A De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) academic has won a prestigious award designed to recognise the potential of early career researchers.
Dr Matt Jones, of DMU’s Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, has been awarded £14,998 by the British Academy through its prestigious Rising Star Engagement Awards scheme.
It provides funding of up to £15,000 to distinguished early career researchers to actively engage in career development by organising events for other young researchers and leading academics in their field.
Dr Jones’ project, Cinema, Memory and the Community, will bring together academics who have studied the social history of the cinema with community groups passionate about preserving their history for two events.
The events have been designed to lay out the current state of scholarly and community work on memories of cinemas and cinema-going, to promote future collaborations between the academy and the public in this area, and to investigate the possibility of establishing a research network around this topic.
Dr Jones said: “I’m a firm believer that research matters most when it matters to people outside the university, so it is a true pleasure to get to work with public groups who have been doing important work in their own communities.
"In places as far apart as Norwich, Liverpool and Glasgow, these groups have been hard at work protecting historic cinemas from demolition and preserving memories of a night at the local picture house. I’m excited to find out what we in academia can learn from them and how we can collaborate in the years to come.”
The project will last for one year.
Posted on Wednesday 30 March 2016