William St Clair Fellowship Report: Dr Sebastian Marshall

The William St Clair Fellowship has provided an invaluable platform to develop my research in the transitional period since completing my PhD. Although I took up the Fellowship during a relatively quiet time at SAS at the end of June, I am grateful for the warm welcome I received from Annie Sherratt, Clare Lees, Katherine Harloe, Valerie James, Eleanor Hardy, and the staff of the ICS and Senate House Libraries. After the final push to resolve PhD corrections and a busy stint at the British School at Athens in the spring, it was a privilege to have uninterrupted research time and institutional support to begin a fresh project on garrison libraries over the summer. Since this calmer period, I returned to the PhD with fresh eyes this autumn to revise it for publication. Throughout, I have enjoyed the security of institutional library access, a workspace in central London at Senate House, the status of a university-accredited email account, and the lively interest that comes from a title associated with St Clair. During the Fellowship, I have had cause to email many colleagues who work on the Mediterranean, history of archaeology, and nineteenth-century studies more broadly; invariably the mention of St Clair elicits either a comment on his work or a memory of the man. As a researcher whose own interests defy easy disciplinary classification – between travel, archaeology, libraries, books, Greek, Ottoman, and Victorian history – it was a pleasure to work under auspices of a scholar whose output showed the value of bringing these subjects together. 

Extracts from the Messina Garrison Library Catalogue, a precursor of the Corfu Library created during Britain’s occupation of Sicily (courtesy of the National Library of Australia).

Garrison Libraries Research

My primary aim during the Fellowship was to pursue an article-length project titled ‘Travel, Archaeology, and Scholarship in Victorian Garrison Libraries.’ With a focus on British garrisons situated in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century, I set out to compare the collections of these imperial libraries and explore their function as stopping points for travellers en route to sites of historical and archaeological interest around the Mediterranean. Over the summer, I created a database of catalogues and books of regulations for officers’ garrison libraries from the Victorian period, assessing their relative size, acquisition policies, and contents. This largely involved visiting libraries in Oxford, Cambridge, and London, but also requesting digital versions of catalogues that had found their way to libraries in Canada and Australia. To gather more primary material, I made several trips to the National Archives to consult architectural plans of garrisons from the Ordnance and War Office papers, Governors’ correspondence and dispatches from the Colonial Office records, and the ‘Blue Books’ of statistics from British Mediterranean possessions. Given that the Gibraltar Garrison Library which survives intact today is reasonably well known and documented, I tightened my focus to the Malta and Corfu Garrison Libraries, which were both dispersed when these islands achieved independence from Britain. These two ‘lost’ libraries are little known among researchers but can be traced across multiple archives and collections.

Correspondence between the Librarian of the Malta Garrison Library and Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., September-October 1936, Archives of Senate House Library.

Over the summer, I developed the following research questions: how did garrison libraries function as spaces for both leisure and study? What do they reveal about Victorian reading habits? How did they include or exclude different groups connected to the respective garrisons, whether civilians or soldiers, British citizens or foreign subjects? What was the relationship between garrison libraries and book collections which predated British rule? What motivated their establishment, and how was their dismantlement shaped by the decolonialisation process in the Mediterranean? I have produced an article draft responding to these questions, which I plan to submit in the spring.

SAS proved a fertile ground to develop this project in several respects. Besides relevant talks at the History of Libraries Seminar, I found Priyasha Mukhopadhyay’s paper and its discussion at the Nineteenth Century Studies Seminar, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire, very useful for thinking about books read and un-read, and the movement of texts in an imperial bureaucracy. The most valuable connection came through a start-of-term social where I was introduced to current IES PhD candidates. Krystle Farrugia, an IES student and curator at MUŻA, Malta’s National Art Museum, proved exceptionally helpful discussing my project and putting me in touch with specialists in Malta. After a meeting with Krystle, I organised a five-day research trip to Malta. Here I visited the special collections of the University of Malta, Maltese National Archives, National Archaeological Museum, the Casa Rocca Piccola, and National Library, to consult the dispersed records of the Valletta Garrison Library. I found a large amount of material, including c. 800 pages of minutes, correspondence, and annual reports from 1884-1937 which survive uncatalogued in the National Library. Since returning I have worked through this material, which reveals the social dynamics, acquisition policies, and everyday fortunes of the library in a remarkable degree of detail. 

The left wing of the ‘Main Guard’ in St George’s Square, Valletta, former location of the Malta Garrison Library, during my research visit; J.T. Wood’s Discoveries at Ephesus with a Malta Garrison Library ex libris stamp, Malta University Library Special Collections.

PhD Publication Plans

Besides work on the garrison library project, over the past three months I have begun reworking my PhD for publication as a monograph. Having a base at SAS has been very useful for making trips to take additional photos or revisit archival material from my PhD case studies in nearby London connections, such as the George Scharf Papers in the Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery and Edward Lear’s correspondence with his publisher George Bentley in the British Library. Ahead of this longer-term plan for a book, I have completed an article draft based on half of one of my PhD case studies which will not appear in the monograph. Provisionally titled ‘Edward Falkener in Anatolia: An Architectural Historian Between Classicism and Orientalism’, the article explores how a Victorian traveller who developed a professional identity as a scholar of classical architecture responded to examples of Seljuk, Byzantine, and Ottoman architecture during a tour of Turkey from 1844-1845. 

Seminars and Conferences

Across the fellowship, I have enjoyed attending events at SAS. At ICS, it has been good to drop in on seminars for the ‘Powerful Women and their Historiography’ series, as well as the training session, ‘Pasts in Space’ on using the Pleiades gazetteer. Besides the History of Libraries and Nineteenth Century Studies seminars, at IES I have profited from the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar’s recent sessions on ‘Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron’ and ‘Shelley’s Plastic Greek.’ Special mention must go to Ian Dooley who kindly invited me to the biweekly IES Postgrad lunchtime teams meeting, which provided a welcoming and friendly space to chat with researchers affiliated with the Institute. Among the Inclusion, Participation and Engagement Fellows, it was good to meet Danae Peguero-Bueno. Given Danae’s work on the colonial architectural heritage of Santa Domingo, we had a helpful discussion about the status of former colonial fortifications in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Since it was difficult to predict when other scholars were using the workspace at SAS, socials and mixer events for fellows proved very welcome for meeting new people in person. 

Taking advantage of the location of Senate House, I have also had the opportunity to attend lunchtime seminars at the Paul Mellon Centre, lectures at the Society of Antiquaries, and events at the Hellenic Centre during visits to London. Beyond SAS, I have submitted paper proposals for the upcoming Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference, the Association for Art History Annual Conference, ‘Travellers in Ottoman Lands: Places Forgotten, Places Remembered’, and the Classical Association Annual Conference in 2025. At the very end of the Fellowship in November, I travelled to Paris to present at the conference ‘Archives de l’archéologie: histoire, pluralité et nouvelles perspectives.’ At this two-day event hosted between the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and the École nationale des chartes, I presented a paper titled ‘Searching for hidden hands: scholars, sailors, and Ottoman communities in George Scharf’s Lycian sketchbooks.’ Working on the paper gave me an impetus to rethink the message of one of my PhD chapters and consider its place in my monograph project. Finally, I have worked with Gordon Davies to provide content for his immersive documentary ‘Filming Archaeology in Hellas: Technopolis City of Athens (and beyond).’

SAS and Next Steps

As my Fellowship comes to an end, I am fortunate to move on to a Leverhulme Early Career postdoc at St Andrews in January. Notwithstanding the move to Scotland, I anticipate there being opportunities to come to London and keep up with SAS events. I shall be keeping a close eye on seminars at ICS, IES, the Warburg and IHR, and will be back in any case to consult some London-based collections for my next project. It has been very fruitful to be affiliated with the research environment at SAS at a critical stage at the outset of my postdoctoral career, and I shall look back with pride on the Fellowship. Professing interdisciplinarity is an academic cliché, but in terms of establishing an academic profile it can be difficult. The William St Clair Fellowship is unique in its generous provision of time to research and write for junior scholars who work on reading and publishing, Mediterranean heritage, and nineteenth-century history. I am grateful for the freedom, security, and connections that came with the Fellowship, and do not hesitate to encourage peers to apply for the role.