AHRC Doctoral Landscape Awards

Departments of English, LLC (Languages, Literatures & Cultures), History, & Classics

Dr Helen Kingstone, Dr John Regan, Dr Carlotta Paltrinieri, Dr Simone Gigliotti, Dr Paris Chronakis, & Professor Jari Pakkanen

How can Digital Humanities methods help us better understand historical cultures and practices?

Royal Holloway Humanities departments are home to the Digital Humanities group, and to the renowned Holocaust Research Institute, Centre for Victorian Studies, and Centre for Visual Cultures among others. We invite PhD proposals that use digital methodologies to explore historical, cultural or literary questions while critically addressing the ethical and discriminatory challenges embedded in academic and cultural heritage practices.

Proposals might consider some of the following issues: 

• How can the digital exploration of natural-language data sets help with the discovery of hitherto-invisible, collective structures of meaning and knowledge? How best can natural-language analysis, such as corpus linguistics, be adapted to historical texts and language?
• How can we fruitfully link datasets of literary text or literary metadata (e.g. about authorship) to datasets of demographic data (e.g. censuses) to yield new analyses? What new answers might this bring to questions about literary, cultural or other historical change?
• How can digital approaches contribute to heritage liberation by opening access, challenging discriminatory narratives, and supporting more inclusive forms of cultural stewardship? How might digital collections be designed or interpreted in ways that actively challenge unethical and discriminatory perspectives within cultural heritage institutions?
• What does the shift from physical object to digital surrogate reveal about the changing material and social conditions of cultural heritage?
• How can multi-dimensional digital representations (e.g. with a time component) be used to study the shifts in the past and the present of cultural heritage?
• How can digital social network analysis, digital cartography, and/or AI interpret and write new histories, e.g. of forced labour during the Holocaust? And how can these approaches also help us discover hitherto-undetected patterns of social relations, informal social hierarchies, and collective structures of meaning in spaces and situations of social isolation, such as in Nazi concentration camps and forced labour sites?

Department of Politics, International Relations, & Philosophy

Dr Jonathan Seglow

The Political Theory of Free Speech

Free speech is a central political right, but what exactly it involves, what justifies its special status, and what its appropriate limits are remain subject to lively contestation among political theorists and philosophers.  These questions have become more urgent as a result of contemporary controversies such as the amplification of online harms through social media; the rise of misinformation at massive scale; high profile cases of ‘no platforming’ and cancel culture; and the transformation of the public square into a global, digital public sphere.

This project invites PhD proposals in political theory and philosophy which can help advance our understanding of the right to and concept of free speech. These might include:

• Foundations: What are the philosophical foundations of speech? How relevant today are longstanding justifications for speech based on truth, autonomy, and democracy? Can free speech best be defended in other ways? Is the right to free speech one against external interference, or should there be a fair opportunity to engage in it? In what can speech be limited by social pressure, as much as by law and rules?
• Hate Speech: How exactly is hate speech harmful?  How should the harms of hate speech best be conceptualised: as an assaults on dignity, incitement to violence, or acts of subordination? What groups are vulnerable to it? What should regulation of hate speech involve when so much of it is communicated via privately owned social media?
• Democracy: What do democratic values imply for free speech?  Should there be greater regulation of political speech (e.g. spending caps), or is a laissez faire policy more appropriate?  Should there be norms of speech at trans-national level?
• Misinformation: What are the harms of disinformation and misinformation?  Does the right to free speech encompass the right to disseminate misinformation?  What is the balance between institutional reform and individual responsibility in countering misinformation
• Social Media: What norms of content-moderation apply on social media? How can algorithmic bias best be addressed? What issues of legitimacy arise from the fact that public sphere is essentially controlled by private corporations?

Department of Politics, International Relations, & Philosophy

Professor Jennifer Piscopo

Care Politics and Policy in Europe and the Americas

Professor Jennifer Piscopo is Professor of Politics and Gender in the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy, and Director of the Gender Institute. She is also co-lead of the CaRI (Care, Rights, and Inclusion) Project, and invites PhD applicants interested in studying care policy and policy in Europe and the Americas (including Latin America). CaRI examines policy innovations that increase state provisioning of care services, with particular emphasis on policies that operationalize and implement a human right to care and on policies that expand the rights and social inclusion of unpaid carers, especially women. In August 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued Consultative Opinion 31, declaring care a human right, and Latin American countries signed the Tlatelolco Commitment, which sets a ten-year deadline for countries to advance towards ‘caring societies’. In parallel, carers’ rights movements in Europe, including the UK, have increasingly mobilized around—and won—policies such as rights to respite for carers. These developments raise multiple normative and empirical research questions about care movements’ strategies and about care policies’ design, development, and effectiveness. Does the vision of care as a human right actually offer the transformative potential its proponents claim and is this vision achievable? 

Potential PhD projects can include:

• Theoretical and conceptual analyses of the evolving international normative framework and jurisprudence around the human right to care and the idea of becoming ‘caring societies’
• Qualitative examinations of how feminist political economic theories about unwaged work and care become translated into international and/or domestic policy conversations and/or developments
• Case studies of carers’ rights movements from one or more countries in the Americas or Europe, including the UK, US, Canada, and countries in Latin America; a focus on other Anglophone democracies (e.g., Australia and New Zealand) is also welcome
• Case studies of care policy design, adoption, and implementation in one or more countries from the Americas or Europe

Department of Politics, International Relations, & Philosophy

Professor Daniel Whistler 

Making Sense of Creativity

Drawing on RHUL’s world-leading expertise in cutting-edge creative practices across numerous media, we invite PhD proposals that engage with theorising creativity and, particularly, the various historical traditions that try to make sense of creativity in theoretical, conceptual and philosophical writings.

In particular, proposals might consider some of the following issues:

• The Romantic account of the creative act and its various critiques;
• Creativity, eventhood and the radically new;
• The different meanings of creativity across the diversity of the creative arts and literature;
• Creativity and innovation in the sciences and in mathematics;
• The concept of genius and distrust of the myth of genius;
• Interdisciplinary approaches to creativity.