Current PhD students

Supervised by Stacy Boldrick

• Katie Slovak (distance learning, part-time): Collecting Contemporary Art for the Nation: Building the Arts Council Collection, 1950-1989
• Elina Sairanen (distance learning, part-time): Examining the role and impact of contemporary art museums established by luxury companies as actors in the contemporary art field

Supervised by Katy Bunning

• Pamela Sithole (campus-based, full-time): Using oral history and storytelling about the experiences of global majority students to understand, communicate and transform the university award gap and the experience gap
• Erin O’Brien (campus-based, full-time): A move away from ‘diversity’ initiatives to interrogating whiteness as decolonisation of the museum space
• Ana Beatriz Almeida (campus-based, full-time): Histories, Cultures and Heritage
• Candace Beisel (distance learning, part-time): Museums’ preference for donors may arise from regional values
• Christine Hristova (distance learning, part-time): Beyond the Duality? Examining the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum as an 'Asian Art and Culture Museum'
• Danielle Megaffin (campus-based, full-time): Confronting the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: Truth, Trauma, and Reconciliation in Canadian Museum
• Aïcha Mehrez (campus-based, full-time): Addressing legacies of slavery and empire in the art museum
• Lauren Safranek (distance learning, part-time): Whose national narrative? Emotion, complexity, and impact at the National Museum of American History

Supervised by Yunci Cai

• Isabel Collazos Gottret (campus-based, full-time): Defining decolonisation in Bolivian museums: from rhetoric and practices to conceptualisation
• Yi-Ru Guo (campus-based, full-time): The role of Kinmen Museum in reconciliation between mainland China and Taiwan
• Jo Hartwell (distance learning, part-time): Creating a heritage of conflict: an empirical study into the impact of women’s participation in the management and interpretation of Bisesero Genocide Memorial site, Rwanda

Supervised by Sandra Dudley

• Kristin Barrus (distance learning, part-time): Exploring the Contributing Influences for Entry into Twenty-first Century Quiltmaking
• Molly Stock-Duerdoth (campus-based, full-time): Audience creativity as the privileged meaning-making locus in the museum assemblage
• Tara Panesar (distance learning, part-time): Towards a New Nomadic Heritage: Understanding the heritage of Yörük tribes in Southwestern Türkiye through contemporary archaeology
• Annika Mazzarella (campus-based, full-time): Shells, Ships and the ‘Spirit’ of the Sea: a comparison on the ‘Materiality’ of Water in Museums between Marine Mollusc Shells and wooden Scandinavian Viking Ships
• Zihui Ding (campus-based, full-time): Selective Authenticity About Living Materials: Cultural Community Participation in Small and Medium-Sized Community Museums
• Yoshiko Wada (campus-based, full-time): The Soul of Things: The lifeworlds of boro and Boro textiles and their interlocutors in time and space

Supervised by Suzanne MacLeod

• Allenda Witzel (campus-based, full-time): Power and partnerships – principles, values and structure with British Museum
• Eithne Owens (Distance Learning, part-time): What Happened Next? Exploring the consequences of storytelling for museums and their audiences
• Elizabeth Peterson Jennings (distance learning, part-time): Exploring the Potential Impact of Universal Design Principles on Marginalized University Students’ Wellbeing and Retention in Southeastern US University Museums
• Carys Tyson-Taylor (campus-based, full-time): ‘A tragedy not to preserve now, while there is still time’ – the establishment of a Folk Museum for Ulster, 1929-1964
• Damon Fisher Shusterman (campus-based, full-time): Poetry on Display - Creating New Poetic Experiences in Museums
• Meredith Peruzzi (distance learning, part-time): Crafting Deaf-Friendly Museums and Programming
• Weilun Sun (campus-based, full-time): Production of Museum Space in Contemporary China: Investigating Local Museum-Making through the Case of Suzhou

Supervised by Nuala Morse

• Andrea Hadley-Johnson (campus-based, full-time): Behind the Cell Door: Exploring how enhanced opportunities for self led creativity impact on the wellbeing of adults living in prison
• Jane Hardstaff (campus-based, full-time): Pathways to Wellbeing: exploring the social and spatial role of museums in supporting mental wellbeing
• Amisha Karia (distance Learning, part-time): Culture-led wellbeing: investigating the changing skills of the cultural workforce
• Chris Jeavons (campus-based, full-time): ‘Community-engaged mindfulness in the museum: Introducing ‘dual-focused’ mindfulness-based interventions to object-centred care in the museum space.’
• Holly Bee (campus-based, full-time): Deeds Not Words

Supervised by Ross Parry

• Ayoub William Clarke (distance learning, part-time) The usage of digital content from museums by teachers and pupils in UK schools
• Hoda Hemaily (distance learning, part-time): Rethinking Accessibility: Community Empowerment through Marketing and Technology
• Kathleen Lawther (campus-based, full-time): Why connect national digital collections? Big data mapping, modelling and simulation for digital heritage and culture
• Zhuolin Li (campus-based, full-time): ‘Who uses digital sound archives?'
• CM Wilson (campus-based, full-time): What role for digital storytelling? Technologies and narratives to enable people in all their diversity
• Shelby Navone (campus-based, full-time): Improving inclusivity and accessibility for disabled and neurodivergent people in digital performance and culture

Supervised by Richard Sandell

• Farradeh Martin (campus-based, full-time): Disability-oriented research for the Stephen Hawking Collection and its public offerings
• Chia-Ying Lin (campus-based, full-time): Curating Visual Culture for Social Inclusion
• Jennifer Shearman (distance learning, part-time): Do museums of gender and sexuality in Europe (from 1981-present) curate and disseminate alternative understandings of identity? And how does their work affect public debate?
• Sophie Leighton (distance learning, part-time): What might be gained or lost by museums expressing a moral or ethical position on divisive contemporary issues?
• Nicole Moolhuijsen (campus-based, full-time): The LGBTQ+ equality movement and the agency of museums

Supervised by Rosie Shirley

• Henry Gayfer (campus-based, full-time): Remembering our maritime past: exploring the role of maritime heritage in Norfolk’s museums in the process of constructing identities and sense of place in England
• Bella Milroy (distance learning, part-time): Centring the Rural: Organisational Identities, Public Engagement and Curatorial Practice at Wysing Arts Centre, 1989 to today
• Mohammed Dhalech (campus-based, full-time): Rural Racism
• Wilda Zhang (campus-based, full-time): Socially-engaged art projects in rural China
• Lucy McPherson (distance learning, part-time): Building Collective Memory: How the Victoria and Albert Museum is Collecting Artefacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic and their role in Public Memory

Supervised by Alice Tilche

• Anand Gupta (campus-based, full-time): Museums on the roof of the extended Eastern Himalayas: An ethnographic study of museum and heritage cultural movement of the bordering tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, North-East India
• Dale Sindell (distance learning, part-time): The Use of Food as a lens to support museum learning about identity
• Victoria Guzman Monge (campus-based, full-time): Power Struggles in the Art Museum: Authority or authorities?

Supervised by Dave Unwin

• Casey Barrett-Gibson (campus-based, full-time): Reviving A Dead Collection: Using Pre 1960s museum entomology collections to track the impact of climate change and habitat loss on the blue morpho butterfly
• Sandra Samolik (distance learning, part-time): Art Authentication through Provenance Research, Art Forensics and AI

Supervised by Giasemi Vavoula

• Lyanna He (campus-based, full-time): Audience Experience Expectations on Digital Heritage Performance: The Collaborative Community Joint Development of Immersive Technology Utilization
• Yushan Wang (campus-based, full-time): Chatbots and gamification in museum engagement —— what did the audience say?
• Jianjun Ye (campus-based, full-time): Games in the Transformation of Museum: An Investigation into the Gamification Strategy of Contemporary Chinese Museums
• Phill Morris (distance learning, part-time): Safeguarding the Uilleann pipes
• Xuwen Yang (campus-based, full-time): Towards a conceptual framework of playfulness in the museum: visitors, interactive exhibits, and playful experiences

Supervised by Sarina Wakefield

• Anna Stein (distance learning, part-time): Representing Korean National Identity in Museums and Cultural Centres
• Aisha Al Muftah (campus-based, full-time): Modern Art in Qatar: Building a Nation Post-Independence

Supervised by Sheila Watson

• Evangeline Collins (distance learning, part-time): How do genocide museums create emotion within their exhibitions that impacts visitors’ responses and behaviour?
• Despina Gerasimidou (distance learning, part-time): Museum/Library sleepover: re-conceptualizing the museum and library visitor experience

Supervised by Isobel Whitelegg

• Angela Billings (campus-based, full-time): Curating the colonial: the afterlives of museums, heritage sites and great houses in Jamaica and England
• Caroline Dunker Fucci (campus-based, full-time): Brazilian Contemporary Art in the Global Biennial Context, 1998-2020
• Catalina Imizcoz (campus-based, full-time): The Modern Paradigm and the Exhibitionary Form
• Julia Jiang (distance learning, part-time): When the Mother Tongue Travels: The Evolution of Contemporary Chinese Art on an International Platform since 1993