Digital Arts & Humanities PhD

Call for DAH applications now open at NUI Maynooth

The call for applications to the digital Arts and Humanities PhD at An Foras Feasa, NUI Maynooth is now open. It will remain so until 01 June 2011. Applications should be made through the Postgraduate Application Centre website.

All interested applicants who have not yet made informal enquiries are encouraged to do so before submitting a formal application. Such enquiries should be addressed in the first instance to the An Foras Feasa Project Office, Dr Jennifer Kelly who can be contacted by email (phdapplications@forasfeasa.ie) or telephone (+353 [0]1 4747105).

An Foras Feasa is pleased to invite applications for funded 4-year doctoral studentships in Digital Arts and Humanities, commencing late September 2011. These are part of the structured PhD programme funded by PRTLI 5 in a consortium comprising National University of Ireland Maynooth, National University of Ireland Galway, Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork. The studentships consist of a stipend of €16,000 per year, for four years, plus fees (at Irish and EU level).

What is DAH?

DAH is a four-year structured doctoral research-training programme designed to enable students to carry out research in the arts and humanities at the highest level using new media and computer technologies.

DAH at NUI Maynooth

DAH students at NUI Maynooth will be part of An Foras Feasa's research institute which has state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities in the university's newly-opened Iontas building and a dynamic postgraduate community. Students will participate in a collaborative Structured Phd Programme with co-registration in An Foras Feasa and a participating academic department (e.g. English, Music, Media Studies, History, Celtic Studies, Modern Languages). An Foras Feasa specialises in the integration of humanities research with information and communications technologies; particular research strengths in the Institute and its partner departments include digital imaging, digital critical editions, data modeling, digital archives and repository development, humanities computing, software engineering, music technology and multimedia.

Programme Structure

Candidates will choose to enter the program within either the ARTS or the HUMANITIES strands. In both strands they are required to complete core, training and career development modules, including main modules shared across the consortium and others institutionally-based. The aim of the research is to enable students to develop and synthesise a PhD dissertation. The overall aim of the taught modules are threefold:

1. To introduce students to the history and theoretical issues in digital arts/humanities
2. To provide the skills needed to apply advanced computational and information management paradigms to humanities/arts research
3. To provide an enabling framework for students to develop generic and transferable skills to carry out their final research projects/dissertations

Year 1 of the four-year programme includes core and optional graduate education modules delivered in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Maynooth. These modules provide grounding in essential research skills and transferable skills together with access to specialist topics. In years 2 and 3 work on PhD research projects is supplemented with access to elective modules. Year 3 features practical placements in industry, academic research environments or cultural institutions.

Sample DAH/AFF Research projects

Applications to NUI Maynooth are welcome for both Digital Arts and Humanities research streams. Applications related to the following research areas are particularly welcome:

• Twentieth-Century Irish Cultural Criticism and New Developments in Digital Literary Humanities: see BILC
• Social Networks in Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction: Literary Text Mining
• Using Virtual Research Environments for Historical Research: see Irish in Europe VRE and The Alcala Ledger
• Constructing Historical Social Networks in a Digital Age
• Nineteenth-Century Studies and Digital Visual Culture
• Computational Philology
• Aspects and Strategies of Live-Electronic Music
• Spectromorphology and Phenomenology
• Digital Signal Processing and Music Creation

Candidates already enrolled on Structured Phd Programmes are not eligible to apply.