Funding the Future

FEATURE FUNDING THE FUTURE

How match-funded grants and the Tjeerd van Andel studentship are helping to attract the best possible PhD candidates to Homerton.

APhD is a significant commitment of time, focus and energies. It also comes at a considerable cost, from fees and living expenses to loss of earning capacity while studying. Candidates are therefore likely to apply to those Colleges which can offer the most financial support.

In the 2019-20 academic year, Homerton was able to offer matchfunded studentships to two PhD candidates undertaking research in the Arts or Humanities as part of the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership (OOC AHRC DTP).

“Fully-funded studentships like these are the gold standard for anyone wanting to undertake a PhD,” explains Dr Melanie Keene, Homerton’s Graduate Tutor. “Rather than relying on a patchwork of loans, savings, and small grants, students have guaranteed support for their research and maintenance costs, and have access to additional opportunities for training and networking. Jointly-funded schemes such as these make any donation go further, and the College’s involvement attracts a high calibre of postgraduate student who might otherwise be lured elsewhere.”

A hugely generous donation from former Principal Dr Kate Pretty, in memory of her late husband Professor Tjeerd van Andel, will provide studentships for one or two PhD candidates each year from autumn 2020.

“Philanthropy such as this allows us to invest in PhD students, bringing talented people to Homerton and enabling them to participate fully in our exciting research community.”

Harry Parker

I work on the history of modern Britain. My thesis project is about the production of social knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what I am calling ‘popular autoethnography’. In this period – the zenith of the British Empire – Britons were used to understanding foreign cultures and peoples through the lens of contemporary anthropology. I ask how ordinary people in Britain came to apply this anthropological or ethnographical lens to their own culture, and how indeed they came to imagine themselves as belonging to a ‘culture’ at all.

I try to show how something as seemingly fundamental as ‘everyday life’ came to be an object of enquiry, something that was not only lived but also studied, analysed, and discussed. For this, I look at a wide range of phenomena, including the Victorian craze for collecting rural folklore, the rise of community surveys via the Edwardian town planning movement, the birth of photojournalism, and early documentary broadcasting.

Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė

I am an OOC AHRC DTP-funded doctoral candidate researching artists’ moving image installations and their capacity for affect and experience. My research seeks to investigate the potential of such installations to function as sites for an experiential critique of the established discourse on contemporary media environments. I work at the intersection of media theory, contemporary art, philosophy and film studies.

Not having any previous experience with the collegiate university system I didn’t know which College to choose or what to expect from it. By leaving it to chance, or rather Homerton’s will, I was attracted to it because of its openness and trust in my project. Immediately after my arrival, I realised that this is a perfect place because of the diverse, friendly and caring environment that the College members try to create.

I applied for PhD funding via the OOC AHRC DTP, the main source of funding for graduate students in the humanities. I was delighted that Homerton was able to offer me a place through its match-funding scheme, and feel especially privileged to be among the first cohort of recipients of the scheme. There was much I didn’t know about Homerton before I arrived: the size and diversity of the graduate community; the programme of research suppers; the surprisingly excellent food! All have made my experience of grad life

so far a happy one.

I was awarded a fees-only scholarship, so Homerton’s contribution was essential for me to be able to enter the PhD programme, which otherwise I would not have been able to do. It was the first time in my education path when I was allowed to focus only on studying, discovering and creating instead of dividing time between work and education, as I had done since I first came to the UK to study in 2010.