We’ve just announced a call out, inviting applications for a three-year, fully funded AHRC Studentship (including full fees and maintenance costs) to undertake a PhD in Theatre Studies under the joint supervision of the School of English (Theatre Workshop) at the University of Sheffield and us.
Under the title Contemporary theatre-making and company longevity, we’re looking for someone interested in how a company’s longevity - and artists’ personal circumstance - might impact the work they make, and how a company’s archive might be read.
From the call out:
This Studentship is designed to examine what makes longevity – both creative and logistical - achievable for a small-scale theatre company in this context and to deepen understanding of the challenges, risks and values attached to this for artists and audiences. The researcher will explore what it means to ‘read’ successive phases of company creativity through a period marked not just by changing economic and cultural conditions, but by altered personal circumstances and familial priorities. Typically, critical analysis of the arts will ‘bracket out’ such factors; by contrast, the research undertaken for this Studentship will be original in interrogating the ways in which creative process and its outcomes change and age with the artists themselves. Thus a key hypothesis that the investigative process will test is that artistic practice is as much about ‘somewhere’ and ‘sometime’ as it is about ‘something’. The Studentship also proceeds from the assumption that in the practice of artists, both the archive (a formal container for ‘inscribed’ and supposedly enduring documents/artefacts) and the repertoire (a non-archival system of ‘incorporated’ knowledge transfer by means of apparently ephemeral actions, languages and behaviours) constitute valuable, interdependent sites of knowledge-making.
This is a two part process: interested applicants should initially apply to the University of Sheffield, and then the selected candidate will work closely with the supervisors to prepare a formal application for a Collaborative Doctoral Award through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).
You can find full details here, on the University of Sheffield’s site, and of all the WRoCAH supported projects here.
The successful candidate will also be a member of the prestigious AHRC-funded Doctoral Training Partnership, the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).