Research Opportunities
- The psychoacoustics of singing in tune (or close enough)
- Perceptually motivated dynamic-range compression for adverse listening conditions
- Recognising sounds in noisy conditions
- British film history
- Film censorship
- Film controversy
- Audiences
- Italian cinema
- European Screen Industries
- Film and space
- New Wave cinema
- Film distribution
Mexican literature and culture
Cultural production from/about the Mexico/US border
Latin American women's writing
The politics and aesthetics of cultural institutions as they relate to Latin America e.g film festivals, book fairs, publishing houses, galleries etc.
Latin American multimedia cultural production
- Global Shakespeare
- Early Modern Literature and Culture
- Shakespeare and Film
- Creative Non-Fiction
- Fiction
- Young Adult Fiction
- French Sociolinguistics and Variation
- The Structure of Spoken French
- Temporality (tense, connectives, frames)
- The Linguistic Structure of Oral Narrative
- Language Policy
Areas of research interest include (but not limited to): Radio; Audio storytelling; Podcasting; Audio drama; Journalism (audio, video, print); Documentary practice (audio, video); Docu-fiction (audio, video); Folklore and Oral History in media practice; Mediated memory and nostalgia; Blends of fact and fiction in broadcast outputs; Irish language media; Media and multilingualism; Innovations in technology and their impacts on storytelling form; and public service media practice
Music in film;
African cinema;
Cinema and diaspora;
Film and migration;
Cross-cultural approaches to film;
Ethics, stakeholder management and organisational decision-making in arts and cultural industries
Arts and Cultural industries management and leadership studies
Cultural policymaking with specific themes of festivals, youth arts and the role of the artist
- Animation
- Popular Cinema
- Film Marketing
- Screen Industries
- Cognitive studies of translation and interpreting
- Translation and interpreting pedagogy
- Translation and interpreting industries
- Conference and community interpreting
- Professionalization of translators and interpreters
- Digital culture in Brazil and Latin America
- Representation of urban Brazil (particularly the favelas of Rio de Janeiro)
- Contemporary Brazilian audiovisual production (especially documentary)
- Urban violence in Brazil
- Brazilian/Latin American cultural studies
- Critical data studies
- Digital ethnography and digital humanities, broadly understood
- Popular Cinema
- French Thrillers
- Literary Celebrity
Representations of history in media and literature.
History of media, particularly in the UK.
Fifteenth century religious and devotional literature and culture
Book history and digital textualities
Historiographical writing
Critical and cultural theory
Translation theory
Critical digital studies
- early modern studies, particularly Shakespeare and Renaissance performance cultures
- age, childhood and gender in early modern literature and culture
- early modern literature (especially drama) and civil unrest, including protest, riot.
- Contemporary Irish Literature and Culture, specifically Northern Irish fiction and drama since the 1998 Agreement
- Comparative studies in Post-conflict cultures, specifically in relation to issues of dealing with the past and reconciliation
- Comparative studies in trauma and memory studies with a focus on the contemporary Irish cultural context.
- Dickens studies
- 19th-century British writers
- 19th-century Irish literature and culture
- 20th-century Irish literature
- Modern post-colonial fiction and theory
- 19th-century women's travel writing
- The literature of landscape
- Film and fiction
- TV adaptations of 18th-century/Victorian fiction
- 20th and 21st-century fiction and poetry
- Textual criticism
- Landscape literature
- The literature of place
- Imperial travel writing and the literature of exploration
- Nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial fiction
- The African novel in English
- Writing for screen
- Writing for theatre
- The language of literature
- (Cognitive) Stylistics
- (Critical) Discourse Analysis
- Translation Studies (of audiovisual/literary texts or from a linguistic perspective)
- Linguistics: formulaic language, multiword-fixed expressions in Irish
- Memory Studies: ideas of collective and cultural memory in linguistic landscapes
- Folkloristics: the narrative tradition and verbal arts.
Score-based composition
Computer-based composition (acousmatic works/works with live electronics)
Computer-assisted composition (OpenMusic)
- Playwriting for stage and radio
- Screenwriting
- American Poetry, in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and the Middle Generation
- American Fiction (19th, 20th, 21st centuries)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Transcendentalism
- Addiction and Literature
- Literature and Suicide
- Literature and Theology, Literature and Philosophy
- Dance Studies
- Choreographic Practices and Processes
- Practice as Research
- Affect Studies in performance
- The Maternal in performance
- Movement practices and performance
- Interdisciplinary performance practices
- Collaborative performance practices
Documentary Theory and Practice
Creative Practice
Irish cinema
Representation of Conflict, Trauma and Transitional Justice
Visual music, film sound, film music, television music, animation, landscape in cinema, acoustic ecology and cinema, experimental film, experimental animation, expanded cinema, psychogeography and the moving image, digital special effects, Hollywood Cinema
• Arts-based interventions for public health.
-Decadence and Aestheticism;
-Oscar Wilde;
-Modernism;
-literature and place;
-the politics of literary form;
-literary theory.
Please contact me if you would like to discuss prospective projects.
- Cinema and the Visual Arts
- Political Cinema
- Documentary Film Studies
- Argentine Literature and Art
- The Fantastic in Literature/Art/Film
- Hispanic Surrealism and Avant Garde Movements
- Religion and Spirituality in Hispanic Art and Literature
- Questions of Self and Subjectivity in Latin American Literature and Art
- Political Aesthetics in Hispanic Literature and Art
- Digital Instrument Design and Performance Practice
- Technology Mediated Composition
Experimental film and video practice
Screenwriting
Landscape and film
- Creative Writing Prose
Contemporary US fiction
US crime fiction
Contemporary fiction and violence
Suspense, spy, thriller, espionage fiction
Theatre and conflict;
Post-conflict theatre and performance in Northern Ireland;
Greek Tragedy and Performance;
Theatre History/Historiography
- Twentieth and twenty-first century Irish writing (mainly drama and fiction)
- British and Irish working-class writing
- Community Theatre
- Diaspora and migrant writing
- Race/ethnicity in contemporary Irish theatre
- Sound art
- Socially engaged arts
- Context-focused Composition and performance
- Multimodal food experience
- Eighteenth-century literature (1660-1820)
- Prose fiction: Behn to Austen
- Laurence Sterne
- Literature of slavery and abolition, 1660-1840
- Contemporary historical fiction
- Syntax and/or morphology (theoretical, comparative, minimalist/generative)
- Cross-linguistic variation and its formal modelling in minimalist grammars
- Diachronic linguistics and language change from a formal perspective (especially Principles-and-Parameters Theory)
- Generative approaches to first/child language acquisition (please note: I cannot supervise applied/pedagogical projects in language teaching, TESOL/EFL, etc.)
- Politics in music and song (all genres/ national/ international/ contemporary / historical)
- Folk Song and Tradition
- Cabaret and Music Theatre
- Eighteenth-century Periodicals
- Literature and empire
- Indian Literature in English
- The Lake Writers
- Ireland and Empire
- Arabic-English translation
- Translation in the Arab world
- Media and journalistic translation
- Citizen media
- Narrative approaches
- Non-professional translation
- Digital culture
- Activist translation
-Spanish Enlightenment
-Spanish Book History
- Francophone-Chinese Studies
- Intermediality
- Contemporary literature, including women’s writing
- Migration / Mobility Studies
- Sartrean Studies
- Critical Discourse Analysis
- Language of Crime
- Language in the Media
- Language and the Law
- Language and Literature
- Victorian Literature, Culture and Politics (including the 1890s)
- Literature and Science
- Literature and Ethics
- Periodical Culture
- Nineteenth-Century Constructions of Childhood
- Nineteenth-Century Fantasy, including Science Fiction and Fairy Tale
- Postcolonial literatures and film from Portuguese-speaking Africa
- Comparative Studies
- Gender Studies
- Biography
- Representations of Heroism
* Reception history of Bach's works in the long 19th century
Early Modern Spanish poetry and poetics
Theories and practice of the lyric
Golden Age 'comedia'
Legacy and reception of the Classics in the Spanish Renaissance (and beyond)
Cervantine Studies
Comparative Literary Studies
- French sociolinguistics
- Variation and change (in any language)
- Sociohistorical linguistics
- Language attitudes
- Language and gender
- Prescriptivism and standard languages
The Politics of Progress: Revolution and Enlightenment, 1650-1800
Transatlantic studies, 1600-1900
British and American culture, literature and history, 1600-1900
History of the book and textual cultures
American studies
Historical biography
Cultural theory
Digital humanities
French literature (19th century to the present) and illness, disease, disability, pain, suffering, death;
French Thanatology;
Literary representations of medical practice, care and experience;
Literature and religion, especially in the 19th century;
Bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy
- Early Modern Women’s Writing
- Shakespeare
- Adaptation
- Memory Studies
PhD and MRes Opportunities at Queen’s
We are delighted to announce a number of PhD and MRes (Masters by Research) funded opportunities at Queen’s University Belfast in the areas of Musicology, Composition and Sonic Arts.
Rated a 4* research environment in the Research Excellence Framework (2014), postgraduate research ranges from practice-based work to scholarly, historical and highly interdisciplinary collaboration with disciplines such as Electrical Engineering, Psychology and Anthropology. Based in the School of Arts, English and Languages, the postgraduate community has access to a breath of supervision expertise and world class facilities including the Music Building the Sonic Arts Research Centre and Queen’s Graduate School. You are encouraged to contact potential supervisors prior to application.
MRes candidates applying through the portal will be eligible for three £3000 bursaries. Candidates have to demonstrate that they have met any condition attached to their offer (either through uploading full transcripts or official documentation regarding any other condition required) by 15th July 2019.
Information on funding schemes for PhD including international studentships are now open to applications and can be found here. Please note the deadline of 28th February 2019 for International Studentships. All applications are made through Queen’s University Belfast direct application portal. https://dap.qub.ac.uk/portal/user/u_login.php
The following projects are strategic interdisciplinary areas of interest.
PhD title: Virtual-Acoustic Plate Instrument Design
Supervisors: Dr Maarten van Walstijn, Professor Paul Stapleton, Dr Matthew Rodger
Project Description: A virtual-acoustic approach to digital musical instrument (DMI) design aims for acoustic sounding output and providing a natural alignment between control parameters and performer actions.
Physical modelling is a good match for this purpose in terms of designing the sound synthesis algorithm. This project is focused on the design of a novel virtual-acoustic plate instrument that is highly configurable through adjusting parameters of both the model and the interface, as such allowing precise control of the instrument affordances. The instrument is intended as a tool for both music performance and experimental investigation into how musicians learn and discover new techniques on computer-based instruments; in addition, its development will also inform ongoing research that aims to improve the interactive audio aspects of virtual and augmented reality applications.
The primary challenges that the project aims to address are (1) the development and real-time implementation of a finite-difference plate model that affords local damping control, (2) the design of a configurable mapping of high-resolution touch-sensitive screen data to the plate model grid, and (3) the evaluation of the instrument through the use in the professional practice of musicians as well as through psychology-based experiments. The student will work closely with the supervisory team who have specialist knowledge in audio engineering, interaction design, and ecological psychology as well as with expert musicians in the testing and experimentation phases of the research.
Candiate Profile: The candidate needs to have an engineering/science background that includes experience in computer programming, as well as an appreciation of the unique demands of music performance. Knowledge of acoustics and signal processing as well as previous experience in experimental psychology and in interdisciplinary research projects are highly desirable but not necessary.
Apply
PhD title: Interactive Virtual-Acoustic Spaces
Supervisors: Dr M van Walstijn, Professor P Rebelo
Project Description: Augmented reality is about imposing a designed reality upon an existing one. In an acoustic sense, this can be considered as sustaining the aural impression of being in a different space than one is physically located in, which is relevant to the improvement of virtual and augmented reality experiences currently in development for application in various fields, including music, film, museums, medicine, and architecture. The sense of sonic immersion is greatly enhanced if a virtual-acoustic space is interactive, i.e. capable of live convolution of live sound sources with realistic room responses, and the potential for social interaction is greatly enlarged if the use headphones and other worn technology can be avoided.
Realising such an augmented acoustic scenarios requires an array of microphones to capture sound sources and multi-channel spatial projection with loudspeakers to impose the virtual acoustics. However, any such setup poses severe feedback issues as well as questions about which room response features need to be faithfully reproduced. This project aims to address these challenges by investigating (1) microphone beamforming techniques to focus the array away from the loudspeakers and onto the sound sources, (2) calibration and signal processing methods to identify and attenuate frequency bands with a high loop-gain and (3) perceptual tests to inform effective use of room response modification and ambisonic panning methods. Apart from formal testing procedures, the techniques will be evaluated along practical criteria in creative settings (installations, concerts, workshops) on offer through related SARC-based research projects. The project aims to establish a methodology for creating augmented and hybrid spaces in which acoustic environment design can contribute to immersive experiences.
Candidate Profile: The successful applicant should have or expect to achieve at least a 2.1 honours or equivalent for undergraduate degree in engineering, physics, maths, music technology, or a related discipline. They will demonstrate strong interest and self-motivation in the subject, good computational skills, ability to think analytically and creatively. Knoweldge of acoustics, signal processing, studio recording/mixing, and music related software and programming as well as previous research experience in contributing to a collaborative interdisciplinary research environment are highly desirable.
PhD title: Digital Performance and Social Inclusion
Supervisors: Dr Franziska Schroeder, Dr Miguel Ortiz
Project Description: The candidate will expand research work currently undertaken in the “Performance Without Barriers” research group: performancewithoutbarriers.com . This group dedicates itself to the design of enabling technologies promoting:
- Social inclusion through creative performance practice
- Accessible and enabling technologies
- Challenging dominant assumptions or exclusive identities
We are looking for candidates with a strong background in interface design, immersive technologies, digital performance, critical theory and / or improvisation studies.
The PhD research could be in designing new interfaces, but also in critically reflecting on all aspects of designing for and with people with different abilities. We are particularly keen to extend the research into the area of immersive, VR/AR technologies. A large part of our methodology stems from frameworks coming from improvisation studies; thus, the candidate might have a solid background in that discipline.
Candidate Profile: The successful applicant should have or expect to achieve at least a 2.1 honours or equivalent for undergraduate degree in interface design, disability studies, engineering, music technology, or a related discipline. The suitable candidate might be experienced in either interface design, VR/AR design, digital performance, improvisation studies and/or critical theory.
They will demonstrate strong interest and self-motivation in the subject, with good electronic and design skills; they will have an ability to think analytically and creatively. Knowledge of music technology, interface design, and music related software and programming as well as an interest in disability studies and music improvisation, with some previous research experience in contributing to a collaborative interdisciplinary research environment are highly desirable.
MRes title: Bow Controller Design for Digital Musical Instruments
Supervisors: Maarten van Walstijn, Paul Stapleton, Miguel Ortiz
Project Description: The focus of this project is to design and prototype a novel musical instrument bow sensing system. The primary aims are to leverage the technical abilities of string instrumentalists in the design and performance of digital musical instruments (DMIs), as well as to broaden the explorative possibilities of virtual-acoustic instruments. To achieve these goals a review of relevant literature and bow sensing systems will be conducted, followed by an iterative cycle of physical sketching, prototyping, testing and experimentation leading to refinement and validation. The student will work closely with the supervisory team who have specialist knowledge in audio engineering, interaction design and musical performance, as well as with expert musicians in the testing and experimentation phases of the research.
Candidate Profile: The candidate needs sufficient experience in the area of physical computing, as well as appreciation of the unique demands of music performance.