Information for prospective students
If you are a prospective student, learn more about how you can apply for a Collaborative Doctoral Award studentship and PhD Studentships available.
How to apply
As a prospective student, you have two routes to applying for a Collaborative Doctoral Award studentship.
- If you have an idea for a project, do consider reaching out to a potential academic supervisor (at your own institution or elsewhere) to discuss funding opportunities and whether they might be available to supervise you. You can also check the websites of Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDPs), like the one we are part of via the Science Museums and Archives Consortium, and of Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs), like Techne or Northern Bridge, for current opportunities. Do bear in mind that Collaborative Doctoral Awards are expected to have a substantive focus on the collections and/or activities of the partner non-academic institution, and to contribute in some way to the institution's goals. You may also find our general guidance on choosing a PhD helpful.
- You can apply to advertised CDA studentships when these are available. These will have been developed by the prospective supervisors and funding obtained. As well as checking this page regularly for opportunities, do check the websites of other partner organisations, CDPs, and DTPs.
We will advertise any current funded CDA studentships with the Society here when they are open for applications.
PhD Studentship available
Editing Empire: The Hakluyt Society in (post-)imperial Britain, 1846 to the present
A fully-funded PhD studentship, to begin in September 2025, is available at the University of Warwick’s Department of History, in collaboration with the Society, through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
The Hakluyt Society has published hundreds of travel accounts mostly of European colonial "discovery". Yet despite its celebration of Elizabethan empire-builders, support for Victorian explorers and connections with the Royal Geographical Society and India Office, it has never been studied in relation to British imperial culture and its public legacies, until now.
The project
Founded in 1846, the history of the Hakluyt [hak-loowt] Society (named after Richard Hakluyt, 1553-1616) reveals the intersections of gentlemanly societies, institutions of learning and British colonialism. By publishing primary sources relating to mainly British and European colonial expansion, the Hakluyt Society shaped how the imperial past was remembered.
This project explores how the Society selected, edited and disseminated historical materials, and how these sources and their editorial framing impacted the understanding of travel and travel writing during the expansion, and break up, of the British Empire.
It also examines how the Society adjusted to changing circumstances in the era of decolonisation. In this way, the project contributes to ongoing conversations within the Hakluyt Society about its institutional past and publishing remit, and broader efforts to ‘decolonise’, and develop more critical understanding of, ‘imperial’ institutions and the continuing significance of the colonial legacies embedded in travel writing and its history.
Applications should be made via the Midlands4Cities portal, which opens on 16 October 2024.
Making Geography Matter: Opening up the Doreen Massey Archive
Applications are invited for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award at The Open University, in partnership with the Society.
The project
Doreen Massey (1944-2016) changed geography. Her theoretical work on space, place and power helped enliven and transform debates across the discipline and well beyond, bringing many into the conversation over the difference that geography makes.
As a prolific public speaker, committed activist, and longstanding educator at the Open University, Massey was a thoroughly public intellectual: from shaping the Greater London Council’s social and economic strategies in the 1980s through to Hugo Chávez adopting her concept of ‘power geometries’ in Venezuela at the turn of the century.
Not only did Massey articulate how the geographical and political are inherently intertwined, but she was insistent that a lively understanding of spatial politics is integral to opening up new possibilities for living together in a changing world.
Doreen Massey’s unpublished archive (held at the Society) contains documents related to all of these as well as further endeavours. It is made up of extensive documentary, audio and visual materials such as: unpublished conference papers; preparatory notes for manuscripts; communications with different academics, activists and political figures; draft policy papers; recordings of unpublished lectures; transcripts from BBC broadcasts; collective teaching material correspondence, and more.
Deadline 7 January 2025
Conferencing British Geography: Disciplinary History told through Annual Conferences (1949-2029) and their Archives
Applications will soon be open for a Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Nottingham, in partnership with the Society.
The project
This research project will provide a new history of post-WWII British geography, constructed through studying the lived experience and academic atmosphere of the annual conferences of the Society. The student will have unrivalled access to the Institute’s archives and will also be embedded in the team which organises the annual conferences today.
The project will focus on how geography conferences were and are planned and experienced, providing a new perspective on the discipline of Geography in Britain. It will emphasise conference organisers and hosts as well as the debates which took place and the concepts or discoveries which emerged.
While the history of the Society (founded in 1830 and merged with the IBG in 1995) has been well studied, with an emphasis on exploration, the role of the IBG (founded in 1933) as the preeminent professional body representing geography’s academic community has barely been studied at all.
The IBG’s most significant influence was its role in organising its annual academic conference held around the UK and the focus of this study. Using the academic conference as a lens (57 of the 75 conferences to date took place outside of London), this project will provide a more regional geography of British Geography, while also attending to the institute’s international influence.
The project will draw from recent scholarship which has reconsidered conferencing as a distinct political and intellectual practice. This work combines analysing both the content of the discussions (key debates, controversies and actors), the para-conference (socialising, fieldtrips) and the broader infrastructure of hosting (accommodation, venues, travel).
Deadline 13 January 2025