We are delighted to announce the results of the latest round of the BME small grants funding scheme. This scheme is administered by SHS in partnership with the Economic History Society, History UK, History of Education Society (UK), History Workshop Journal, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of Labour History and Women’s History Network. It was set up in 2019 in recognition of the under-representation, structural inequalities and racism afflicting UK Higher Education Institutions.
Applications for funding are judged by an independent panel. This year’s panel comprised Michael Joseph (University of Cambridge), Miranda Lowe (Natural History Museum) and Jonathan Saha (University of Durham).
Projects Supported:
Dr Janet Couloute, Black Emotionality in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture
The supplicatory image of a shackled lone black figure, down on his or her knees, looking skyward or in the direction of a white man or woman became the stock character for the nineteenth century abolitionist movement: non threating in tone, and reassuring in its display of physical defeat. Such images were designed to elicit feelings of solace and abolitionist support from white audience’s eager to convey outward displays of sympathy and sensibility.
Described by art historians as a further example ‘slave portraiture’. Following on from my PhD thesis, Visual images of Madness and Insanity in European Artistic Traditions: From the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century. I want to use images such as Slave in Chains (Royal Museums Greenwich), John Simpsons 1827, Head of a Man, Probably Ira Aldridge (Tate Britain) and Simpson’s 1827 Captive Slave, (The Art Institute of Chicago) to revise the usual and limiting art history telling accompanying these images. And instead reveal the manner in which theses images capture a moment in European art history where the supplicatory image of a Black man is grafted onto familiar and popular images of carceral insanity-complete with iron collars and manacles-creating for the first-time, hybrid representations of Black melancholy and emotionality, far removed from white expressions of distraction and absorption made famous by Durer’s 1514, Melancholia I. and artists of the cult of sensibility.
Dr Janet Couloute is an independent art historian, with a professional background in social work academia, and psychodynamic counselling. Having a long term interest in the making gallery, museum and heritage sites safe, accessible and relevant spaces in which to engage audiences with Atlantic histories, the British Empire and their enduring legacies. Dr Couloute has sort to do this through her pioneering work as the founder of African Heritage Tours at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Her EDI consultancy work with galleries and museums, her recent fellowship, supported by the Understanding British Portraiture network entitled, Seeing Whiteness through the prism of three Early Modern Portraits, and her art history writing which has appeared in online open access platforms including ART UK, Tate etc. and Tate Papers.
Dr Saffron East, Histories of racialised communities in Britain: a workshop for racially minoritised PhDs/ECRs
Dr Saffron East is a Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. She just published a co-authored edited collection on Anti-racism in Britain with Manchester University Press and is currently writing her first monograph on South Asian social movements in Britain, c.1958-c.1984. She is also developing new research on the history of antiracist, radical and decolonial pedagogies in UK universities.
Miss Elizabeth Joseph, The Windrush Textile
Elizabeth Joseph will run one creative Crafts Workshop per week, for six weeks for members of:
– The West Indian Association of Service Personnel (WASP) www.waspuk.co.uk
– The Barnet African Caribbean Association (BACA) https://cbplus.org.uk/baca/
– The Hackney Caribbean Elders Association (HCEO) https://hackneycaribbean.org.uk/volunteer/
All of the people in the above groups are Seniors, mostly over the age of 65. The members of WASP served in the British Army during World War 2 and remained in the UK. As well as people who travelled from the Caribbean and African (aka the Windrush Generation). Joseph is creating a unique fabric, using drawings, embroidery, crochet and beading, crafts that she will teach in the weekly Workshops (in the premises of each group). She will collect their work and design and make an inspiring and beautiful mixed media textile artwork that would be displayed in galleries/public Libraries and spaces in London, from Windrush Day 2025 (22nd June) and onwards. Next to this group artwork will be printed booklets, of the experiences and stories they’ve shared during the Workshops.
Miss Elizabeth Joseph graduated with a Degree in 3-Dimensional Design. She has over 10 years’ experience in designing and running creative crafts Workshops for groups of adults. Including for Private Members Clubs, bespoke creative workshops for businesses, teenagers in PRUs, and charities. Her Caribbean / Ghanaian background helps her to develop creative services to address specific and diverse perspectives. She teaches these craft Workshops in a modern environment with references to fashion, music and fabrics from different cultures. In 2023 she founded a Community Interest Company: Heritage Community Crafts CIC. This enables her to apply for grant funding so she can not only continue to design and run Workshops, but to develop her ideas into artworks that can be viewed by the general public. She is particularly passionate about sharing stories from African and Caribbean Seniors (aged 65+) while we can.
Dr Christine Checinska, Fashioning Black Masculinities: Taking Control of the Gaze
Fashioning Black Masculinities: Taking Control of the Gaze features the work of multiple fashion designers, artists and photographers, and explores 250 years of Black style across Global Africa, from the near nakedness of plantation enslavement to the revalorization of traditional dress characteristic of Afro-Futurism, in 5 objects. Setting fashion into the wider context of visual and material culture, this history serpentines its way around issues of visibility and invisibility, self-respect, the reclamation of personhood and voice, elegance or ‘fine dressing’, appropriation, creolization and re-appropriation. With a particular focus on diasporic viewpoints, Fashioning Black Masculinities: Taking Control of the Gaze metaphorically journeys across the Black Atlantic, from Hackney to Harlem, Johannesburg to Jamaica, tracing similarities and differences, investigating tensions and flows between global aesthetics and localised distinctions.
Dr Christine Checinska is an artist, designer, curator and storyteller. Her work sets fashion and textiles into the wider contexts of art and culture, exploring their relationship to race and gender. She is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, and Lead Curator of the international touring exhibition Africa Fashion. She is a member of the Costume Institute at the Met’s Advisory Committee for the 2025 show Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. Later that year she will take up a research fellowship at Yale Centre for British Art. Christine has exhibited work in the group shows The Missing Thread, Somerset House, London, 2023-2024, and Folded Life, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, 2021. She was a co-curator of Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, Crafts Council Gallery, London, 2021. Her recent publications include ‘Material Practices of Caribbean Artists Throughout the Diaspora’, in Crafting Kinship: A Visual Journal of Black Caribbean Makers, Marlene Barnett (ed.), 2024. Her website is: https://christinechecinska.com
Dr Carolina Topini, Paths to Justice: Reproductive Politics, Activism and Global Solidarity in the Late 20th Century
While the long fight of women of color for reproductive justice in the United States has been widely acknowledged and researched, the struggles, campaigns and protests led by women of African, Caribbean, and Asian descent in the UK, and the specificity of their activism, remain much less known and explored. From the campaign against virginity testing of South Asian migrants to the advocacy against the use of the injectable Depo-Provera, this one-day workshop proposes to explore this rich history through an intersectional lens. How have these women advocated for their sexual and reproductive health needs? How has their activism been influenced by and connected to similar struggles around the world? By situating their campaigns and protests in not only in local and national, but also in international contexts, the workshop will offer a more diverse picture of the global women’s health movement in the late 20th century, exploring the pioneering involvement of British feminists in transnational activist networks. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, the workshop will bring together feminist historians working with intersectional approaches on the British context, the legacies of the British Empire and global perspectives.
Dr Carolina Topini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Gender History, University of Glasgow. Her current research looks at the history of the global women’s health movement between the 1970s and the 2000s, with a particular focus on debates around population control, family planning and reproductive rights. Her latest article, ‘Resisting population control: global women’s health activism and contraceptive controversies, 1980s-1990s’, published in Third World Quarterly, investigates transnational feminist struggles against the use of harmful contraceptives in deprived communities.
Mr Ruben Darrell, The Flames Grow High: Black British Historical Experiences of Psychiatry
Information about Darrell’s project will be uploaded shortly.