COLLAGE · Composite Cultural Production: Transnational and Multidisciplinary Approaches to Pre-Modern Collage

‘COLLAGE’ will facilitate the delivery of the 24-month project ‘Composite Cultural Production: Transnational and Multidisciplinary Approaches to Pre-Modern Collage’. The project will be undertaken under the supervision Prof. Mónica Bolufer at the University of Valencia (UVEG). The action comprises a multidisciplinary analysis of collage made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering its multimedia manifestations, transnational spread across the British empire, and its status as a highly gendered form of cultural production. The mobility afforded by the project will facilitate the acquisition of research-specific skills through close work with Prof. Bolufer, whose highly complementary research project Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies (CIRGEN) makes UVEG an extremely apt and timely host for the project. Undertaking COLLAGE will globalise my established expertise on collage, advancing my international career as a research leader. COLLAGE has four key objectives: 1) to explore the popularity, cross-cultural movement, and diversity of composite cultural production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on its manifestations in the context of the British empire; 2) to reveal the ways in which individual instances of consumption and production related to wider transnational contexts, such as trade, empire, and industry, in order to provide a better understanding of how collective values related to individual agency during this period; 3) to examine how the production of pre-modern collage expressed, reflected, and conveyed the gendered identities, emotions, and relationships of those who made, owned, and viewed it; 4) to provide an unprecedented multidisciplinary historical and theoretical framework for discussing composite cultural production that moves beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries.