also recently published an article for the Museum of Modern Art’s online journal (post: notes on art in a global context) on my approaches to ‘decolonising’ museums and how working with contested collections, such as the Tibetan context, needs a nuanced, methodologically-focused approach – From Loot to Legacy: Rethinking “Tibetan Art” in Western Museums – post. 

Mediating Imperial Science: Economic Botany and Agrarian Ecology in Colonial South Asia – Aparajita Mukhopadhyay, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

Currently in its second year (part-time), my project Mediating Imperial Science: Economic Botany and Agrarian Ecology in Colonial South Asia rethinks the nature and scale of Indian participation in shaping agrarian ecology in colonial South Asia. Drawing upon new archival sources and the Economic Botany Collection at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this research presents a nuanced reinterpretation of Botany and Empire by underlining intersections of imperial initiatives and complex colonial realities.

Interpreting Borneo in Britain – Jennifer Morris, The British Museum

I have compiled a database of nearly 3000 ethnographic objects held across multiple institutions in the UK and Europe, which were all originally collected from Borneo by Charles Hose between 1884 and 1907. This has involved research visits to World Museum Liverpool, the National Museum of Scotland, the Pitt Rivers and the Horniman, and an ongoing audit of the British Museum’s documentation. I have also started digitising Hose’s photographic collection in the British Museum, aiming to make it accessible online by late 2025.

My community engagement activities have included my September 2024 visit to Malaysian Borneo and Singapore, where I gave several public talks and ran three community workshops in Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, attended by both heritage professionals and representatives of grass-roots cultural groups. The visit also helped finalise an MOU between the British Museum and Sarawak Museum Department, signed at the British Museum on 6 November, consolidating relationships that will support the project and future collaborative research. In London, I have organised object-viewing sessions for UK-based Sarawakians and hosted several visiting researchers.

These activities all confirmed significant interest in engaging with the UK museum collections, and the responses and contacts made helped to shape my second trip to Sarawak. In June 2025, I travelled to the rural Baram region, where Charles Hose did most of his collecting, and organised a series of community engagement events in towns and villages around the region. The findings gained from this are guiding my priorities during the final stages of the project.

Cetacean (Re)Sources: Reconnecting London’s Natural History Museum cetacean specimens with the legacies of empire and whaling – Sophia Nikolov, The Natural History Museum

I recently co-wrote an article for the Natural History Museum website about my ongoing research into a blue whale specimen in the collection which we now know was originally exhibited at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. The two blue whale vertebrae are now registered with updated temporal and geographic data, which means they can be better used for research, as well as being associated with a rich historical context. This work has uncovered wider links between the Natural History Museum and the British Empire Exhibition, including specimens being both received for     the collection and contributed for the display. More broadly, through various forums, I have been emphasising the value of embedding historians in natural history collections and collaborating with curators, including presenting at the History of Science Society in Mérida and writing an article for the November issue of the NHM’s Members’ Magazine. 

Fragrance in the Fungarium: Capturing Heritage Scents of Mushrooms and Mycological Art – Siôn Parkinson, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

I began my fellowship at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in January 2024. By August, I had contributed several mushroom-inspired artworks to Fungi Forms, an exhibition at RBGE’s Inverleith House Gallery. The exhibition coincided with the UK release of my first monograph, Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press). This overlap created valuable opportunities to share insights from my fellowship and engage with diverse audiences, including colleagues, academics working in related fields, and members of the public.  

Other notable highlights from the year include: 

Visiting the KB National Library of The Netherlands in The Hague to conduct an odour extraction and analysis of their first-edition copy of The Description of the Phallus (1564), the first printed book dedicated to a single mushroom species. 

Contributing dune stinkhorn specimens to the RBGE Herbarium. This process required learning how to collect, preserve, and annotate specimens in accordance with RBGE protocols. Additionally, I included my own observations on fungal odours, which are often overlooked in fungarium records. 

Collaborating with colleagues from the Universities of Edinburgh and York to host a day-long workshop at the Botanics in September. Titled Scotland’s Botanical Smellscapes, the event marked the third in a Royal Society Edinburgh-supported series, The Smell of Scotland’s Heritage. It brought together 30 participants, including artists, smell scholars, curators, collection managers, and heritage professionals from across Scotland, the UK, China, and Sweden. The workshop explored innovative ways to engage audiences with collections through scent, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and creative. 

The Historic Environment as an agent of change in the climate emergency: a community-centred approach – Audrey Scardina, Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

Over the course of 2024, I ran a series of successful co-creation workshops. The pilot sessions were held in May at Dundonald Castle, set up with support from the Friends of Dundonald Castle. Two workshops, at Stirling Castle and Glasgow Cathedral in August and September, were run in collaboration with the Equalities Team, who have recently published the 2025-2030 Equalities Outcomes for HES. These workshops focused on the intersection between the climate crisis and the experiences of marginalised communities. A final internal workshop took place at the HES Green Champions Conference. The HES Green Champions are an internal network that advocate for climate action and sustainability within their own teams across the organisation.  

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Perspectives on Research aims to shine a light on different aspects of research in cultural and heritage organisations, with contributions invited from a range of practitioners with experience of working in or with the sector. Through this series, we aim to develop a set of resources that may be helpful to researchers working in or thinking about working in cultural and heritage organisations beyond the programme itself.