Postgraduate research students (ResM, MPhil/PhD, EdD)

Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business

The Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business is home to circa 200 postgraduate research students, studying in the School of Society and Culture, School of Art Design and Architecture, and the Institute of Education. On this page, you’ll find a sample of those students who have chosen to publicise their research and to share the wide diversity of research projects and practices that occur within faculty.

Postgraduate research students - School of Art, Design and Architecture

Cândida Borges

PhD student, art and media

Contact details: candida.borgesdasilva@plymouth.ac.uk

Supervised by: Dr John Matthias, Dr Andrew Prior and Dr Anya Lewin

Thesis: Integrating Transnationalism into transmedia

In this practice-led PhD, I am developing a compositional practice on transmedia works - across sound art, installations, moving image and other fields - that responds to transnationalism, as a resulting understanding of transhumance (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I will create a body of work that creatively brings together the sounds, images and narratives responding to the present cultural aspects resulting from the migrational movements that have reached the Americas and formed my mixed DNA ancestry, accompanied by reflexive and critical writing.

Postgraduate research students - School of of Society and Culture

Jayne Buchanan

PhD student, art history

Contact details: Jayne.Buchanan@postgrad.plymouth.ac.uk

Supervised by: Professor Jody Patterson and Dr Péter Bokody

Thesis: Imagining and Remembering the Soldier at the Imperial War Museum (1980 - 2000)

My PhD research considers the ability of art to memorialise conflict through representations of the soldier. Building on studies examining art during the first and second world wars, I focus on the art collection at the Imperial War Museum over the period 1980-2000 in which the Falklands war, the Gulf war in Afghanistan and the Bosnian war occurred. I combine visual, stylistic and iconographic analysis, archival research and interviews to explore the commissioned works produced by Linda Kitson, Peter Howson and John Keane and consider how their interpretation of the soldier re-frames mass-media narratives of war.

Joel Merriner

PhD student, art history

Contact details: joel.merriner@plymouth.ac.uk

Supervised by: Dr Péter Bokody and Dr Jenny Graham

My current research explores notions of alterity and commonality within late 20th century Central and Eastern European Illustrated translations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Through the analysis of the work of illustrators originating from two former Soviet Republics (Russia and Georgia) and three former Soviet satellite states (Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland), I am in the process of revealing fresh incidences of cross-cultural contact and visual appropriation occurring within global Tolkien visual culture during the final years of Communist rule.

By adopting a ground-up contextualising approach which connects each illustrator’s individual narrative to country-specific and wider Soviet, and post-Soviet narratives, my project is designed to obviate the trait of western self-absorption common to many studies of this kind.

Instead, I am seeking to emphasise the distinct regional specificity of content and context present within the illustrations, whilst also acknowledging and elucidating the interface of eastern/western visual motifs.

Rosemarie Corlett

PhD English and Creative Writing

Email: rosemariecorlett@plymouth.ac.uk

Supervised by: Dr Miriam Darlington, Dr Min Wild and Professor Angela Smith

Thesis: Scars the Shape of Wings: Flightlessness, Superstition and Violence in the Story of the Great Auk

This practise-based project will investigate and analyse the conceptualisation of flightless birds, using the Great Auk as a framing device. Using both contemporary and traditional understandings of these creatures, the project will attempt to reimagine the flightless bird and its associated narratives through original poetry. In the course of this work I will be offering new and hitherto unconsidered ways to conceptualise the human relationship with flightless birds.

The thesis will seek to elucidate the themes that emerge from the study of flightless birds and to engender a dynamic dialogue between critical and creative work. The themes that emerge will include flightless birds as commodities, prophets, adornments, mothers, monsters, literal objects of geopolitical

appropriation (particularly through the trade of feathers), literary metaphors for colonialism and most importantly for the Great Auk, creatures to be feared and to destroy. I will place in parallel the poetic transformation of a subject through the operation of metaphor, and the scientific transformation of a creature as we reflect upon the current plans to ‘bring back’ the Great Auk and the concept and practice of de-extinction.

Postgraduate research students - Institute of Education

Kerissa Nelson

MPhil/PhD Education

Contact details: kerissa.nelson@plymouth.ac.uk

Supervisors: Beth Gompertz, Dr Jan Georgeson and Elizabeth Done

Thesis: Dyslexia and its effect on a child’s mental health

I propose to use a qualitative study where I attempt to understand, interpret and analyse information from high school and university students who have to live day to day being dyslexic and its effect if any on their mental health as well as issues surrounding their inclusion in school.

Katherine Gulliver

MPhil/PhD Education
Contact details:Katherine.gulliver@plymouth.ac.uk
Supervisors:Dr Jan Georgesonand Dr Emma Macleod-Johnstone
Thesis: How do children with Williams Syndrome (WS) experience mainstream primary schools?
Using an adaptation of the Mosaic Approach, this study aims to engage with children’s own perspectives using photographs, videos and activities. Children with WS often display hypersociable behaviour but despite their eagerness to interact with peers, experience difficulties with interactions due to social skills.