The Australian Research Council has funded a $260,000 three year Discovery Project to be led by Dr Martyn Jolly, Head of Photography and Media Arts. Called 'Heritage in the limelight: the magic lantern in Australia and the world', the project aims to discover and analyse the large number of glass magic lantern slides that remain under-used in our public collections. International scholarship has recently begun to show that lantern slide shows were a ubiquitous, globalised and formative cultural experience. The project aims to explore the international reach and diversity of this globalised modernist apparatus from the Australian perspective. It plans to understand how diverse audiences affectively experienced these powerful forms of early media, and to develop ways for today’s Australians to re-experience their magic, invigorating and expanding our cultural heritage.

The team is: Dr Martyn Jolly and Associate Professor Martin Thomas Australian National University; Professor Jane Lydon, University of Western Australia; Professor Nicolas Peterson and Professor Paul Pickering, Australian National University; Associate Professor Joe Kember, University of Exeter. These scholars aim to find amazing material from around Australia and do wonderful things with it in terms of identification, critical analysis and re-presentation.The team will be working with the European project A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in the Common European History of Learning.