Project Partnership Liaison Assistant

Do you have excellent written and oral communication skills, strong note-taking and report compiling skills and experience of organising meetings?

Are you interested in providing administrative support to a research project concerned with language, dialect studies, archives, and museum work?

With generous support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the University of Leeds, School of English, is embarking on a national project centred on the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC). The LAVC is a unique and nationally important multi-media archive including the records of the Survey of English Dialects and the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies.

The collection is housed and accessible at the University of Leeds Special Collections:https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-leeds-archive-of-vernacular-culture The HLF project is led by Dr Fiona Douglas, working in conjunction with Special Collections and five partner museums across England.

The project will digitise and make available, meaningful and relevant to public audiences the LAVC. The project will marry LAVC resources with the museums’ complementary and contemporaneous artefact collections, putting the LAVC back into the communities from which it was originally collected and where it truly belongs, reuniting tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and breathing new life into museum displays, local heritage, and the archive. Public engagement activities with a lasting legacy will enable visitors (both within museums and online) to uncover their own cultural heritage and that of others, to learn more about their dialect inheritance, and to share their stories, memories and linguistic heritage for the benefit of current and future generations.

The project partners are: Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, Dales Countryside Museum, Museum of East Anglian Life, Ryedale Folk Museum, Weald and Downland Living Museum.As Project Partnership Liaison Assistant, you will provide administrative support to the Project Lead and to the wider project team. You will have excellent written and oral communication skills, strong note-taking and report compiling skills and experience of organising meetings. An interest in language, dialect studies, archives, and museum work and/or an understanding of rural museum environments is desirable.

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact: Dr Fiona Douglas, Project Lead, email:F.M.Douglas@leeds.ac.uk