AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Award - The Making of the National Archive: The First Century of the Public Record Office

The School of History at the University of Leeds and The National Archives are pleased to announce a fully funded Collaborative doctoral studentship, from October 2026.

Session 2026/27 - Closing Date 17:00 (UK time) 8th May 2026

Award provides full fees and maintenance at the UKRI rate (£21,805 in Session 2026/27), a London allowance of £1,000 per annum plus a £600 enhancement per annum, a research training support grant and other allowances (pro rata for part-time study).

Project overview

The studentship will research the first hundred years of the UK’s Public Record Office (now The National Archives), in anticipation of its bicentenary in 2038. The project will focus on how the office was created, early record-keeping practices, and what effect the formative years of the organisation still have today. In particular, it will explore the preservation of historical documents and communication of historical knowledge, both at The National Archives and in the wider archives and museum sector. It will, thereby, contribute to cutting edge historical research into how the constitution of the archive itself affects what it is possible to know about the past.

Utilising the underused PRO series of records created by the institution’s staff, the PhD will explore the development of archive practice within the 1838, 1877, and 1898 legislative frameworks. John D. Cantwell’s The Public Record Office, 1838-1958, published in 1991, is the last full history of the office, and does not focus on the ways in which the record office’s creation affects contemporary engagements with the records. This project will build on this and earlier extant histories of TNA. You will investigate the files on the early history of the PRO, reading correspondence and minutes around the creation and subsequent legislative shifts in the nineteenth century.

The research aims of the PhD project are to address:

• Early PRO decision-making and the impact it has on how records are accessed today. How records policy developed/changed in the early years of the PRO. And if these policies influenced or responded to the legislative frameworks.
• Record-keeping priorities in the early years of the PRO (particularly series, subjects, departments), and changes over the century.
• The influence of early record-keeping practices on the wider archival sector.
• The continuing influence of early PRO practices and policy on what kinds of records are available and therefore what kinds of history can be written.

Through case studies to explore these issues you will have the opportunity to shape the project based on your interests, background and experience. For example, you may wish to interrogate the racialised or gendered assumptions inherent in the early creation of the PRO, how the PRO’s developing practice impacted local archives, or the way medieval records were sorted and catalogued in the institution’s early years.

For further project information contact Professor Kevin Linch