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New PhD studentships with National Gallery and Tate Modern announced

AHRC-funded studentships to be run collaboratively between Birkbeck and the major arts institutions

The School of Arts has announced new doctoral partnerships with the National Gallery and Tate Modern. Applications for the fully-funded PhD studentships arising from the collaborations are currently open.

The new studentships, which have defined topics of research, are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The National Gallery studentship

  • Titled ‘Modern Mistresses on the Old Masters’, the PhD studentship will explore the networks and influence of nineteenth century women writers on western European art, focusing especially on those who inspired a greater interest in the collection at the Trafalgar Square gallery.
  • The successful applicant will also research the social and cultural history of the Gallery’s present-day efforts to democratise access to its collections and reach new audiences by examining the understudied critical and art-historical writings of nineteenth-century women, which typically had a more popular reach than that of their male counterparts while also speaking to specialists, then and now.
  • The studentship will be supervised by Birkbeck’s Professor Hilary Fraser, and the National Gallery’s Dr Susanna Avery-Quash.
  • Applications close on Friday 22 April. Find out more

The Tate Modern studentship

  • This second new studentship will investigate the idea of the ‘Public Programme’ in modern curatorship. It follows from the growing interest in the complex nexus of spaces and forms through which the discourse of art and its publics are produced.
  • The successful applicant will investigate the idea and form of the public programme through a practiced-based historical-critical enquiry into the particular ways in which 'public' and 'programme' have been mobilised, challenged and reassessed through their propositional interrelation
  • The studentship will be supervised by Birkbeck’s Dr Ben Cranfield, and Tate Modern curator Dr Marko Daniel.
  • Applications close on Monday 16 May. Find out more

Professor Hilary Fraser, executive dean of the School of Arts, said: “We are delighted to announce these two new PhD studentships. They will provide the successful applicants with invaluable academic skills and experience of working collaboratively with globally-renowned arts institutions, plus top academics and practitioners in their relative fields of investigation.”

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