You can study all kinds of topics within these subject communities, in a postgraduate research environment that brings together staff expertise and students with common interests and aspirations. There's a lot of opportunity for cross over between subject communities – and we actively encourage interdisciplinary, theoretical or practice-based research approaches.
Our specialisms are corporate governance, financial management, reporting for sustainability and management accounting.
We also have one of the largest programmes of its kind in Europe – our Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) – with around 150 candidates working across 5 continents.
We offer supervision for cross-disciplinary projects in management, public health, health promotion, education and social care. Our research includes professional development, physical activity promotion in healthcare & community settings, intervention design & evaluation, and intervention pathways & effectiveness for patient care.
Applied research is particularly important for us – providing the evidence needed to transform services and improve outcomes. For example developing new & advanced care models, redesigning urgent & emergency care, strengthening general practice, gaining best rehabilitation models and transforming mental health & cancer services.
Our research has a long-established and meaningful impact in a number of areas – including physical activity & wellbeing, sports pre/rehabilitation, sports therapy & sports medicine, sports & exercise performance (including biomechanics), and the role of sport & exercise in physical therapy.
This has taken place within nationally and internationally-funded projects working with a range of partners, as well as within research programmes undertaken by postgraduate researchers.
We specialise in practice-based research and encourage exploration of new ways to examine the relationships between creative practice and theory across the core disciplines of fine art, illustration and photography. Our supervision teams are composed of arts practitioners and established academic researchers with experience of supervising and examining postgraduate research.
Research offers the chance for cross disciplinary creative collaborations, such as our current students’ work with landscape architecture and creative writing – as well as opportunities for exploring curatorial practice, such as Jonathan Parsons' work with The Wilson Art Gallery & Museum in 2017, and a forthcoming project with Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest, Germany (2021). We welcome students from diverse backgrounds and offer research methods training for applicants with strong research ideas but less prior experience of academic methodologies.
We supervise across a wide range of topics. These include:
- leadership and organisational culture/learning
- most areas of HRM and generational attitudes to work and careers
- enterprise and entrepreneurship, lifestyle entrepreneurship, enterprise and entrepreneurship education, enterprise policy, innovation and SMEs in context
- trade and economic development
- financial market and institutions
- accounting reporting and disclosure, auditing, fintech solutions, banking (including Sharia banking), corporate governance
- business performance, including mergers and acquisitions and cultural due diligence
- customer service, quality/satisfaction, supply chain management, business ethics and corporate social responsibility
- diversity, quality and workplace health/wellbeing.
Our expertise in journalism and communication covers journalism studies, sports journalism, journalism ethics, censorship, football culture, social media, political communication, protest & campaigns, and media representation.
A recently completed project in this area was entitled ‘Journalism Culture Shift in the Development of New Media: The Practice of “Curation Journalism” in Indonesia’.
Our research specialisms include:
- food, farming and the environment
- environmental governance
- policy analysis and programme evaluation
- social innovation
- rural development and knowledge systems
- heritage and landscape
- rural economies and societies
- commons management and governance
Study a postgraduate research degree and get a masters or PhD in creative computing. Conduct your own piece of unique research on a range of topics including research, design & development of various systems, computing technologies and applications. Our specialisms include VR, AR and MR, IoTs, mobile technology, gamification and serious games, user experiences and user interface development.
Our staff research specialisms include:
- sustainable technology
- the relationship between music and landscape
- alternative methods of representation, augmented aurality and digital tools for sound representation
- biophilic design for improving health and wellbeing
- digital and traditional
- the theory and practice of illustration in advertising and design
- representational drawing and painting techniques
- the atelier system
- colour theory.
As you might expect, Education covers all areas of research linked to formal schooling from early years to higher education – but also extends well beyond formal schooling to a variety of professional and community contexts.
Recently we've seen PhDs on technical apprenticeships, the regional management of educational provision, the impact of shifting youth work policy, art and culture in schools, and teaching English as a foreign language using digital platforms.
Study a postgraduate research degree and get a masters or PhD in technical and applied computing. Conduct your own piece of unique research on a range of topics including research, design & development of various engineering systems, applied computing theory, technology and applications.
Our specialisms include engineering system modelling, analysis, simulation & optimisation, design & development, applied computing, artificial intelligence, IoTs, engineering management, bionics engineering for innovative product design and development by learning from nature.
We specialise in ecology and biology, physical & human geography and international development.
- Alice Edney (MSc by Research) studied the development of time-lapse photography in seabird monitoring, and is now a DPhil student at the University of Oxford.
- Jordan Brearly (MSc by Research) studied practitioner insights regarding modern slavery in Gloucestershire.
- Jamie Wood (PhD) studied palaeoflood chronology of blocked-valley lakes in eastern South Africa, and works in our luminescence dating laboratory.
There's an extensive range of subjects covered in film and TV, including (but not limited to) practice-based research, film production, cult media, genre, film & television theory, film studies, the film industry, writing for the screen, and animation.
Past and current research includes ‘The Wild, Wild West: No Country for Old Men, or is it? Feature Films and the 60+ Audience’ and a practice-based screenwriting thesis entitled ‘Representations of Relationship Break-ups in Ensemble TV Dramas’.
The Creative Writing team has specialisms in the writing of poetry, plays, short-stories, novels and novellas, as well as in the creative process, creative writing pedagogy, language and style, writing and cognition. There are also opportunities for interdisciplinary work with English language and literature, fine art or performance.
Opportunities for research in English cover language and literature as well as interdisciplinary projects. While our expertise is broad, we particularly welcome applications in:
- Renaissance and Caroline drama
- romantic, nineteenth-century and American literature
- Thomas Hardy
- crime fiction
- women's writing
- ecolinguistics
- discourse analysis
- language variation
- sociolinguistics
- dialectology.
Our team is skilled in a variety of research approaches – ranging from path modelling to projective approaches, survey, interview & focus group techniques, plus ethnography and autoethnography. Our research areas also address a wide variety of topics.
In marketing and events, this includes consumer culture theory, collaborative marketing & the circular economy, digital, fashion & place marketing, retail environments, sustainable tourism, exploring services and value co-creation in all its many guises.
The law group focuses on issues surrounding ethics, governance, child rights, human rights, sports and clinical legal education.
We're also able to support multidisciplinary work – and have an established record in finding innovative ways to create boundary-spanning research.
We offer a wide scope for potential research projects – currently specialising in practice-based research, philosophical perspectives on music, musicology, popular music, ageing & music, gender, music documentaries, community media, digital storytelling, music & sound production, immersive audio technologies, composition, telematics, and phonography.
Past and current thesis titles include ‘The Experience of Ageing for Women who Identified with Punk Music’ and the more practice-led ‘Exploring Nonlinear Time Within Interactive and Adaptive Electronic Music Composition’.
We offer supervision for cross-disciplinary projects in management, public health, health promotion, education and social care. Our research includes mental health nursing, health & wellbeing, public health, and intervention pathways & effectiveness for patient care.
Current topics include investigating the clinical benefits from closer links in a three-way therapeutic relationship between carers, service users & clinicians, and considering the effects of obesity and wellbeing on women's fertility.
Our subject community is interested in research topics that innovatively cross disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship is welcomed – as well as pioneering approaches to embodied scholarship and immersive practice-as-research.
Our supervisory teams cover a wide range of specialisms including performance studies, writing for performance, acting, immersive & participatory theatre, theatrical adaptation, multimedia performance, classical theatre, site-related performance, musical theatre, theatre & education, applied theatre, dance science, dance education & therapy, philosophy and community dance.
We have strong established links and partnerships with arts organisations, professional dance and performance companies, practitioners and publishing houses in the UK and internationally – and you'll be encouraged to create work with external stakeholders.
The aim of your PhD, MPhil or MA by Research studies will be to produce a thesis that contains original research. If focused on practice, the thesis might comprise a ground-breaking performance (of a publishable/ performance standard), or make a significant contribution to the production of new knowledge in professional practice.
Our research specialisms cover many areas of photography, including industry practices, social & amateur practices, moving image and installation. We're also active in the history and theory of photography.
Our major specialisms include documentary photography and landscape photography – especially in relation to ecologies – and the photography of place. We welcome practice-led research proposals and proposals based in history or theory.
We carry out pure and applied research in health, wellbeing, human reasoning and human error across many diverse settings.
- Recently Sam Warne (MSc by Research) studied the effect of covid lockdown on physical activity habits.
- And currently Natasha Stonebridge (PhD) studies the benefits of nature for wellbeing.
History offers research opportunities in early modern, modern and contemporary Britain, American and African American history, Russian and Soviet history. A wide variety of topics can be supported, including women & gender relations, domestic, social & cultural policy, popular movements, music, diplomacy, foreign policy & international relations, militarism, warfare & trauma, migration, and local history.
In philosophy and ethics, the underlying ethos is that philosophy is transformational and practical, and is a living tradition of engagement with the wider world. We offer research opportunities in continental philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and the philosophy of religion and aesthetics.
In theology and religious studies we have an established pedigree of wide-ranging research with students in UK and international contexts. We have special interests in social scientific approaches to biblical studies, the socio-political use of biblical texts, New Testament theology, Islamic political philosophy, Buddhism, and the study of religious diasporas.
We specialise in work that focuses on social vulnerabilities and overcoming harms, including interpersonal violence, restorative justice, and inequalities.
Examples of student research:
- Franki Grant (MSc by research) studies how police forces are using restorative justice as an approach to overcoming the harm of crime.
- Sue Haile (PhD) studies domestic homicide reviews and the lessons that police and other agencies can learn from these serious case reviews.
- Natalie Dowling (PhD) studies the impacts and benefits of detached youth work as an approach for supporting young people within communities.
Our postgraduate students focus their research on improving and developing services, health and wellbeing, promoting a culture of care and enabling provision of high quality and safe care for people with complex needs in a range of health and social care settings.
Our research represents the huge breadth and depth of experience and expertise in the community – and includes nationally and internationally-funded projects working with communities, governing bodies and international research teams.
Research areas include physical activity & wellbeing, sports leadership & coaching practice, spirituality & religion, pedagogy & participation, and sport philosophy & ethics. These provides unique, important and purposeful analysis and evidence that has a positive impact on research and practice.
Our specialisms include applied computing, artificial intelligence, cyber security, big data and data mining, business intelligence, e-business technology, application and management, IoTs, IT and IS, e-learning and digital forensics, and system modelling.
Study a postgraduate research degree and get a masters or PhD in technical and applied computing. Conduct your own piece of unique research on a range of topics including research, design and development of various systems, computing theory, technology and applications.