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‌HRC Doctoral Fellowships

The HRC offers a number of Doctoral Fellowships to arts and humanities PhD students currently in their third full-time year of study (or equivalent part-time) at the University of York.

The criteria for being nominated for a Doctoral Fellowship are intellectual achievement and potential, and the capacity to communicate high-quality research clearly and engagingly to a non-specialist audience.

Finalists for the Doctoral Fellowships will be asked to give a short presentation on their research to staff, students and judges at the HRC Doctoral Fellowships Finals, which takes place annually in May.

HRC Doctoral Fellowships competition 2023

This year, the HRC will again be awarding doctoral fellowships to some of our most promising arts and humanities PhD students currently in their third year of full-time study (or at an equivalent stage of part-time study).

Each of the arts and humanities departments (Archaeology, English, History, History of Art, Language and Linguistic Science, Philosophy, School of Arts and Creative Technologies), and the Centre for Medieval Studies may nominate one candidate for an HRC Doctoral Fellowship.

The School of Arts and Creative Technologies may nominate two - one from each subject area. The nine candidates will then automatically progress to the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Finals.

Each candidate will be asked to devise a presentation. There will then be a finals event on Wednesday 15 May 2024, to which all members of the HRC community will be invited to watch the finalists give their presentations.

There will be opportunities to discuss the presentations with the candidates, and the fellowships and prizes for the best presentations will be awarded.

The principal criterion on which the judging panel will make its discriminations will be the capacity to communicate high-quality research clearly and engagingly to a non-specialist audience.

Subject to a satisfactory presentation, all finalists will be awarded the title of HRC Doctoral Fellow and a bursary of £500 as a small contribution to supporting their fourth year. As well as this, there are cash prizes for the top three presentations.

2024 Timetable

  • Applications to reach departments by Wednesday 12 March.
  • Departmental nominations with all supporting documentation to be received by the HRC Administrator (hrc-admin@york.ac.uk) by 12 noon on Wednesday 24 April.
  • Doctoral fellowship finalists will be notified by the end of the day on Wednesday 1 May.
  • Finals event will take place on Wednesday 15 May.

Full details of the application process

Trying to condense my own doctoral work into a ten-minute presentation for a non-specialist audience was quite a challenge. However, the process of paring down my ideas and questioning the jargon that I take for granted was an incredibly helpful exercise, allowing me to bring the core elements of my PhD into sharper focus.

Patrick, HRC Doctoral Fellow 2016