Fellowships and Grants

Our funding supports innovative scholarship in British art, art history and visual culture. The total amount given out in grants and fellowships for 2021–22 was £1,006,894, which supported original research and activity engaging with a striking range of topics, methodologies and cultural contexts.

In line with the Paul Mellon Centre’s commitment to ensuring that the histories of British art are enriched and made more relevant to a broader range of people, we have continued to revise our guidance and have expanded our funding, including increasing the duration and amount of our Senior Fellowships.

A new set of awards, designed to increase the diversity of perspectives among researchers and students within the field of British art history, was introduced in early 2022. This ‘New Narratives’ programme of funding includes an MA/MPhil Studentship (£32,000 over one year), a Doctoral Scholarship (£32,000 each year for three years) and an Early Career Fellowship (£32,000 each year for two years). The Doctoral Scholarship and MA/MPhil Studentship are the first awards offered by the Centre to specifically support the university fees and living expenses of individuals undertaking further education. The first grantees were announced in May 2022, and comprised Peter Miller, who will undertake an MPhil at the University of Cambridge with a project titled Aubrey Williams, Ronald Moody and Transnational Caribbean Ecology; Nicholas Brown, who will undertake a doctoral project at the University of the Arts London titled The Significance of Magazine Publishing for Black British Art; and Jareh Das, whose Early Career Fellowship project is titled Tracing Post-Colonial Perspectives in Nigerian and British Pottery

Peter, Nicholas and Jareh join the twenty-eight other individuals who were awarded fellowships in the Spring 2022 round, to research topics ranging from Holbein to the homoerotic networks of the Grand Tour, from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to Brian Sewell and the art history of the 1990s. More than forty individuals have also benefited from Research Support Grants, distributed in our Autumn 2021 and Spring 2022 rounds, and we have provided substantial support for institutions across the UK with Collaborative Project Grants, Curatorial Research Grants, Digital Project Grants and Event Grants.