Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context

The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Aberdeen is offering funding for postgraduate students interested in pursuing research on the topic of ‘Translating Cultures: Literature, Music and the Arts in a World Context’, a four-year interdisciplinary project that sets out to explore how the arts matter in an age of globalization.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/funding/research/translating-cultures

Through a series of case studies that take up the theme of ‘translating cultures’ from a variety of perspectives and with regard to different geopolitical constellations, this project seeks to illuminate the ways in which the arts play a significant role in contemporary societies. We invite applications from students from a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines, including those interested in pursuing practice-based PhDs in Music, and Film and Visual Culture.

Candidates interested in joining the project who do not yet have a masters degree, can apply for funding to take one of our research preparation masters: the MLitt in Comparative Literature http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sll/complit or the MLitt in Visual Culture http://www.abdn.ac.uk/visualculture/.

This project draws on existing research strengths at the University of Aberdeen, such as Francophone studies, which has been singled out by successive RAE sub-panels as truly distinctive and ground-breaking.

‘Translating Cultures’ forges links between this research focus and strengths in other areas, such as Latin American Studies, Visual Culture, Cultural Sociology and Electroacoustic Music.

The supervisory team is drawn from a number of disciplines, including Anthropology, Film and Visual Culture, French, German, Hispanic Studies, History, History of Art, Music, Museum Studies and Sociology.

Possible research titles and topics may include the following:

• Minor Cinema and Art;
  
• The Politics of Landscape (Film and Photography);
  
• Investigating Art as Thought in the Literature, Film and Music of the Haitian, Antillean and West African traditions;
  
• Writing (in) the Museum: Constructing Knowledge Through Text;
  
• The Role of the Art Institute in Oil Cities;
  
• The City as a Space of Experiment;
  
• The Laboratory as a Creative and Critical Site in Contemporary Art;
  
• Cinema and the Construction of the Critical Spectator;
  
• Performing Self and Community;
  
• Spaces for Creation / Spaces for Performance: A Study in Electroacoustic Music;
  
• Thinking the Archive;
  
• Developing a New Concept of the Working-Class Aesthetic.

For further information, see
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/cass/graduate/funding/research/translating-cultures