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.