L-R: Professor Vanessa Harding, Aaron Columbus and Peter Estlin (Lord Mayor of the City of London)
Aaron is a second year PhD candidate in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.
Birkbeck awards over 100 PhDs each year. In March 2019, 12 Birkbeck Doctoral Researchers were awarded a PhD or MPhilStud for their work in the following areas:
School of Arts
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF History, Classics and Archaeology
PhD research is often seen as a solitary activity, with long hours spent at the library and only occasional opportunities to get together with colleagues. However, making connections with fellow researchers and building a professional network is essential for identifying opportunities for collaborations, for future career prospects and even just for brainstorming and bouncing ideas off each other.
To facilitate this process, we would like to invite you to join our new PhD network. We are planning to organise regular social events and discussion groups to provide an opportunity for PhD students to meet, get to know each other better and to talk about our research in an informal setting. We know how important it is to have a relaxed and safe environment for discussion as opposed to high-pressure events such as conferences and competitions.
We are also exploring opportunities for organising small peer review groups by subject area where students can volunteer to critique each other’s work, as well as more a more informal and relaxed version of the Three Minute Thesis. As our network grows, we could also set up our own qualitative and quantitative research support groups and invite early career researchers to give talks.
We would love to hear about your ideas and what you would like to see and take part in. Drop us an email at su-PhD-network@bbk.ac.uk and don’t forget to sign up!
With warm regards,
Your fellow PhD students (Meg Kiseleva, Alex Leggett and Dalila Villella)
The following events and opportunities are available via the AHRC funded CHASE Doctoral Training Programme. All of the opportunities below are open to all Arts and Humanities PhD students at Birkbeck, regardless of whether they are funded or self-funded.
Room TC 1.9, University of Essex
Legal research entails the evaluation of legal phenomena in their political, social, cultural, doctrinal or other contexts. Contemporary modes of inquiry into legal phenomena increasingly use more than one discipline in the production of interdisciplinary research and writing. Even subjects that were traditionally taught by way of the doctrinal method have opened up to socio-legal approaches. There is a much greater emphasis on the sociology of law, and the social and political forces that shape legal doctrine and institutions. Law as a social phenomenon can be understood empirically through a range of different methods. Thus, contemporary postgraduate researchers need to expand beyond the black letter law training of practitioners and be aware of major trends in the social sciences of relevance to their own research and future careers. The key idea behind the multidisciplinary workshop for law postgraduate research students is to introduce candidates to a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to legal research.
This three day workshop will consist of workshops, and informal networking.
Following the success of her photography series inspired by the Berlin Childhood texts (Berlin Childhood, published by Steidl in 2001), artist and photographer Aura Rosenberg embarked on a collaborative project with filmmaker Frances Scholz, featuring Walter Benjamin’s granddaughter, Chantal Benjamin, and her daughter, Lais Benjamin Campos. The project, which is still in progress today, consists of disparate film segments based on the original textual vignettes. The short films revisit the sites of Walter Benjamin’s childhood in contemporary Berlin, resulting in an uncanny continuity of experience as they depict his great-granddaughter in the different phases of her own urban childhood.
This Training and Research Workshop at the University of Essex aims to bring together historians from different stages of their careers: Masters Level students, PhD researchers, post doctoral researchers, Lecturers, Readers and Professors, together with historians who work outside of academia, to share and reflect upon experiences, develop collaborative strategies and build networks which will act to support historians facing gender bias and inequality in their chosen profession. The workshop will be non-hierarchical, with panels being made up of historians from different stages in their career, and will focus upon small group discussion. Participants will produce a ‘zine at the end of the workshop, and plenty of time for informal networking will be built into the day’s timetable.
Room GOR 124, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
This workshop offers training for students in ways of researching, teaching and engaging the public in histories of gender nonconformity, non-binary and transgender experiences. The workshop will be relevant to historians of all periods and students working on gender and/or sexuality in literature and art history.
Working with leading historians, archivists and museum professionals, participants will address issues such as:
Wivenhoe House, Colchester Campus, University of Essex
In this two-part workshop, Professor Helen Sword and Dr Will Pooley make an evidence-based case for recuperating pleasure as a legitimate (and indeed crucial) academic emotion. Via practical exercises, they show how you can enjoy writing, and in this way become a more engaging communicator, skilful wordsmith and productive researcher.
