Study with CTS: PhD level

The CTS contains a vibrant community of 10 research students (listed in the 'Members & Affiliates' section linked above) and working on all aspects of textual scholarship and across all periods. The students' home is the Centre's well-equiped graduate lounge, which contains open-access Windows and Apple computers, scanners and printers, dedicated workspaces and sofas (food and drink allowed), and several thousand research-specialist books (the Briggs-Blake-Zurbrugg Memorial Library) covering the medieval, early modern and modernist periods.

The CTS also has a specialized workshop for research into the technology of letter-press printing using movable type (the process Johannes Gutenberg invented in the 15th century), with a large amount of historical type and all the ancillary equipment--setting rules, composing sticks, furniture, galleys, chases--and tools and consumables to enable printing on the CTS's own hand-operated Albion iron printing press. This workshop supports research into early printed books and practical classes are also offered in this technology.

As well the modern computers in the CTS's graduate lounge, the CTS has a computing lab containing a number of historic pieces of computing equipment--including paper tape punch/readers, magnetic tape drives, Altair 8800 microprocessors, and VDU and Teletype dumb terminals--that are used in the teaching of elementary skills in algorithmic approaches to textual scholarship and computer programming for stylistic applications. The CTS has the expertise to teach research students in these areas and offers practical programming supervision in the languages XML, XHTML, XPath, XQuery, JavaScript, C, Perl, and BASIC. See the 'Study with CTS' page linked on the left to see the CTS workshops in action.

All the permanent staff members of the CTS are active in supervising research students and welcome enquiries from prospective research students. (See the description of each staff member on the Members & Affiliates tab above to find out who specializes in which field.) Moreover, the following opportunity has just become available:

AHRC funding for UK/EU arts and humanities research students The Midlands Three Cities Doctoral Training Partnership will be awarding 410 PhD studentships over a five year period to excellent research students in the arts and humanities. The DTP, a collaboration between De Montfort University and the universities of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Leicester, Birmingham and Birmingham City, provides research candidates with cross-institutional mentoring, expert supervision including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate, subject-specific and generic training, and professional support in preparing for a career. The CTS is inviting applications from students whose research interests include:

  • textual criticism
  • book history
  • manuscript studies
  • the editing of literary and/or historical texts
  • genetic criticism
  • the sociology of authorship and/or publication and/or reading
  • enumerative, analytical (descriptive/physical and/or historical) and/or textual bibliography
  • computational stylistics
  • print technologies
  • digital publication

The deadline for applications for the next round of applications is 9 January 2015, by which time students must have applied for a place to study and have provided two references to a university within the DTP. For full details of eligibility, funding and research supervision areas, please visit the Midlands Three Cities website using the link on the left of this page.

As part of the CTS commitment to the Midlands Three Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, we run a specialized Doctoral Training Programme that is geared to the specialist research training needs of those working in textual scholarship. All research students are enrolled on this programme, which covers such important aspects as just how to manage a textual scholarship research project, how to give conference presentation talks, how to get published in our field of specialism, and how to develop your skills at teaching undergraduates