Museum and Heritage Research at University of Westminster covers a wide range of areas.
Our researchers contribute to The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) which is rated one of the top five research centres for visual and media arts, design and music in the UK in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. Our researchers often work in collaboration with museums and galleries in the UK, from major institutions such Tate Modern and the Museum of London to smaller museums such as the Roald Dahl Museum, the Museum of Migration and the Foundling Museum.
The research projects we support are international as well as UK based. Westminster researchers have conducted projects in the Middle East into the cultural perception of museums, in North America and Australia into ways that museums work with technology, and across Europe looking at ways that artists collaborate with museums .A number of our team have significant ongoing collaborations with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Research projects have included studies of inclusive practice and designing multisensory activities for blind and partially sighted people; creating intergenerational museum events for families; evaluating how Londoners’ understand their history in relation to museums; examining the visitor experience and what makes museum visits memorable; exploring the ‘threshold’ experience of visitors when they enter a museum building.
We welcome applications from PhD candidates and we support PhDs that might be conducted in part as ‘practice’, or through professional projects, as well as PhDs that are entirely theoretical.
Current and recent PhD projects
- Studies of Islamic art exhibitions in museums, their interpretation and visitors, which includes both reinstallations of Islamic art collections and temporary exhibitions of Islamic art
- A study of small scale craft museums in the UK examining how they contribute to intangible cultural heritage
- The 'Lost Museum': a history of the United Services museum 1830- 1962