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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

Communal Words: How can art institutions support non-normative art writing?

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Alison Price

The Ontology of the Photographic Moment - An Exploration of the Implications of Speculative Realism for Photographic Practice

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Annie Runkel

The Boredom Project: Boredom, Art & Attention

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Awdhah Alotaibi

Analysing the Impact of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait on Thuraya Al-Baqsami's Artworks

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Calum Eccleston

Performing the Unseen. A practice-led exploration of intangible cultural memory through engagement with the Alastair MacLennan Performance Art Archive

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Cat Dunn

Spaces of Diaspora; Identity Otherness and Belonging in contemporary art of black women artists working in Britain

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Cate Newton

Contemporary sculptural practice and philosophies of time: material, context and temporality

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Cathel de Lima Hutchison

Towards multispecies urbanism: Negotiating wildlife and biodiversity in design practice

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Catherine Hehir

Printmaking in the expanded Field

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Dan Drage

Sacred Space, Place, Time: Extra-material realities in and through the material

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Désirée Coral Guerra

Invisible stories of plants: Seven chapters on botanical trajectories of appropriation and exchange, probing colonial historical narratives and hierarchies to interconnect relationships through their materiality.

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Eman Almukaimi

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

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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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Federica Bruni

A Sense of Surreal and Magic in the Work of Contemporary Italian Female Artists 

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Hamer Dodds

The sublime and the unimaginably unpresentable.

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Heather Maycock

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

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Johanna Roehr

Imagining Alternative AAC Futures Together: Can Artistic Literacy Help Neurotypical Communicators Integrate into a Neurodiverse World?

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Karen-Ann Dicken

Integrating 3D printing and hand fabrication in contemporary craft practice

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Katie Hart Potapoff

With an Attentiveness Towards Intimacy and Texture: Exploring a Sense of Land and Place Through Creative Practices

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Kunning Ding

From E-waste to Jewellery: practice-based research on exploring creating emotionally durable jewellery with the metal recovered from electronic waste

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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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Louise Ritchie

Automaking - A Nomenclature of Art Practice

Find out more about Louise's research

Lucy Smith

Making the Conceptual Tangible: The Role of Art in the Understanding and Communication of Science.

Find out more about Lucy's research

Mahtab Karami

Comparative Gendered Aesthetics in Contemporary Middle East Painting, with a focus on Afghanistan (pre/post Taliban occupation)

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Margaret Kerr

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

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Mark Vella

Exploring the impact of the Maltese National Planning Framework on the natural and built environment to achieve sustainable development.

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Maryam Forghaniallahabadi

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

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Merrily Hall

An Investigation of Creative Practice as a Shield for Innate Sensitivity

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Morgan Wood

Towards an Ontology of Gendered Aesthetics: Surveying Topologies of Self and Other in Performance, Society and Media

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Nicholas “Nikki” Ilic

On Representation in Medical Illustration

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Nuo Cheng

Hieronymus Bosch and the Cavalier Perspective: The Transcultural East-West Bond

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Oludare Osore

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

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Poom Subpaiboonkit

The Cultural Appropriateness of Housing Design: Responding to Kon Muang Local Housing Culture with Earthquake-resilient Architecture in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand.

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Raveendran Selvarajah

Developing a Planning Framework for Sustainable Urban Form for Jaffna

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Rui Bao

How contemporary jewellery construct cosplayer’s self-identity?

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Samantha Robinson

Inter-Species Ongoingness: Exploring Entanglement with Other-Than-Human ‘Pests’

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Sascia Pellegrini

Sense Amplification: a Phenomenology of Time

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Sean Yu

Capturing, communicating and collaborating with Virtual Reality in forensic science

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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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Xiaoyue (Eve) Zhang

Online Exhibitions after the Covid-19 Pandemic

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Xiang (Kevin) Li

The Guiding Role of Creative Thinking Training in the Foundation Programme of Art and Design Higher Education

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Yingying Ren

Revealing Meanings embedded within Craft Processes used in the Making of Textiles 

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Yufei Gong

The Convergence of Visual Storytelling Conventions in Western and Eastern Comics, Film, Animation and Concept Design.

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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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