Cambridge University Library is delighted to have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and invites applications for PhD studentships, starting in October 2024. The successful PhD candidate will receive funding to work on the Spanish chapbooks collections, as part of the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) with the University of Oxford.
This PhD project aims to make use of Cambridge University Library’s extensive Spanish chapbooks collections to explore Iberian popular culture from the eighteenth century onwards. Chapbooks responded to the demands of an increasingly literate public. They are therefore particularly diverse in subject matter: from moral advice, religious tracts, and popular accounts of news events to gruesome stories (murders, monsters, natural catastrophes), as well as folk tales, romances, and ballads. The project may appeal to students interested in popular literature and culture, intellectual history and print culture and the history of the book. Likewise, the chapbooks offer exciting areas of comparison with similar material held by Cambridge in other languages. This is a varied and attractive collection for potential CDA candidates and other researchers in the fields of modern languages and European social and cultural history. The themes and narratives of popular print often circulated over many decades and countries, translated, and reused in many different contexts: tracing the connections over time and space is one area the student might pursue.
The Library’s Spanish chapbooks collection includes some 2,000 pliegos sueltos (chapbooks) and nearly 200 poster-sized aleluyas (broadsides) freely available on the Cambridge Digital Library (CDL). The Library also has several hundred further chapbooks and over 1,800 comedias (plays) which are not yet digitised and are only partially catalogued.
The doctoral student’s research on the collection would further the discoverability of the Cambridge University Library’s chapbooks. Depending on the student’s specific focus, this could be the production of catalogue metadata for the uncatalogued comedias and chapbooks or more detailed descriptions for the digitised chapbooks. This work would benefit future users in making the collection far more easily discoverable.
Their research would allow Cambridge University Library to complete or significantly near the completion of metadata work relating to the digitised chapbooks or the uncatalogued components of the collection. The Spanish chapbook collection attracts regular research interest already, but most of the comedias and other unprocessed chapbooks lack any catalogue entries and the digitised chapbooks’ discoverability would greatly increase with richer metadata. The collection offers potential for PhD research in digital humanities projects, and this project could advance work carried out so far in this respect with the chapbooks. As part of their PhD, the student will also help in the promotion of the collection and their own contribution, through blog posts and public events.
The student will undertake relevant metadata training in their first year alongside their literature review under the guidance and advice of Cambridge University Library’s Hispanic Specialist, aiming to deliver most of the expected metadata work in their first two years. They will also benefit from the programme of research training events provided by The Open University.
The lead supervisor for the project will be David Hopkin, Professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford, whose research focuses on social and cultural history of modern Western Europe (c. 1760-c. 1914) Cambridge University Library supervisor will be the Hispanic Specialist, Sonia Morcillo García.
Applicants should be able to read Spanish and would be expected to have an MA and/or a BA degree in history, Hispanic Studies, or another relevant discipline. To know more about the application process, please visit the Doctoral Training Partnership website.
Sonia Morcillo