Closing Date Extended for Applications for a PhD Scholarship in Digital Arts & Humanities @ Moore Institute

PhD Scholarship in Digital Arts & Humanities

Call for Applications

NUI Galway invites applications for a four-year structured PhD scholarship in Digital Arts & Humanities to commence by January 2020.

The closing date for applications is 5pm, Friday, August 30, 2019. Applications are made via the Postgraduate Application System (CRM Recruit) :

The Structured PhD in Digital Arts & Humanities at NUI Galway is a full-time four-year doctoral programme from which twelve students have graduated since its inception in 2011. Our ambition is for students to contribute to the developing digital arts and humanities community world-wide. The programme provides fourth-level researchers with the platform, structures, partnerships, and innovation models to engage and collaborate with a wide range of academics and practitioners. We welcome proposals on the use of digital tools and methodologies in the scholarly analysis of cultural texts and phenomena, and on practice-based research in digital art and media. Students will gain exposure to transferable skills in digital content creation and analysis that are academically and professionally beneficial.

Programme Structure

Candidates enter the programme via the Humanities or the Arts strands (in the relevant discipline within the College of Arts). See below for a description of these two strands. Both strands

  1. introduce students to the history of and theoretical issues in digital arts and humanities via a range of elective modules;
  2. provide the skills needed to apply advanced computational and information management paradigms to arts and/or humanities research;
  3. create a framework for students to develop generic and transferable skills to complete the required work for the award of the PhD. Work placements at pertinent institutions may also form part of the scholarship.

Application Process

Scholarships are valued at €16,000 plus fees per annum. Entrants should possess a first-class or upper second-class honours primary degree within a relevant discipline and (preferably) a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline.

Digital Humanities proposals should include a strong and clearly defined digital component, either as a core method of research and dissemination, or as a subject of research in itself. Proposals may address any topic within Digital Humanities, including (but not limited to): archives & preservation; authorship attribution; classical studies; corpus analysis; crowdsourcing; digital scholarly editing; historical studies; interdisciplinary collaboration; internet history; literary studies; ontologies; stylistics and stylometry; text-mining; textual studies; visualisation.

Digital Arts proposals may examine questions such as artistic practice informed by digital media; the intersection between artistic creativity and technological innovation; or the impact of the digital on the form, structure, and function of narrative. Proposals for practice-based doctorates are welcome as well as traditional academic formats.

Previous Digital Arts & Humanities PhD students have also worked closely with researchers at the Data Science Institute at NUI Galway (https://datascienceinstitute.ie/) and co-supervision may be sought from this research centre.

Prospective applicants are strongly advised to identify and correspond with potential supervisors for their research proposal before submitting a scholarship application: http://www.nuigalway.ie/findasupervisor/

Submitting an Application

Application should be made online at the Postgraduate Application System (CRM Recruit)  . The course description is ‘SDA-Structured PhD (Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences) Digital Arts & Humanities’.   One sample of academic writing (e.g. a recent BA or MA course essay) should be submitted under the heading ‘Writing Sample’ and a 1500-word research proposal should also be submitted under the heading ‘PhD Proposal’. The proposal must be structured under the following headings:

  1. Description of proposed research (800 words): This section should clearly describe the subject and scope of your research, and the proposed outcomes in terms of the creation of new resources, tools, knowledge transfer, etc. You should indicate the critical problems or research questions you propose to address in the thesis component of your PhD, as well as any digital outputs that may arise from your work.
  2. Context (350 words): This section should describe, to the best of your ability and as far as you are aware, the extent of the existing academic and digital work in your area of interest. You should be able to explain how your research will challenge or extend this existing topic.
  3. Methodology (250 words): Here you should describe the specific methodologies and technologies you expect to employ.
  4. Sources and Archives (100 words): Give a preliminary indication of the primary and secondary material you expect to work with.
  5. Evidence of previous achievements in digital media or art practice (for practice-based PhD applicants only

PLEASE NOTE: The Application System will also look for one form of identification and the name of a supervisor.  If you have not as yet identified a supervisor, please input Dr. Tonra’s contact details until a suitable supervisor has been assigned  (see following).

For further information please contact Professor Daniel Carey, Moore Institute or Dr Justin Tonra, Discipline of English (daniel.carey@nuigalway.ie | justin.tonra@nuigalway.ie).

Closing Date for Applications is 5pm, Friday, August 30, 2019.