We are delighted to announce that the 2024 WSG Bursary has been awarded to Amy Solomons. Amy is a trained archivist and librarian and is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Liverpool and the National Trust. Her research focusses on eighteenth-century female reading experiences in historic house spaces. She will use the bursary to fund two research trips: to Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, and Sandon Hall, Staffordshire, each of which contains bibliographic and archival sources documenting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her daughter, Lady Mary Countess of Bute, and her granddaughter Lady Louisa Stuart.
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Previous Bursary Winners
- 2023: Eleanor Bird, ‘Margaret Davy, sister-in-law of Humphrey Davy and collector of his works’ (Main Award); & Brianna Robertson-Kirkland , ‘Examining three Georgian opera singers: Elizabeth Billington, Anna Selina Storace and Gertrude Mara’ (Travel Award)
- 2020: Anna Jamieson, ‘Spending and Shopping: Women’s Experience in the Eighteenth-Century Madhouse’ and Alexis Wolf, ‘Women Nurses and Inspectors of the Foundling Hospital, 1750-1830’ (Joint award with Foundling Museum)
- 2019: Charlotte Young, ‘Women’s involvement in Canterbury sequestrations, 1643-50’; Hannah Jeans, ‘Women’s Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, c.1600-1700’
- 2018: Madeleine Pelling, ‘The friendship of Horace Walpole and Mary Hamilton’; Rebecca Simpson, ‘Narratives of pregnancy’
- 2017: Charmian Mansell, ‘A new history of female service in early modern England, 1550-1650
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