This month, we welcome Jennifer Coombes to the HRC, as the recipient of the RSHA Director's PhD Scholarship in Interdiciplinary and Cross-Cultural Research.

Jennifer, a curator at the National Film and Sound Archive, provides a decription of her research project below:

Drawing on my experience working in galleries, museums and archives, I’m planning to look at how their different disciplinary approaches play out in the ways these institutions collect and exhibit, especially when they collaborate. The current focus of the sector is on digital spaces, though physical exhibition spaces provide collaborative and convergent opportunities as well. Exhibition collaborations are an opportunity to break down distinctions between collections and to challenge traditional subject disciplinary boundaries. For example, depending on the institution doing the collecting, photographs are acquired as examples of publicity, art or social documentation, and will be interpreted differently in each context. I’ll be looking at a number of case studies from Australia and overseas, including an exhibition I worked on recently between the National Film and Sound archive and the National Portrait Gallery called Starstruck: Australian movie portraits.

Welcome Jennifer!