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Getting started with research at Wellcome Collection

, –
Past
  • Free
  • Discussion
  • British Sign Language (online)
  • Auto-captioned
Photograph of a laptop on a desk. The laptop screen shows a live event with the speaker, Julia Nurse. Julia is sitting on the edge of a table next to material from the collections. She has brown shoulder-length hair. There are two photographs of Wellcome Collection's library spaces on the laptop screen, the library admissions desk and the bookshelves with a reader. There is a red phone icon with other video call icons on the top left corner of the screen.
Getting Started with Research at Wellcome Collection, Photo by Kathleen Arundell, portrait of Julia Nurse (left) by Ben Gilbert, image (top right) by Steven Pocock, image (bottom right) by Thomas S.G. Farnetti. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What you’ll do

Watch a recording from different researchers explaining how you can use our library to access Wellcome Collection materials in the open stacks and Rare Materials Room. Four researchers will tell you about how they work with items from the collections to produce artwork, podcasts and academic research papers. You will hear from:

  • Dr Carly Boxer on working with medieval European manuscripts
  • Shireen Hamza on cultures of Islam and medicine in medieval India
  • Delphine Sims on 19th-century colonial photography
  • and performance artist Sophie Woolley on collections relating to disability.

Wellcome Collection research development specialists Julia Nurse, Ross MacFarlane and William Schupbach answer questions and speak about unresearched materials in the collections that could inspire your next project.

Dates

, –
Past

Need to know

British Sign Language (online)

This event is British Sign Language interpreted. An interpreter will be embedded in the event livestream or visible on screen for online viewers.

Auto-captioned

There will be automatically generated subtitles for this event.

For more information, please visit our Accessibility page. If you have any queries about accessibility, please email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call

Our event terms and conditions

About your contributors

Black and white photograph of Carly B. Boxer, a person with short brown hair and glasses wearing a checkered shirt and grey jacket, with blurry stone archways in the background.

Carly B Boxer

(she/they)
Speaker

Carly B Boxer is the Nancy and Robert J Carney Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Art and Architecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Boxer is a historian of medieval art whose work centres on the connections between medieval image-making practices and period ideas about vision, knowledge, and the capacity of images to structure and guide thought. Boxer’s current book project analyses manuscripts related to medicine, health and healing made in late-medieval England to propose that images in these books not only taught their readers how to perform surgical procedures or produce medicines, but also trained readers in how the human body ought to look, and how it should be looked at.

Black and white photograph of Shireen Hamza, a brown woman wearing a turban, glasses, and a jacket, standing in front of a floral ceramic design.

Shireen Hamza

(she/they)
Speaker

Shireen Hamza is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She is completing a dissertation on Islam and medicine in the medieval Indian Ocean world, and has also published on the history of sexuality. She is also a managing editor of the Ottoman History Podcast.

Black and white photograph showing Delphine Sims from the bust up, wearing a white button upped, shirt. Her curly hair falls around her full face as she looks up at the camera slightly smiling. Just above her head is a large tropical leaf and behind her is a blurred background of water and tree trunks.

Delphine Sims

(she/her)
Speaker

Delphine Sims is a curator, writer, and PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. With a focus on the history of photography and Blackness, she has curated and organised public programming for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Autograph ABP, and SF Camerawork. In addition to exhibition-catalogue contributions, her writing can be found in Matte magazine, The Believer and Aperture.

Black and white photograph of Sophie Woolley, a white woman, with long bobbed fair hair. She wears a plain black dress and looks brightly into the camera with a slight smile.

Sophie Woolley

(she/her)
Speaker

Sophie Woolley is a writer and performer from London, working across theatre, radio and TV. In 2019 she set up Augmented Productions, which became an associate company of Told by an Idiot. In 2020 she toured her solo show, Augmented. In 2021 she appeared in Best in Lockdown (An Idiot Film) and Veneer (Film 4/ Mutt & Jeff Pictures). Recent TV-writer credits include ‘EastEnders’ and ‘Casualty’.

Black and white photograph of Julia Nurse, a white woman with brown hair, smiling. She wears an animal-print dress and the corners of paintings are visible in the background.

Julia Nurse

(she/her)
Facilitator

Julia Nurse is a collections research specialist at Wellcome Collection with a background in Art History and Museum Studies. She currently runs the Exploring Research programme, and has a particular interest in the medieval and early modern periods, especially the interaction of medicine, science and art within print culture.

Black and white photograph of Ross MacFarlane, a white man with glasses, wearing a shirt and a dark jumper.

Ross MacFarlane

(he/him)
Facilitator

Ross MacFarlane is a research development specialist at Wellcome Collection. He has researched, written and lectured on the collections and other topics at the intersection of death, folklore and medicine.

William Schupbach

Facilitator

William Schupbach is a research development specialist at Wellcome Collection and author of ‘The Paradox of Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Of Dr Tulp”’.