In collaboration with Wiley, the Society has digitised substantial parts of its pre-1945 Collections. Digitised materials are available for research through the Wiley Digital Archives (WDA) platform.
Our Collections contain over two million documents, maps, photographs, paintings, periodicals, artefacts and books, and span 500 years of geography, travel and exploration.
The richness and potential of the Collections lies in our ability to make connections between materials in many different formats, drawing together items scattered across the different parts of the collections to build up a richer portrait of a given place, person or expedition. In addition to enabling access to hundreds of thousands of digitised items and materials, the WDA platform helps to facilitate making such connections through its suite of user features.
If you are interested in learning more about how to use the Wiley Digital archive, please see our resource.
Wiley Digital Archives Research Fellowships
To enable access for researchers not at subscribing institutions, we have to date run three rounds of applications for Wiley Digital Archives Research Fellowships. These Fellowships provide successful researchers with access to the Wiley Digital Archives for six months, to pursue a focused research project on a part-time basis.
Please note these will not be offered for 2023-24.
Previous recipients
The projects supported cover a wide range of topic areas, advancing knowledge and providing new insights on a number of key themes, including providing new insights into the science and technology of exploration, making use of innovative new digital methodologies, highlighting hidden and forgotten histories, exploring under-researched parts of the Collections, and more. To read more about each of the projects, new materials that are found, and how the digital archive is enabling new kinds of scholarship please see the interviews and talks linked below.
2022-23 recipients
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Felix de Montety (Université Grenoble Alpes): Mountain cartography and the languages of exonymy
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Kate Simpson (University of Sheffield): The spatial poetics of artefacts: David Livingstone’s expeditionary collecting
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Ellen Smith (University of Leicester): Searching for Cinchona: Reconstructing the Experiences of Minna Markham in South America, India and Sri Lanka
2021-22 recipients
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Nokmedemla Lemtur (University of Göttingen, Germany): Labour in the lofty peaks: tracing lives of high altitude porters in the Mount Everest Expeditions (1921 – 1953) Read our interview with Nokmedemla
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Maria Sebastian Sebastian (University of the Balearic Islands, Spain): Travelling women. Depictions of the Mediterranean area in the narratives of Emilia F. Noel and Margaret Hasluck Read our interview with Maria and watch her Be Inspired talk.
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Joy Slappnig (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK): Marshall Islands stick charts and the idea of the ‘Indigenous map’
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Jonathan Westaway (University of Lancashire, UK): Encountering the Indigenous body in the Himalayan Borderlands: Gurkhas, Sherpas, and the embodied construction of 'Martial' and 'Mountain' Races in British India, 1890-1947 Read our interview with Jonathan
2020-21 recipients
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Alicia Colson (Independent): From ‘Banishment’ to ‘Cool’: a chairborne exploration of a ‘forgotten archipelago’ - Santa Catarina, Brazil Read our interview with Alicia
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Sherezade Garcia Rangel (Falmouth University, UK): Unbound Beauty: Venezuela according to the Wiley Digital Archive Read our interview with Sherezade and watch her Be Inspired talk
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Emily Hayes (Oxford Brookes University, UK): (Un)commonplace knowledge: geographical relativity in the fin de siècle Read our interview with Emily
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Sandra Hayward (Independent): Hidden treasures: low-latitude historical aurorae and their relevance to future space flight Read our interview with Sandra
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Rick Mitcham (Kindai University, Japan): Corresponding Geographies: A Critical Exploration of Walter Weston’s Contact with the Royal Geographical Society, 1892-1924 Read our interview with Rick
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Fred Morton (University of Botswana, Botswana): Cattle People: The Tswana & Metsemegologolo: Multimodal Landscape of African Urbanisms Read our interview with Fred
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*Joanne Norcup (University of Warwick, UK): The life and legacies of the 1998 British Council / Royal Geographical Society exhibition (1998) Photos and Phantasms: Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston’s photographs of the Caribbean (1908 – 1909)
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Catherine Oliver (University of Cambridge, UK): Animals in the Royal Geographical Society’s archives Read our interview with Catherine and watch the 'Be inspired' talk
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Karen Rann (Queen’s University Belfast, UK): Moving Mountains: early uses of isobaths and contour lines on maps Read our interview with Karen
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Bradley Rink (University of the Western Cape, South Africa): Airmindedness redux: Growing tourism and worldliness through aeromobility in Africa Read our interview with Bradley and watch his Be Inspired talk
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Shaun Seah (Columbia University, USA): ‘Watch on Deck – the Orientalist gaze of tourists, naval officers and colonial officialdom along the Straits of Singapore’ (1850-1950)
*awarded but not taken up.