University for the Creative Arts

Qualification Type: PhD

Location: Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Rochester

Funding for: UK Students, EU Students, International Students

Funding amount: The package includes a fee waiver for three years full-time study, and a stipend of £15,285 each year for three years.

Hours: Full Time

Placed On: 9th February 2021

Closes: 31st March 2021

About UCA

UCA is the UK’s highest-ranked creative university (Guardian/Complete University Guides 2021), offering courses in Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion, Film, Performing Arts and Creative Business across Surrey, Kent, and overseas.

But that’s not the whole story.

Creativity makes communities more vibrant, innovative, human. So we support our students to forge their own path and use their creativity to make a difference. Right now, they’re making the creative industries more inclusive and sustainable, changing perspectives, and winning awards – from Golden Globes to Pulitzers. 

Research at UCA

With a vibrant and progressive research community and a wealth of specialist resources for creative research and practice, UCA offers the ideal environment to explore your chosen field and develop unique and impressive doctoral work.

We are a top ten research community for Art & Design, and the second largest provider of creative education in Europe. In REF 2014, 93% of our research was internationally recognised for quality, and 64% to was judged to be world-leading or internationally significant. In our research centres (including the Crafts Study Centre, the International Textiles Research Centre, and the Centre for Sustainable Design), 90% of research produced impacts that were rated world-leading or internationally significant.

Our PhD Studentships

We are currently seeking exceptional applicants to our MPhil/ PhD programme, and have a number of Vice Chancellor’s PhD Studentships on offer for Home, EU or International candidates looking to pursue practice-based or thesis-only research projects. The package includes a fee waiver for three years’ full-time study, and a stipend of £15,285 each year for three years.

Our subjects

To apply, you will need to submit a research proposal that is focused in one of our specialist areas (or spans several of them). These are:

• Crafts (including ceramics and textiles): contemporary textiles, textiles emerging from traditional practice, textiles as spatial intervention; textiles as expressions of cultural specificity, modern and contemporary British studio ceramics and makers, modern craft guilds and societies, topics across the Crafts Study Centre collections.
• Fine art and photography: photography and its practices, performative photography, women in photography, the archive, the artists interview, the photobook, issues around the body, hybridity and appropriation.
• Visual communication and design: the politics of design, contemporary political theory, experimental and speculative design, principles of design, graphic design and typography, archives and design, design history and theory, design for sustainability.
• Fashion: cloth, memory and experience, public and private dress, fashion heritage, fashion and class, gender and thrift, subcultures, experiential retailing, the branded environment, consumer culture and the history of shopping, fashion technology and electronic textiles.
• Music: music technology, improvisation, notation practice and art/science collaboration.
• Film, media and performing arts: artist’s films, film genre and aesthetics, film and space, radical geography, essay cinema, theoretical approaches to film, performance and technology, interactive and immersive art and performance, wearables in performance, embodiment/presence in technology (theory and practice), art-science/technology collaborations and innovations, cyberfeminism and feminist technology in media art.
• Video Games: Indie and Art Games in performance; video games and play, spatiality, interface, and intersections between video games and biopolitics, intermediality in film and games; indie and art game and narrative design, gender representation in video games.
• Animation: archives and animation; experimental, documentary and activist practice; expanded animation, VR and immersive technologies; issues of gender, sexuality, post-colonialism and social inclusion.
• Architecture: activist practices, alternative organizations, architectural education and critical pedagogy, critical spatial practice, ecologies and climate change, ethics, gender, race and class analysis and methodologies, isovistic analysis and space syntax, spatial mapping, architectural history and theory, particularly of the twentieth century.
• Critical Theory: contemporary political theory, racial capitalism, feminism and representation, feminism and technology/ cyberfeminism, post-digital culture, memory, popular culture and mediation practices.
• Business for the creative industries: sustainability for business and design, innovation, technology exchange and business strategy in the arts and creative industries, sustainable development, circular economy, social innovation and wellbeing, entrepreneurship and innovative business models, eco-design, eco-innovation, arts and creative markets, funding for the arts and creative industries, inter-industry and societal creative crossovers.

How to apply

To see our entry requirements, register your interest or apply, please visit www.uca.ac.uk/research/research-degrees

Please note: All our PhD students begin their studies in September, so we recommend that you submit your applications by 31 March 2021. We will consider applications after this date, but early applications may be more likely to be successful, as supervisors’ capacity is limited. All applicants wishing to be considered for a Vice-Chancellor’s Studentship or other funding must apply by 31st March.