Strathmartine Trust Scottish History University of Dundee

Overview

This scholarship funds doctoral research that engages with the aims and objectives of Eden Project Dundee in advance of its opening in 2025. The Strathmartine Trust Scottish History programme is offered at  University of Dundee .

About the programme

The Projects:

• The first Strathmartine Scholarship in Modern Scottish History investigates the Eden Project’s theme of ‘People and the Natural World’. From the mid nineteenth-century, stand-alone associations dedicated to recording, collating and analysing instrument-recorded climate observations did most to embed meteorological science within medical and environmental analysis. Using these data to evaluate the physical and mental health of the people in Victorian Dundee, this project will evaluate the comparative impact of the ‘natural world’, the ‘industrial world’ and the ‘urban world’ on variations in rates of disease, mortality and life expectancy. By examining evidence gathered by contemporary medico-climatologists, including hospital and asylum admissions, along with air quality, diet and epidemiological data, the project examines the public health in the city during the final phase of transition away from pre-industrial temperature levels.
• The second Strathmartine Scholarship in Early Modern Scottish History will be focused on a key partner to the Eden Project: The Nine Incorporated Trades of Dundee, a body with roots into the fifteenth century. The trades and the guilds will form the key ‘experience space’ that will enable visitors to the Eden Project to explore the relationship between working lives and the natural and built environment. To meet this theme, the second studentship will investigate the philanthropic activity of the trades in early modern Dundee. It will explore their dealings with the town’s poor and marginalised population, and will place this within the context of urban charity and social care more broadly. The project will be centred on examination (and, ideally, digitisation) of the ‘lockit books’ preserved by the Nine Incorporated Trades of Dundee, but will also take in other relevant records, such as central government records, burgh council minutes, and ecclesiastical registers. By reconstructing the matrix of urban philanthropy in this way, the project will help develop a deeper understanding of civic participation and social inclusion in early modern towns.