Research Groups and Student Profiles
Below you can find links to the Arts and Humanities research groups and, where they are currently available, research student profiles.
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A(³)RO
A3RO addresses global challenges through advanced and applied architecture-led interdisciplinary research. Architecture is essential to pursuing solutions to global social and environmental challenges as they require us to collectively imagine different worlds and invent ways to realise them together.
Art
We are an internationally recognised group of artists, curators and writers producing world-leading exhibitions, writing and books. A key focus is developing collaborative projects that create new configurations of knowledge across our research clusters…
Centre for Fiction
A community of fiction writers and writers about fiction. For us, fiction is about both popular appeal and critical excellence.
Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS)
The Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS) works in the fields of postcolonial, migration and diaspora studies, literary and cultural geography, and global testimony studies.
Centre for Place Writing
Exploring the relationship between writing and place to examine major contemporary issues including the climate emergency, urban regeneration and mass migration.
Contemporary Intimacies, Sexualities & Genders Research Group
Advancing critical, cutting-edge, and methodologically innovative research on contemporary intimacies, genders and sexualities.
The Dark Arts Research Kollective (D∀RK)
Investigating occulture, the paranormal, magic, esoterism and counterculture through art and creative practices.
Design Factory Manchester
Design Factory Manchester is an innovation hub at Manchester School of Art. It is a vehicle for practitioners, researchers, and students to drive sustainable development in communities within and beyond the city.
Design for Health and Wellbeing Research Group (DoWell)
The Design for Health and Wellbeing (DoWell) research group promotes creative, collaborative practices to foster holistic, solution-focused and integrative approaches and policies to health, wellbeing and social change.
Digital Society Research Group
Developing multidisciplinary research into the transformational impact that digital technologies are having on people and society.
Drugs Policy and Social Change
Addressing novel and emerging challenges in research design, knowledge translation and policy impact.
Embodied Experiences
Exploring concepts emerging from expanded practices and process-based technologies that set up situations for an embodied active audience.
F/fashion Narratives
Considering fashion’s role in the lifecycle of stories that people and communities share to galvanise their self and social identities.
LOkesh Ghai
Heritage and Modernity: craft shoe making in India and the construction of identities
Medha Priya
Caste and Clothing in India: Understanding and Challenging Discrimination through Dress
Julian Randall
Black Men and Their Clothes
Jennifer Richards
Manifesting the Gothic: Reflections on Fashion and Visual Culture
Fashion Technologies
Exploring the role of systems, tools and interfaces in fashion design and production through practice-focused research.
Heritage and Humanities
Progressing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of cultural heritage and humanities, exploring and transforming these fields through innovative research.
Histories and Cultures of Conflict (HACC)
Examining how war and conflict have shaped, and continue to shape, societies and cultures, through the application of innovative and path-breaking methodologies to new and established areas.
Abdel Majid Mohammad Al-Adwan
The Arabs and the Current Definition of Aggression in International Law
Dominic Barron Carter
The Politics of Participation: Reconstructing political movements by retracing the notion of participation from radical socio-political movements of 19th century Britain to the present day
Daniel Bennett
US-Russia Relations post-Cold War
Katrina Ingram
Veterans in Medieval Literature (AHRC NWCDTP Consortium Funded)
David Jellas
Understanding the Origin of the Bosnian-Croats and the Bosniaks War 1992-1994 during the wider war in Bosnia (1992-95)
Mohemed Hagi Mahamoud
Turkey’s Strategic Advantage in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Effects of Reciprocity and the Continuing Viability of the Engagement
Luke Quinn
Mongol Involvement in the Crusades
Stephen Roberts
The Great War and the People of Wirral in Cheshire c.1911-1925
Jake Sheppard
Race, Nation and Memory in England and America: CSS Alabama and the ‘Anglo-American Commons’, c. 1860-1914
Histories of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Identity Research Group (RGSI)
Exploring the historical and philosophical context of what we now call ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘disability’, ideas which have helped shape modern society.
Isaac Israel Carreon III
Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici and Dynastic Identity: A multi-faceted inheritance that inspired the preservation of Florence’s artistic past for its citizens
Haseeb Khan
Seeking a long history of British Muslim identity in north-west England, c. 1870-1950: Converts, Sailors and Merchants
Jodie Neville
Female Football Coaches: Revealing, Recording and Representing an Intangible Cultural Heritage
Louise Parker
The Development of the English Borstal System Between 1900 and 1908
Shuwen Wang
Giuseppe Castiglione’s Paintings: The Transmission and Transformation of European Techniques in Eighteenth-Century China
The Long Nineteenth-Century Network
Bringing together academics and students specialising in history, literature and the arts to help us understand our present and future in Manchester and beyond.
Rebecca Alaise
Ethereal Instruments: The Singing Voice in Literary Representations of ‘Gothic’ Music in the Long Nineteenth Century
Steph Boydell
The Arts and Crafts Movement in late nineteenth century Manchester: production, consumption and idealism in Britain’s “shock city”.
Alice Durocher
Gothic Cities: Manchester, Edinburgh and Paris in Contemporary Literature and the Cultural Imagination
Catherine Elkin
Representations of Baby Farming, 1838-1908
Camilla Prince
Women Writers and Editors 1890-1930: feminism, modernism, and the evolution of the short story in British Periodicals
James McCrae
A Cultural History of the Animated Skeleton, 1700-1900
Michelle Ravenscroft
The Portico Library and Collection: History, Culture, Identity, and Reading the North 1806-1930
Hannah Williamson
Bertha Hindshaw (1881-1955) and the Horsfall Museum Collection
The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies
Promoting the study of the Gothic both nationally and internationally, including prestigious collaborations and regular public engagement activities.
Rebecca Alaise
Ethereal Instruments: The Singing Voice in Literary Representations of Gothic Music in the Long Nineteenth Century
Fredrik Blanc
Towards a Weird Hydropoetics: Monstrosity, Thalassophobia, and Aquatic Transcorporealities in Modern and Contemporary Weird Fiction
Sarah Dutson
‘Spiritualism was triumphant’: The Legacy of Spiritualism as a Feminist Counternarrative to Patriarchy in Neo-Victorian Gothic Fiction 2010 to 2025
Alice Durocher
Gothic Cities: Edinburgh, Paris and Manchester in Contemporary Literature and the Cultural Imagination
Kirsten Imani Kasai
Kiss, Marry, Kill, Transform: The Quadripartite Witch, Absent Voices and Feminine Power in Historical Witchcraft
Karmel Knipprath
‘Always, worlds within worlds’: Clive Barker’s Transmedial Gothic (1978-present)
Brontë Schiltz
Mediation, Manipulation and Exploitation: Britain’s Televisual Gothic, 1953-2024
Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics
Advancing research through a focus on the role of language in creating socially-just communities.
Manchester Centre for Youth Studies (MCYS)
Promoting innovative youth-informed research with marginalised groups of young people.
Jennifer Lavender
Disrupting Flood Risk Management Narratives: Youth-centred research into Education, Action and Resilience in Flood-Affected Places (ESRC, White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership)
Vicki Morris
Appropriate Practice? An exploration of the role of the appropriate adult in supporting child suspects during police interviews
Anuarita Mphwina
Exploring the lived experiences of racially minoritised children in youth justice system subject to Out of Court Disposals
(ESRC, White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership)
Clara Paul
Understanding the experiences and perceptions of children who have been ‘criminally exploited’: reframing the debate (ESRC CASE Studentship)
Hollie Rochfort
Investigating potential linguistic prejudice in the Youth Justice System: a participatory child-centred sociolinguistic approach to evaluate the impact on outcomes for children (ESRC, North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership)
Beatrice Tailby-Hardstaff
Solidarity! Engaging young people in working-class movements in the past, present & future (AHRC, North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership Collaborative Doctoral Award)
Manchester Game Centre
Interrogating the relationship between games and society, and emphasising games as a medium to generate social change.
Alex Brooke
Evolutionary Algorithms for User Responsive Games
Russell Cass
Immersive Worlds and Interactive Stories: Exploring Theatrical Postmodernism in Video Games
Melissa Chatterton
Exploring the Self: The Performance of Gender and Sexuality in LARP Game Systems
Mick Chesterman
Mick’s PhD studies involve families exploring systems thinking and ecological concepts through digital game making.
Suzie Cloves
Introducing Geolocated Sound To Explore the Effect of Tangible Heritage on Place Attachment, Community Cohesion and Habitat Custodianship
Thomas Dukes
Castlefield Gallery and the Curatorial Project: forming new perspectives, from the past, through pLAY
Rachael Gittins
The Hermit Crab and the Sea Anemone: Perspectives on More-Than-Human Meaning in the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Gilles Deleuze
Jose Sherwood Gonzalez
Mesoamerican Futurisms: How Can Extended Reality (XR) Storytelling Cultivate Human and More-Than-Human Transformations?
Joe Macleod-Iredale
What can design educators learn from analogue game makers?
Reiji Nagaoka
Reviving Alternative Future Cities: Cognitive Climate Behaviour in an Urban Environmental Multiplayer Online Game
Gang Pan
Cinematic Architecture of Video Games: Virtual Camera and Architectural Representations
Jamie Rhodes
The Phenomenological Experience of Stories
Richard Rowlinson
Manchester Poetry Research Group
Consider the role of contemporary poetry within wider society and culture.
Material Cultures of the Past
Bringing together historians and archaeologists, who are internationally-recognised for their research and practice in cultures and material cultures of the past – from the prehistoric to the modern world.
Media and Digital Culture
Exploring the relationship between digital culture and society, and investigating how technology is developed within and in response to our societies.
Migration and Interdisciplinary Global Studies
Examining migration-related issues through a cross-disciplinary research network.
Music and Sonic Studies
Exploring how music and sound shape our identities, communities, spaces and understandings of the world, and how they can be used to communicate and inspire social change.
Performance Research Group
Nourishing world-leading, industry-focused and interdisciplinary research in the field of performance.
Alice Brockway
Caroline Clegg
Katie Dymoke
Bradley High
Christian Jones
Peader Kirk
Benjamin Knowles
Meriel Price
Serena Slack-Robbins
Daniel Tierney
Tamur Tohver
Dobromir Tsenov
Policy Evaluation Research Unit (PERU)
Making a real-world difference by using innovative methods in applied policy research and evaluation. Our activity is co-produced with policy-makers, services and service users.
Politics Research Group
Producing world-leading research in political cooperation and resistance in local, national, and international contexts.
Popular Screen Cultures Network
Consolidating, nurturing and showcasing existing world-leading research into a diverse range of screen studies areas.
Q-Step Centre
Focusing on innovative, evidence-based pedagogic research, with a specialisation in teaching quantitative methods, data and statistical literacy.
Speculative Technologies
Using speculative research methodologies to define, examine and imagine the uses and ethical considerations of emerging technologies.
Sustainable Approaches in Fashion Entrepreneurship (SAFE) Futures
Pioneering sustainable business practices, including circular economy solutions in the fashion industry, through interdisciplinary collaboration, cutting-edge research, and impactful industry partnerships.
Bingqian Bai
Diya Ni
Michael Shokumbi
Sustainable Urban Futures
Developing and conducting transdisciplinary, collaborative research that enables to deliver sustainable, smart, and liveable future cities.
Transformative Practices
Exploring how material, design and craft processes are used to critically examine political, social and cultural issues, and to engage with diverse cultures and their heritages.