We have many PhD students working across the arts, humanities, and cultural institutions. As a PhD student, you will find yourself in an ambitious and supportive research environment, with a tailor-made supervisory team, that provides you with the intellectual and professional skills to realize your research goals.
Current doctoral projects
Current doctoral projects supervised by staff affiliated with the Institute include:
- art and space in Lebanon
- architectural politics after Deleuze and Guattari
- violence in the novels of J.G. Ballard
- Cold War British science fiction
- the rhetorical figure of the administrator
- contemporary travel writing
- psychoanalysing structures of political and legal order
- racialism in nineteenth-century science writing
- ethics in the work of Danilo Kiš
- diasporic writings of immigrants to Ireland
- architecture, prosthesis and extended mind
- a critical history of British Asian Theatre.
Our PhD programme
As an incoming PhD student, to encourage a sense of intellectual community and prepare you for the challenges of PhD study, you are required to take our two-semester long postgraduate module entitled ‘Knowledge, Cultural Memory, Archives, and Research’.
Contributed to by members of the Institute, the module offers a critical introduction to research methods. It foregrounds and engages with the critical implications of knowledge in the arts, humanities, and cultural institutions through interdisciplinary approaches to literature, visual, material, and spatial cultures.
The module presents postgraduate students with questions such as:
- How do students study?
- How do you start getting to understand what it means to do research?
- What is self-reflective practice, and how does it relate to your research practices?
- What actually are (visual, textual, sonic, material, immaterial, digital) documents as starting points for thinking, making, writing?
- How can you start coming to terms with things like historical documents, archives, critical and theoretical methodologies, and also wikis, blogs, and other kinds of user-generated content as a way of beginning to think more generally about the status, veracity, and potential of knowledge in the twenty-first century?
The module will facilitate critical thinking, develop transferable skills of research and writing, and generate an understanding of the nature and practice of research in the arts, humanities, and cultural institutions that will enable you to develop your individual PhD research projects.
Contact
For an informal discussion about our PhD programme please contact Dr Simon Avery.