AHRC North-Sea Heritage in Transitions

Application Procedure

Please ensure you follow the application procedure carefully, as we cannot consider incomplete or incorrectly submitted applications.

To apply, please submit your application via email to pgrc-studentships@abdn.ac.uk

Email Requirements

• Subject line: This should read “Project ID – [Your Name]” (e.g., NHT_UOA_BH – Joe Bloggs).
  The specific Project ID can be found at the bottom of each project advert.
• Email body: Please include the title of the project you are applying for, the name of the lead supervisor, and state whether you are a Home/UK or an international student.
  You do not need to include any other information in the body of the email.

Required Documents
Please ensure all the documents below are attached directly to your email. These can be combined or sent as individual attachments.
We are unable to download files from external sources.

• Cover letter: Addressed to the supervisor of the project. Please ensure this is attached as a separate document and not written in the body of your email.
• Supplementary Questions: A document containing your answers to the three specific questions detailed below.
• Up-to-date CV: Detailing your academic qualifications, employment history, and any other relevant experience. Please clearly state your current permanent address, as this will help us determine your fee status.
• Degree certificates and transcripts: Clear copies (if available).
• Evidence of settled or pre-settled status: (If applicable).
• Two academic/professional references: We cannot request references on your behalf. Please either provide us with copies yourself or have your referees email them directly to us.
  Direct emails from referees must include your full name and the project you are applying for.
  Should you be invited to an interview, we would ideally like to have received your references beforehand. However, we understand that this may not be possible during the summer break.

Supplementary Questions In addition to your cover letter, please provide written responses to the following:

1. Why does this doctoral project interest you, and why do you think you are a strong candidate for it?
2. Briefly outline how you might develop or approach the advertised project (c. 300–500 words).
3. How do you see this PhD contributing to your future research, creative practice, or career?

• Portfolio link (optional): If relevant to the specific project you are applying for, please include a web link to a digital portfolio showcasing your creative practice or previous work.

Mermaids in the Basement: Scottish Folklore and Contemporary Street Art
Supervisors: Dr Catriona McAra, Dr Shane Strachan, Dr Antonia Thomas
Find out more here

Mermaids in the Basement explores the myriad ways in which Scottish literature has informed and reimagined contemporary street art and its audience identities. Drawing inspiration from KMG’s recent mural for Nuart Festival, Unseen, Unheard, Yet All Beside Us (2026), the selected doctoral candidate will advance the cause for gender diversification in street art. The resulting thesis will be the first art history of the North-East’s contribution to such heritage.

Creating Medieval Aberdeen: Archive-led Game Development and the Experience of Space in a North Sea City
Supervisors: Dr William Hepburn, Dr Jackson Armstrong, Dr Verda Munir
Find out more here

This creative practice research project responds to the missing medieval visual heritage in Scotlands’s built environment, using archives and game development to explore non-visual sources through a visual frame and imagine spaces that have been lost and what they meant to people in medieval Aberdeen. In doing so, it throws light on rich and largely untapped sources of cultural identity and economic growth for the region.

Sacred Sites in Transition: Medieval Architecture and Pilgrimage in Orkney
Supervisors: Dr Karl Kinsella, Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon, Mr Douglas Pritchard
Find out more here

How do medieval churches and sacred landscapes continue to serve as religious sites while also transitioning to important heritage attractions? This PhD explores how people experience, understand and care for the Orkney Islands’ medieval religious sites in the modern day. Situated within one of Britain’s richest medieval religious landscapes, the Orkney Islands offers an exceptional and unique environment for research. Focusing on St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall and the St Magnus Way pilgrimage route, the project asks how historic buildings and landscapes can retain their religious significance while welcoming growing numbers of visitors from diverse backgrounds.

The visual, ecological and creative landscapes built around Nawken (Gypsy/Traveller) stopping places
Supervisors: Prof David Anderson, Dr Michael Stratigos, Dr Jim MacPherson
Find out more here

Stopping places (greens, foreshore, wood-ends and roadside sites) used by Scottish Gypsy/Traveller (Nawken) families for generations are disappearing from the North-East landscape, and no systematic visual record of them exists. Where Travellers do appear in Scottish art, photography and archives, they were most often pictured by others, on the others’ terms. Central to the project will be understanding the harmony or dissonance of visual artefacts to the Nawken community. This project will support a PhD student to work with local Nawken communities in Aberdeenshire, Moray, and Orkney to document Nawken landscapes visually, and thereby record and reclaim a unique and threatened living heritage infrastructure at a time of transition new restructuring and enclosures.

Walking the energy transition: Art, anthropology and heritage at the North Sea coast
Supervisors: Dr Jo Vergunst, Dr Andrew Whitehouse, Dr Jen Clarke
Find out here 

The current energy transition marks a broad social, economic and environmental shift from humanity’s use of fossil fuels to renewable energy. Decision-making on energy transitions takes place across many layers of governance and while the effects of climate change are felt everywhere, rural and coastal communities are often on the front line of energy transition infrastructure. This PhD at the University of Aberdeen, will draw on art and anthropology to explore the everyday experience of the energy transition in North Sea rural and coastal areas. While we expect the main focus of the research to be in north east Scotland including the Northern Isles, we welcome proposals that also broaden this geographic reach. 

Making Heritage Otherwise: Material Lives and Afterlives in the North Sea Region 
Supervisors: Dr Jen Clarke, Dr Jo Vergunst 
Find out more here 

How can artistic research make heritage otherwise? With this PhD project, making heritage otherwise means using artistic practice not only to represent or preserve the past, but to work across unstable boundaries—between the living and the mineral, the natural and the artificial—questioning how materials are classified, valued and cared for, and opening different possibilities for their futures. 

Cultivating a Productive Wood Culture: Heritage, Creativity and Forestry in North-East Scotland
Supervisors: Dr Chris Fremantle, Dr Isabelle Gapp, Dr Jonathan Scott
Find out more here

This PhD project asks: How can heritage and creative practice help build a productive wood culture in Scotland's expanding forests? Adopting a place-based approach within the North-East of Scotland, the student will draw upon the region's rich woodland heritage, landscape art history, archives and collections, and contemporary creative activity to investigate how culture-based action can contribute to sustainable woodland futures. The project will explore the role that heritage, creative practice and public engagement can play in shaping relationships between people, forests, timber and woodland products, considering how cultural knowledge, skills and traditions might support Scotland's changing forestry landscape.

Sea Changes: Charting the contemporary archaeology of North Seaa energy through the eyes of women artists 
Supervisors: Dr Antonia Thomas, Dr Catriona McAra, Dr Jen Clarke 
Find out more here

Drawing on art history, contemporary archaeology, visual and material anthropology, and the environmental humanities, this PhD will examine the contemporary industrial archaeology of marine energy infrastructure and material culture through the lens of contemporary women artists. It will explore the role that visual art responses to marine energy regimes can make to interdisciplinary critical debates about energy in a region currently undergoing transition (Gormley et al 2025), and the ways in which contemporary art can contribute to understandings of contemporary and industrial archaeology (McAra 2025; Thomas et al 2018; Thomas 2024). It will also engage with established and emerging contemporary women artists who are working in the North Sea region today and whose work explores marine energy.

Creative Islands, Past, Present and Future: Heritage as a driving force for creative practice in the Northern Isles of Scotland 
Supervisors: Prof Ingrid Mainland, Dr Antonia Thomas, Dr Siún Carden
Find out more here

This PhD at UHI Orkney asks how heritage and creative practice can contribute to more sustainable futures for Scotland's island communities. Combining approaches from art history, heritage studies, visual culture and anthropology, the project will investigate how artists, makers and creative practitioners engage with the heritage of the Northern Isles, and how contemporary creative practice contributes to understandings of place, identity and community wellbeing.

Women as Agents of Change in Scotland's Coastal Communities 
Supervisors: Dr Siún Carden, Prof Roxane Permar, Dr Rebecca Macklin
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The project aims to make visible the ways that migrants have reshaped Scotland’s coastal communities, past and present, and to identify pluralistic and dynamic conceptions of place and identity in relation to understandings of coastal life. In particular, it will focus on gender and identity in the context of belonging, placemaking, and cultural heritage. Through place-based participatory research, the project aims to encourage dialogue between communities and expand ideas of local belonging in ways that will inform contemporary global challenges related to increasing global mobility, environmental and climate displacement, and rising cultural tensions in the 21^st century.

Living Heritage as Custodian of Memory and Catalyst for Resilience
Supervisors: Prof Roxane Permar, Dr Siún Carden, Dr Rebecca Macklin
Find out more here

This PhD at UHI Shetland examines how environmental change intersects with cultural memory and community identity in rural and coastal contexts through creative practice. It asks how living heritage can inform genuine place-based and community-led research that emerges from and with the communities it concerns. It is practice based and employs methods drawn from socially engaged art to bridge the cultural heritage of North Sea coastal communities with lived experience, cultivating and recovering alternative ways of thinking rooted in ethical relationships, shared stewardship, and mutual learning (Meighan, 2023; Nı́ Mhathú na, 2022).