Postgraduate Opportunities
The Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts supervises MPhil and PhD students in a range of different disciplines. We welcome applications from potential research students in Art & Design and Digital Media, Drama and Theatre Studies, English Literature, History, Sociology, and Media & Cultural Studies. Students can read for these degrees in full or part-time modes.
Research degrees are supervised by approachable, experienced staff, through regular tutorial meetings. Each student has their own supervisory team, drawing on expertise at the University of Worcester and elsewhere. Tutors are happy to advise on potential projects, no matter how imprecise they are at first.
Students can read for academic and theoretical degrees, or for practice-based degrees in the Creative Arts and Drama, using the facilities of the £1m Digital Arts Centre, Drama Studio, and Art workshops.
Qualified Staff
The staff in the Institute are highly qualified and have good research reputations. There are two Professors in English, with international publications, over half of the staff hold doctorates, and we have successful published research in English literature, Drama, History, Sociology, American and Cultural Studies.
We have an internationally renowned Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, with links to universities in Northern Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States.
Drama, Art and Digital Art
We are running a large, government-funded digitisation project on Victorian plays, and staff have recently published books on the Russian Revolution, Irish history, Victorian and Edwardian literature, Critical Theory and sociology, the Renaissance stage, and the history of Birmingham’s theatres.
The Institute has a strong Arts section, with practising artists teaching Art and Design, and exhibiting in art galleries and museums across the UK and further afield, including Australia, Italy, France, and Norway. Several have regional exhibitions in Birmingham and Worcester, but many have also exhibited in galleries in London.
The million-pound Digital Arts Centre, opened in 2003, provides an opportunity to study the Creative Arts in a modern media space, and its courses bring together sound and vision technology in a video production studio and sound recording studios, with work in multimedia, animation and internet design on state of the art computers.
Staff in the Digital Arts Centre have close links with business and industry, and are currently undertaking projects with the BBC (on digital television), MMMLive (a media company with clients such as Jaguar, Ericsson, and Hewlett-Packard), and retail giant Argos.
The Institute also has a working drama studio that showcases students’ performances, and has shows by visiting theatre companies. The Drama team have particular expertise in Theatre and Education, with three resident theatre companies: Collar and TIE, Albion Theatre, and Magic Attic Theatre. Drama are also engaged on a research project to develop multimedia in drama performance, using state of the art lighting, camera and music equipment awarded as a successful government grant.
Staff Expertise
Staff across the Institute have particular expertise in the following areas:
- The Visual Arts / Fine Art Practice
- Visual Communication and Design
- Creative Digital Media, especially web-based and video
- Drama and Performance, including contemporary theatre, disability and theatre, and theatre in education
- Theatre Studies, especially Elizabethan theatre, Victorian drama, and Twentieth-century British theatre
- English Literature, especially Renaissance literature, eighteenth-century literature, Victorian literature, Modernist poetry and fiction, twentieth-century literature, children’s literature, women’s writing, and American literature
- History, especially post-sixteenth-century British history, local history in Worcestershire and Herefordshire, modern Irish and Russian history
- Sociology, especially race and education, hermeneutics, police and community initiatives, the beauty industry, soft pornography, the media and contemporary television, politics, domestic violence
- Media & Cultural Studies, especially media representations, international politics and communication, film and screen studies, the internet, science and the media, media and publishing history, globalisation, popular culture, American culture
The Children's Literature, Literacy and Creativity International Research Centre offers particular opportunities to undertake research in the field of international children’s literature.