Please note this call is already closed.

The Studentship

The studentship will be supervised by Professor Anthony Gardner and Mr Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Art and Sara Bevan of the IWM. This full-time studentship, which is funded for three years at standard AHRC rates, will begin on 1 October 2015. The student will be affiliated with The Queen’s College, Oxford.

Building on its internationally-renowned collection of 20th-century Modern British art, IWM has been commissioning, collecting and exhibiting contemporary art since the early 1970s. However, contemporary art has recently become a more prominent focus within our exhibition programme and collecting ambitions. In 2013 IWM staged Catalyst, a significant exhibition showcasing the contemporary collection at IWM North, and launched IWM Contemporary in London, a programme of exhibitions and events by leading artists and photographers whose work is a response to war and conflict. Given this reinvigorated focus, we hope that this Collaborative Doctoral Partnership will contextualise IWM’s programme within a broader field of contemporary art, with the aim of informing the Museum’s long-term thinking for the IWM Contemporary programming strand.

Through library and primary research the CDP will also enrich contemporary art’s understanding of its own practice, examining its engagement with contemporary geopolitics as represented by war and conflict. In particular, the CDP will locate the IWM’s curatorial practice within global discourses of ‘contemporaneity’ - and around the significance of dialogue and conflict within any approach to contemporary art - while profiling artists whose works epitomise the shifting presentation and understanding of geopolitical conflict. Three key questions inform this approach: Firstly, how have artistic responses to conflict since the late 1970s informed the discursive and practical turn from postmodernism to the contemporary? Secondly, if the politics of contemporary art and curating are driven by dialogue, affinity and collaboration, how then do they respond to the very different politics of conflict? Finally, does the ‘contemporaneity’ of contemporary art map onto or differ from that of contemporary military conflict; how might we understand anew the category of the contemporary in art and in war?

The successful student will be part of the vibrant research community of contemporary artists, curators and art historians at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, which will a unique contemporary art environment in which to undertake doctoral research. The successful student will also be expected to spend time working with the team at IWM London and will gain practical experience through the realisation of projects within the IWM Contemporary programme or a major exhibition planned for 2017.

The award pays fees up to the value of the full time home/EU rate for doctoral degrees as well as maintenance (the latter is available to UK citizens and residents only. For more information please visit: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/Student-Funding-Guide.pdf). In addition, the student is eligible to receive up to £1,000 a year from IWM and a similar amount from Oxford University towards research expenses.

How to Apply

Applicants should have a good undergraduate degree in art history, fine art, or another relevant discipline, and will need to satisfy AHRC eligibility requirements including Masters-level advanced research training or equivalent.

Applicants should submit the following information via email to Sara McCallum, Research Officer, IWM (research@iwm.org.uk) no later than 5pm on Friday 10 April:

A research proposal of 1,000 words in length;
Curriculum vitae (no more than 2 pages);
A sample of recent written work (of between 4,000 and 6,000 words) that is either a full essay or a clearly defined extract of longer work prefaced by a note putting the work into context;
Official transcripts detailing university-level qualifications and marks to date; and
A brief letter outlining their qualification for the studentship, and the names and contact details of three academic referees.

All documents should be submitted in either MS Word or PDF format. Please ensure the subject line of your email appears as ‘surname, first name – IWM/University of Oxford studentship.’

Interviews are scheduled to be held in London on W/C 27 April 2015. Shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete an application for a place on the DPhil in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. For further information please contact Sara McCallum (SMcCallum@iwm.org.uk | 020 7416 5461).