Recent Research Funding Awards

RCMG has received further funding to develop its research collaboration with the Wellcome Collection. This work forms phase 2 of Ethics, Inclusion And Audiences At The Wellcome Collection (2026), which brings together diverse forms of expertise to co-produce ethically informed approaches to inclusion and equity.

Professor Sandra Dudley has been successful with a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship application. Entitled Feeling and Sensing Heritage: Tie-Dyed Cloths and Transformed Bodies in an Artisanal Community in Gujarat, India (Sep-Dec 2026), the Visiting Professorship will enable Dr Urmila Mohan, to visit Leicester and collaborate with Sandra, SHAC colleagues and PGRs.

CR/IA (Dr Alice Tilche and Dr Isobel Whitelegg) with partners in Brazil, Argentina; Italy; Germany, Portugal and Spain (2026-2029), have been awarded a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchange Network (2026-2029): Reactivating Experiences: Art, Culture Industry and Authoritarianism in a Digital Age (REACT)

REACT examines how a contemporary culture industry shaped by digital capitalism and global media platforms influences subjectivity and tends to foster authoritarian tendencies. Building on a Critical Theory tradition, it addresses the crisis of lived experience produced by commodification, standardisation, and algorithmic control.

Adopting a Research-Creation Lab (RC-Lab) methodology, REACT will sustain an innovative environment where theoretical research and artistic experimentation are closely integrated and deliver new theoretical tools, comparative analyses, and artistic outputs to understand and resist the authoritarian potential of digital cultural industries.

By circulating knowledge, comparing regional perspectives, and translating between critical theory and artistic practices, REACT will reinforce democratic resilience; open forms of subjectivity, intercultural dialogue and sustainable collaboration between academic and non-academic partners, and foster a new generation of scholars and artists trained to combine critical theory with creative practice.

University Partners include: Universita di Bologna (Italy); Bauhaus University Weimar; Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (Germany);  Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal); Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain); Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina); University of Leicester (UK); University of Potsdam; Universidade de São Paulo; Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil). Creative Arts Partners: Kepler-452 (Bologna); Julian Radlmaier (Berlin); EPA (Córdoba); Suono Mobile (Córdoba-Stuttgart).

RCMG has secured an AHRC Award of £1,498,213 for Addressing the Attendance and Benefit Gap: a new Research and Implementation Paradigm for museums, galleries and heritage organisations (March 2026-Feb 2030). The project has been developed in partnership with Mark O’Neill (Honorary Research Fellow in RCMG), Sara Wajid, Co-CEO Birmingham Museums Trust and a range of co-investigators and collaborators at UoL, UCL, University of Birmingham and a long list of cultural organisations.

From prestigious national institutions to volunteer-run local organisations, museums, galleries and heritage institutions (MHIs) are a core part of the UK’s cultural infrastructure and amongst the most visible opportunities for people to engage with the Arts and Humanities in public settings. The cultural experiences they offer and the societal benefit they generate reflect the wider aims of public education in democratic societies, summarised by Crossick and Kaszynska (2016) as the cultivation of ‘reflective individuals' and 'engaged citizens'.

Nationally and internationally, however, museum visiting reflects the socioeconomic gradient, and inequalities in who benefits from MHIs are rising. In England, whilst participation overall has increased since 2000, the participation gap between upper and lower socioeconomic groups has remained unchanged at c.24 percentage points and may be growing (Taking Part/Participation Survey). Decades of international research in cultural sociology, regardless of methodological or theoretical approach, show that people who participate in state-sponsored culture, including MHIs, are more highly educated and more economically advantaged. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture which show that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, emphasise the lack of fairness in this distribution of cultural resources.

Despite this evidence, MHI policy, investment (including over £5 billion Heritage Lottery funding) and redevelopment continue with little or no recognition of this wider context. There is no government policy or MHI strategy which addresses the fact, universally accepted in the sociological literature, that the most significant predictor of museum visiting is level of educational attainment; visiting increases at each educational level, with the most significant jump at degree level. In MHIs, often due to funder requirements, research capacity is used on evaluations of small projects to show their positive impact on participants from non-visiting groups. This approach cannot provide the level of strategic analysis and research rigour required to understand and address population-level disparities in attendance. As Hadley (2021) summarises, ‘the policy of the democratisation of culture, and the practice of audience development, appear to have failed’.

Building on the RCMG AHRC Network (AH/Y002520/1), this research will provide MHIs with an urgently needed Research and Implementation paradigm equal to the complex challenge of closing the attendance and benefit gap. The project will, for the first time, enable MHIs to understand how they can close the attendance and benefit gap and deepen their contribution to society.

Dr Yunci Cai, Associate Professor, has been awarded a British Council Connections through Culture programme award. CTC nurtures fresh cultural partnerships between the UK and select countries in Asia Pacific and Europe, to support new ideas and collaborations from artists and cultural organisations. The project, Disappearing Voices of the Lotud High Priestesses in Sabah, East Malaysia (Nov 2025-Oct 2026), is a collaboration by Yunci and Judeth John Baptist / Sabah Seamex Association This community-driven project aims to preserve the endangered ritual poetry of the Lotud, an Indigenous group in Sabah, East Malaysia. With fewer than six priestesses fluent in this sacred oral tradition, the knowledge is at risk of vanishing. By co-producing a bilingual short film with Indigenous creatives, this project makes the poetry accessible through storytelling.

Professor Ross Parry,  has secured funding to continue the research and development of the Museum Data Service (£689,988) This will support research and development in and around the MDS for the next three years, with project partners: Art UK; The Collections Trust; and Knowledge Integration. This means that MDS is now officially a ‘Trusted Data Service’ within the AHRC’s growing infrastructure for data in arts and humanities – iDAH. Prestigiously, it is funded through UKRI’s ‘World Class Labs’ budget line.

Leicester is now the home of museum data.  The Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has celebrated the Museum Data Service as “another leap forward in museums' digital capabilities, expanding opportunities for research and collaboration, and preserving the rich history that our museums hold”.  The Executive Chair of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, describes MDS as an “exemplary and world-leading piece of digital heritage infrastructure that will make our heritage sector better and more inclusive, as part of our commitment to supporting sustainable digital humanities right across our sectors”.

Dr Isobel Whitelegg, Associate Professor, is the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship: Reassembling the São Paulo Biennials of the 1970s: Repairing a Lost Decade (Sept 2025 – May 2026).

São Paulo’s prominent bi-annual art exhibition, the Bienal de São Paulo, was boycotted by a swathe of powerful nations during the 1970s. This landmark artist-led protest against Brazil’s military dictatorship is widely referenced, but the question of what happened at the Biennial itself during a decade-long boycott remains overlooked. Contrary to international expectations, it was occupied by Brazilian collectives whose interdisciplinary works addressed social and ecological concerns which remain pressingly relevant today.

This project transforms understanding of an overlooked decade by repairing gaps in the archive, creating new interdisciplinary narratives and exploring digital means of increasing access to knowledge. 

Dr Alice Tilche has been awarded a grant from the AHRC on Indigenous Film Ecologies in India, Feb 2023 – Jul 2025 (£311,000) co-developed with Dakxin Bajrange Chhara (Co-I), Dr akshay khanna, and with a collective of indigenous artists and filmmakers associated with Nomad Movies. The project aims to develop and consolidate indigenous filmmaking practices, methodologies and visual languages that address the asymmetries in the public sphere and the exclusions of indigenous communities from knowledge production. Designed as an action-research intervention, the project is developing: a) an ambitious training programme for young leaders from indigenous and marginalised communities in India’s most fragile ecological regions, generating fiction and non-fiction films based on robust research; b) a Nomad Film Festival as a platform for showcasing films from indigenous communities across the country and beyond. The project addresses longstanding questions of power in knowledge production, enabling the restitution of power to communities over knowledge produced about them.

Associate Professor, Yunci Cai, is hosting Dr Magda Buchczyk who has secured a British Academy Visiting Fellowship for Weaving ecologies – intangible heritage between social and environmental justice, Jul 2023 – Oct 2023  (£31,365) at the School of Museum Studies.  This Fellowship brings together heritage ecology and social and environmental justice to push the boundaries of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) studies. It draws on ethnographic research of basket-makers harvesting plants for their craft in the Mediterranean wetlands. The artisans consider themselves the caretakers and gardeners of the lagoons. However, the threat of coastal erosion and climate change leads to new environmental policies restricting their access to landscapes. In Europe and Ramsar wetlands worldwide, ICH has become an area of conflict about social and environmental justice, and contrasting claims about preserving traditions or conserving ecosystems. The Fellowship combines research and networking to situate the ethnography globally. Foregrounding social and more-than-human relations, it questions the underlying assumptions and the binary frameworks of safeguarding ICH and environmental conservation. The project seeks to pioneer a new approach to ICH for the heritage sector in the Anthropocene.

Associate Professor, Yunci Cai, has been awarded a grant from the British Museum Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, for Rediscovering Linangkit: The Traditional Hand Needle-weaving of Women from Sabah, May 2023 – Apr 2025  (£99,924). The linangkit technique uses a needle and threads to create a system of tiny intricately connected identical knots to form a dense fabric of colourful motifs, which are used on the costumes of several Indigenous groups in Sabah to denote their distinct beliefs and cultural identities. Through detailed cultural mapping of linangkit, representative heirloom analysis and interviews with living master craftswomen, owners and users, the project seeks to understand the linangkit craft, how it is historically produced and transmitted, and the role of material culture in identity creation.

Professor Tilly Blyth has been awarded a grant for Communicating Time and Culture: Championing a Global Perspective in Science and Technology through Public Engagement AHRC award, Oct 2023 – Jun 2024, (£79,921). Designed to build on our transnational understanding of the creative industries in the UK and China, the research connects to the forthcoming exhibition, Zimingzhong: Clockwork Treasures from China's Forbidden City, due to open at the Science Museum in February 2024 by developing creative approaches to audience engagement.

Professor Ross Parry has been awarded an AHRC grant (as one of three Co-Is with Professor Hannah Thompson, Royal Holloway, as PI) for The Sensational Museum: The Practice and Provision of Trans-sensory Collecting and Communicating, Apr 2023 – Jun 2025 (£269,640). ‘The Sensational Museum’ is an ambitious multi-partner, multi-year initiative bringing together university-based researchers in Royal Holloway, Leicester, Westminster and Lincoln. In its inter-disciplinary approach it is leveraging insights and methods from critical disability studies, psychology, product/service design, as well as museology. The aim is to conceive, develop and then test a ‘trans-sensory’ approach to both museum collections management and public provision. Challenging the traditional limited array of ‘senses’ hard-wired into museum practice, in particular the privileging of sight. The project will take a series of objects through their journeys within the museum (from accession to display), as well as a piece of public programming (from conception to delivery) to understand how shifts in assumptions around sensory experience (taking instead a more expansive ‘trans-sensory’ notion of sense) might profoundly impact upon the work and outputs of museums.

RCMG has been awarded an AHRC network grant on Addressing the museum attendance and benefit gap (AHRC), Oct 2023 – Mar 2025 (£44,494). At population level, data from the official Taking Part Survey shows that the majority of people who visit museums are from upper socio-economic groups and that this divide is growing. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture also tell us that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, a finding which reveals the lack of fairness in the current distribution of cultural resources and the way museums reflect and contribute to established inequalities in health and wellbeing. Yet at museum level, often due to funder pressure, research capacity is used on project evaluations to show the positive impact of small-scale activities on groups of non-visitors. Shaped by 'intuitive' approaches to inequality, these projects fall far short of the level of strategic thinking and research capability required to understand and address population-level disparities in visitation and benefit. This network will bridge this divide, move the museology sector beyond 'intuitive' approaches to inequality and generate a new research agenda and strategy to support museums to understand and address the museum attendance and benefit gap. It complements the AHRC's "Research culture and heritage capital with an interdisciplinary team" call, by focusing not on defining cultural value, but on who gets that value.

Professor Corinne Fowler has been awarded an AHRC network grant (as Co-I with Professor Simon Bainbridge, Lancaster University, as PI) on Addressing the Histories and Legacies of Empire in Literary House Museums: Dove Cottage and Beyond (AHRC) Aug 2023 – Aug 2024 (£34,552). This network brings together academics, museum personnel, consultants, writers and stakeholders to investigate the colonial links of Romantic-period literary house museums and consider how best to interpret these connections for a wider public. The network will address the challenge of complex colonial histories and consider how best to respond strategically to the sensitivities involved.

Professor Corinne Fowler has been awarded a grant (as Co-I with Professor Neil Chakraborti as PI) The Rural Racism project (Leverhulme) Oct 2023 – Mar 2025 (£350,278). The project seeks to ‘re-story’ our understandings of life in the countryside by using evidence to unpack and transform old narratives. It is the first project of its kind to place the lived experiences of ethnic minorities centre stage through its co-produced research design, and in doing so it will expose and dismantle the barriers which prevent minority ethnic households and visitors from feeling a sense of belonging within rural communities.