Postgraduate research funding in the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Select the headings for more information
Applications are invited for one E. Allison Peers Doctoral Studentship in Iberian and Latin American Studies, to begin in October 2025. The Scholarship provides full fees at the Home student rate (approx. £5,000) for students undertaking the PhD in Modern Languages and Cultures (Hispanic and Latin American Studies pathway), plus a £6,000 yearly stipend.
Teaching and research in Iberian and Latin American Studies at Liverpool is informed by a plurilingual, pluricultural understanding of the Luso-Hispanic world. We welcome applications from students wishing to undertake research in any one or more of Basque Studies, Catalan Studies, Galician Studies, Portuguese Studies (Brazilian and European), Spanish Studies and Latin American Studies.
We especially encourage applications that are comparative or relational, and which cross languages and national borders. Possible focuses for study include: cultural politics and the politics of culture; popular culture; film and visual culture; literary studies; digital culture; gender and sexuality; transnational, postnational and postcolonial studies; migration and diaspora; memory and representation.
Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of demonstrated academic excellence. Applicants are required to make contact with a potential supervisor for assistance in formulating a research proposal; for a list of potential supervisors and their specialist areas, and an “expression of interest” form, please see the document overleaf.
Completed expressions of interest should reach the department through the contact below by 30 May 2025. Applicants for an E. Allison Peers Scholarship must also make a formal application for admittance to the PhD in Modern Languages (Hispanic and Latin American Studies pathways) at the University of Liverpool by that same date, via this page.
Please indicate if you are applying for any other University of Liverpool bursary, awards or scholarships.
Peers PhD studentship 2025-26 application form (Word doc, 28.1kb)
Applications should be submitted to hlcscholarships@liverpool.ac.uk.
We welcome applications from students wishing to undertake research in any one or more of Basque Studies, Catalan Studies, Galician Studies, Portuguese Studies (Brazilian and European), Spanish Studies and Latin American Studies. We especially encourage applications that are comparative or relational, and which cross languages and national borders. Possible focuses for study include: cultural politics and the politics of culture; popular culture; visual culture; literary studies; digital culture; gender and sexuality; transnational, postnational and postcolonial studies; migration and diaspora; memory and representation.
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· Sociolinguistics · Migration Studies · Minority Languages · Galician Studies |
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· 20th and 21st century Spanish peninsular poetry · Catalan Studies (charnego/xarnego) literature, poetry culture, language, language policies and politics · Representations of the body in Spanish literature |
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· Contemporary Spanish film · Television and media · Documentary theory · Feminist media theory · Cultural memory |
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G.Mercero-Altzugarai@liverpool.ac.uk
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· Basque literary and cultural studies · Nationalism, postnationalism and post-identity · Opposing identities, memory and conflict resolution |
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· Latin American popular music (especially Brazilian) · Latin American cinema (with a particular interest in popular genres and Brazilian cinema) · Popular Portuguese cinema 1930-1960 |
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· 20th and 21st century Latin American literatures, especially the Boom and post-Boom · Latin American cinema, with a particular interest in cinema from the 1960s onwards · Latin American digital culture, especially hypertext novels, literary blogs, and net.art · Gender studies, in particular, Latin American women’s writing and feminist discourse · Memory studies, with a particular focus on museums, transitional justice, and Colombia |
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· Contemporary Latin American Literatures · Latin American Cinema, with a particular focus on Mexican film · The war story Latin American literature and film · Digital participatory cultures · Queer representations in Latin America · Chicana/o and Latina/o cultures |
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· Muslim and Jewish literature and culture in medieval Spain · Representations of Muslims and Jews in medieval and early modern Castilian literature · Transculturation and Frontier Cultures in the medieval and early modern Hispanic world · Representations of the Moriscos and of post-Reconquest Granada in Castilian literature |
Applications are invited for up to two E. Allison Peers master's Scholarships in Iberian and Latin American Studies, to begin in September 2025. The Scholarship covers fees plus a £5,000 stipend, for students undertaking a Hispanic topic in any master's programme in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film at the University of Liverpool.
Teaching and research in Iberian and Latin American Studies at Liverpool is informed by a plurilingual, pluricultural understanding of the Luso-Hispanic world. We welcome applications from students wishing to undertake research in any one or more of Basque Studies, Catalan Studies, Galician Studies, Portuguese Studies (Brazilian and European), Spanish Studies and Latin American Studies.
We especially encourage applications that are comparative or relational, and which cross languages and national borders. Possible focuses for study include: sociolinguistics, translation studies, cultural politics and the politics of culture; popular culture; visual culture; literary studies; film studies; digital culture; gender and sexuality; transnational, postnational and postcolonial studies; migration and diaspora; memory and representation.
Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of demonstrated academic excellence. Applicants are required to make contact with a potential supervisor for assistance in formulating a research proposal; for a list of potential supervisors and their specialist areas, and an “expression of interest” form, please see the document overleaf.
Completed expressions of interest should reach the department by 31 July 2025.
Applicants for an E. Allison Peers Scholarship must also make a formal for admittance to one of the master’s programmes offered by the Department of Languages, Cultures and Film at the University of Liverpool by that same date:
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/courses/translation-ma (Spanish pathway)
https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/courses/modern-languages-and-cultures-mres (Any Hispanic pathways, including Latin American Studies)
Peers master's scholarship 2025-26 application form (Word doc, 28kb)
Applications should be submitted to hlcscholarships@liverpool.ac.uk.
The Institute of Irish Studies in pleased to offer the Owen Templeman prize for 2025.
The prize is a £3000 bursary towards funding postgraduate study related to the discipline of Celtic Studies.
You must have been assessed for fee status as a ‘home’ student, or expect to be assessed as a ‘home student’.
How to apply
To apply for the Owen Templeman Prize please provide:
For consideration, applications must be submitted to hlcscholarships@liverpool.ac.uk. Please give the subject line of your email as ‘Owen Templeman Prize Application’.
Application deadline: 31 July 2025
The Department of History at the University of Liverpool is pleased to invite applications for two fully-funded (fees and maintenance) PhD studentships to start on 1 October 2025. One studentship will be ring-fenced for Black applicants and may focus on any field of historical study and any period in which the department has supervisory expertise. The other studentship will focus specifically on the History of Race, Health and Medicine in any period between 1700 and the present. These studentships provide three years of full-time funding, including tuition fees at the home-student rate and an annual maintenance stipend equal to the standard UKRI rate (£19,237 p.a. in 2024-25).
This studentship is funded through Departmental endowments to signal our support for the findings of the Lifting Barriers to Black Academia Through Decolonisation and Positive Action Report, which follows on from an online series of symposia hosted by the Department’s Centre for the Study of International Slavery in 2021. The report documents the racial disparities and barriers Black scholars face in progressing at higher education institutions and recommends positive action to address the awards gap for Black academic staff and research students. This studentship will be ring-fenced for applicants of Black ethnicity (including Black British, Black African, Black Caribbean or dual heritage backgrounds), since this group has been disproportionately under-represented in doctoral study and research funding in History, in our University and nationwide.
This studentship will focus on any field of historical study and any period in which the department has supervisory expertise. The Department of History is part of the School of Histories, Languages & Cultures, one of the largest Schools in the University, exploring culture and society from the origins of humanity and ancient history to modern-day politics. We are an interdisciplinary group of historians committed to an engaged approach to the global past. In the 2021 REF exercise, 100% of our research was classified as 4* and 3* for Research Environment. We had a 24% increase in 4* research across our outputs, impact, and environment since the last REF. We place particular emphasis on addressing historical injustices through our work on the Holocaust, medical racism, slavery, and colonial and postcolonial violence. From the rise of the far right to climate change, health care, library provision, abortion, religious intolerance and knife crime, we pride ourselves on using historical research to inform key contemporary debates.
As a PhD student, you will form part of an active postgraduate research community within the History Department, who hold Work-in-Progress seminars and organise an annual History postgraduate conference, which invites speakers from within and outside the University. You will have dedicated career development training from history staff, giving you guidance on subjects such as academic publishing and post-doctoral fellowships, as well as opportunities to apply for paid teaching experience on certain undergraduate modules.
PhD students are a central part of the department’s vibrant research culture. You will have access to a dedicated study space within the School of Histories, Languages & Cultures, enabling you to meet and form interdisciplinary collaborations with other early career scholars during your time at Liverpool. The Department contributes to several highly active interdisciplinary research centres which offer further opportunities for collaboration, enrichment and career development, including the Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Eighteenth-Century Worlds, the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, the Centre for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, the Centre for Health, Arts, Science & Environment, and the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. The Department also has excellent links with a wide range of museums and other institutions on Merseyside and beyond, including National Museums Liverpool, the International Slavery Museum, the Bluecoat contemporary arts centre, the Athenaeum and Unilever Archives.
This studentship will focus specifically on any aspect of the history of race, health and medicine from the 18th through to the 21st century. The relationship between medicine and race – including medical racism – has recently attracted sustained attention and significant responses from national medical and public health associations, including the American Medical Association, the British Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, with major medical publications connected to these leading organizations publishing special issues on the subject (see: BMJ, AJPH, JAMA). Potential projects might, for example, consider the global circulation of medical knowledge produced in the context of the ‘plantation system’; health care practices and health care experiences of Global Majority groups in a specific historical period or geographic setting; the racialization of bodies, diseases and illnesses; issues around the training and career development of Global Majority staff within medical systems such as the British NHS.
There are a wealth of opportunities and archival resources relevant to this topic within the Liverpool city region, including those relating to the first Liverpool Infirmary (opened in 1748), the Liverpool Medical Institution (founded as a medical subscription library in 1779) and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (established in 1898). The University of Liverpool Library system has extensive holdings related to the global history of slavery and the history of medicine, including key print and online resources such as the full series of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography and Gale Nineteenth-Century Collections Online: Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1780-1925. Other relevant initiatives at the University of Liverpool include the interdisciplinary Centre for Health, Arts, Science & Environment and the University’s flagship partnership with Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum, the Centre for the Study of International Slavery.
This studentship is open to all applicants. We strongly encourage applications from communities underrepresented in UK academic History, including people from Global Majority communities who are currently underrepresented in the department’s teaching and research.
To apply, please send a CV (including degree transcripts), a PhD proposal of between 500 and 1000 words, and a sample of academic work (3,000-5,000 words in length) to hlcscholarships@liverpool.ac.uk by 5pm GMT on Friday 30 May 2025. In their application, candidates should make clear to which studentship they are applying.
In developing your proposal, it is essential that you identify a potential supervisor(s) within the Department of History and that you make contact with those members of staff before submitting your application. You can find a list of staff on theDepartment of History staff page. General queries should be addressed to the Departmental Director of Postgraduate Research Dr Junqing Wu (Junqing.Wu@liverpool.ac.uk).
To be eligible for these studentships, you will need first to have applied for a PhD place at the University of Liverpool prior to the deadline for this competition and be a Home fee status student. You do not need to wait for the outcome of your application before applying for funding.
The award will be made based on the academic merit of your application, including the fit between the proposed project, the supervisory team and wider research priorities within the Department. The successful candidate will ordinarily have either a first class or a 2:1 undergraduate degree in a relevant subject, and will have completed or be close to completing a master's degree by September 2025.