Our PhD successes in recent years include students who have gained positions with the V&A Dundee, employment in industry, lecturing posts, post-doctorate positions, government, the NHS, and many have continued to build successful careers in art and design.

PhD students have received major accolades, including the Scottish National Portrait Award, the Scottish Government Awards Climate Change Fund, and the AHRC Research in Film Awards.

We welcome many types of research, both theoretical and practice-based, reflected in applicants’ distinctive proposals.

Current students

Aaron Goddard

Unworlding the wider audience: Artist’s moving image investigation of behind-the-scenes opera production

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Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf

Attempts To Locate the Body Are Continuing: an experimental writing collection on the artist’s workshop as a site of undercommoning

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Annamaria Valavaara

Memory, absence, and the anarchive: A practice-based inquiry through film, autoethnography, and psychogeography

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Awdhah Alotaibi

Rules, Roles, Resistance in Contemporary Kuwaiti Painting: The Body as the Site of Resistance

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Calum Eccleston

“Die to self”: A practice-led exploration of the unseen in Alastair MacLennan’s archive

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Catherine Hehir

Printmaking in the expanded Field

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Catherine Smith

Workshop Scenes: Investigating the Workshop as Signature Pedagogy of Creative Arts Higher Education

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Domenica Landin

Practice-based Approaches to Justice Through a Multispecies Lens

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Elle Amelia Crawley

Immersive Nature Environments for Wellbeing and Place-Based Healing through XR

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Eilidh Guthrie

Scottish Wetland Regeneration by Beavers: A Creative Practice-led Exploration Focusing on Biodiversity Restoration

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Eman Almukaimi

The Influence of European Modernism on Today's Arabic Contemporary Ceramics 

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Emma Elston

[Re]defining Suburbia: a sustainable alternative for intensifying city edges

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Ewan Allinson

Working the Land, Knowing its Grain

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Fatemeh Mahmoudnejad

Understanding Inclusive Participation in Planning Practice (The Case of Co-Design in Scotland).

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Georgia Dunn

Neurodiversity, Masking, and Mockumentaries: Practice-Based Character Writing and Trash Performance

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Gerard Jefferson-Lewis

Photography, Voyeurism and the Stasi Archive

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Haitian Liu

Exploring the representation of death-related objects through the collection and documentation of conceptual photography and installation art

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Haorui Yu

Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Cultural Understanding in Heritage and Arts Contexts

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Heather Maycock

Rehearsing Death: A Cultural Analysis of Death Procedures in Single Player Role-Playing Videogames

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Jen McAlinden

Development of Visual and Interactive Ecophilic and Biophilic Narratives using Mycelium to Promote Early Childhood Microbiology Education

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Jess Akerman

A Deep Ecology approach to the Built Environment: A Transdisciplinary Framework for Ecological Awareness, Placemaking, and Regenerative Models of Living.

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Jinyu Han

Making Sense – Co-designing better visitor engagement experiences with blind and partially sighted people

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Johanna Roehr

An Unreadable Thesis: Exploring Multimodal Communication through Creative Practice with Artists Described as Having Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD)

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Leena Nammari

A practice-based examination of the nature of Haneen: framing thoughts and representations on post-locational home and belonging.

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Liz Crichton

Beyond the clouds: Employing listening as a creative practice to explore the relationship between this attention to sound, imagination and hope

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Mahtab Karami

Comparative Gendered Aesthetics in Contemporary Afghan painting (post 1970)

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Margaret Kerr

Recovering what has been left behind: an interdisciplinary exploration of interconnected ways of knowing

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Maryam Forghaniallahabadi

Scalability within smart spatial planning: mapping coherence, linkage and distribution across scales of planning.

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Monica-Lucia Madas

Is the Mind a Piece of Art? A Practice-Based Interdisciplinary Research on Curating the Image as a ‘Living Symbol’

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Nuo Cheng

Seeing through Cavalier Perspective: Hieronymus Bosch’s World and Chinese Spatial Perception

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Oludare Osore

The Paradox of Sustainable Urban Development as Demonstrated in the Prevalence of Informal Housing Development in Developing Countries: A Case of Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria

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Raveendran Selvarajah

Developing a Planning Framework for Sustainable Urban Form for Jaffna Town, Sri Lanka

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Rui Bao

How contemporary jewellery construct cosplayer’s self-identity?

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Sang-hun Sean Yu

Dundee Ground Truth Imaging Protocol: Optimising Forensic Scene Documentation Through the Art of SfM Photogrammetry and Immersive VR 3D Reconstruction

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Sihao Fan

The Life of Churches: A Contemporary Photographic Exploration at The Intersection of Archive, Anthropology, and Architecture

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Susan Douglas-Scott

Past, Present, Future: Thoughts on Disability and Things

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Susie Johnston

Matters of entanglement: exploring making and metaphor as expansive ways of being and thinking.

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Titus Nnadozie Onuoha

Assessment of the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Urban Water Provision Practices in Owerri, Imo State Nigeria

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Wendy Bell

How Reality is Grounded not in what we Perceive but in what we do not Perceive.

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Ugo Igere

AI-Driven Decision Support for Environmental Impact Assessment: Enhancing Scoping, Baseline Synthesis, and Consultation Analysis in UK Offshore Wind farms.

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Xiaoyue (Eve) Zhang

Online Exhibitions after the Covid-19 Pandemic

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Xiang (Kevin) Li

The Role of the Creative Behaviour Operating Unit (CBOU) in Knowledge Generation and Learning: Validation Through Art and Design Practice and Its Educational Implications

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Xinyu Huang

Private Wilderness: Reconstruction of Individual Life and Elimination of Alienation Dilemma in the Context of Contemporary Atomization

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Yimou Huang

How to Touch Nature? A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Taoism and Western Ecofeminism

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Yingying Ren

Traditional Crafts and Living Traditions in South-Western China

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Yufei Gong

Transnational and Transmedia Approaches to Creating Comics in Asia, the USA and Europe

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Yuxin Li

Investigating digital identity through taking digital as material within the jewellery design practice.

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Ziyue Tao

Developing design guidelines for creating a sense of home in dementia care home environments in Chinese rural area 

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