"There is tremendous scope to receive training from outside of your main discipline"
PhD Programme
Chimera is an interdisciplinary grouping that cuts across different Schools within the Faculty of Humanities. This page provides information on doctoral supervision topics and areas of expertise. You can use it to identify staff relevant to your research interests and build a supervision team. At Manchester each doctoral student has a minimum of 2 supervisors.If you are interested in studying under the supervision of a Chimera member, you will still need to register with a specific academic subject area. We recommend that you first contact the academic member(s) of staff who could supervise your project. They will help you build a supervision team and give you advice regarding your application to a specific subject area.
The Centre for Museology is also involved in the development of Professional Doctorates. If you are interested in studying along this route, please do get in touch with us to discuss your options.
Doctoral Supervision Areas
Dr Kostas Arvanitis
Lecturer in Museology
kostas.arvanitis@manchester.ac.uk
- Digital media in museums, galleries and heritage environments
- Mobile media as mobile museums
- Web 2.0 media, audience development and online curatorship
- Museum exhibitions in outdoor spaces
- Archaeological sites in everyday settings
- Archaeological curatorship and museum archaeology
Caroline Bithell
Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Arts Management
caroline.bithell@manchester.ac.uk
- Ethnomusicology: history, theory and methodology
- The US folk revival
- Music in the Community
Rupert Cox
Lecturer in Visual Anthropology, Social Anthropology
rupert.cox@manchester.ac.uk
- Zen and the traditional arts in Japan
- The visual history of mutual perceptions of Japan and Europe following the first contacts in the sixteenth century
- Orientalist automata in culture, history and mind
- The US military and Pacific war memories in Japan
- Soundscapes as cultural heritage
- The political ecology and cultural history of military aircraft noise
Ian Fairweather
Lecturer in Social Anthropology
ian.s.fairweather@manchester.ac.uk
- Identity and representation in Southern Africa
- Museums and the tourism and heritage industries
- Religious belief and expression
- Memory and memorialisation in Southern Africa
Melanie Giles
Lecturer in Archaeology
melanie.giles@manchester.ac.uk
- Approaches to identity (particularly the issue of the Celts)
- The archaeology of death, burial and funerary practice
- Social space, place and inhabitation
- Materiality, technology, art and aesthetics
- The history of archaeology (particularly antiquarian studies)
- Integrating theory and practice: methodological studies addressing the professional development of the discipline
- Representing the past
Sian Jones
Professor of Archaeology
sian.jones@manchester.ac.uk
- The role of monuments and landscapes in the production of meaning, value and place
- Memory and identity
- Authenticity and conservation
- Community Archaeology
- The production and negotiation of heritage values, in particular social value
- The role of the past in the construction of ethnic and national identities
Petra Kalshoven
Lecturer in Social Anthropology
petratjitske.kalshoven@manchester.ac.uk
- practices of play and imitation
- identity play and cultural appropriation in transnational settings
- amateur stagings of heritage: re-enactment and living history
- ateriality, material culture, and human-thing relationships
- anthropology of landscape and art
Sharon Macdonald
Professor of Social Anthropology
sharon.macdonald@manchester.ac.uk
- The globalization of heritage, including 'world heritage' and the workings of international heritage organisations
- Ethnographic study of the making and reception of local or regional cultural heritage, especially (though not only) in Europe
- 'Difficult heritage' - identities and conflicts in dealing with the past
- Tourism and the consumption of heritage
Keir Martin
Lecturer in Social Anthropology
keir.martin@manchester.ac.uk
- Cultural tourism
- South Pacific
- Relationship of cultural heritage debates to wider socio-economic disputes
Nick Merriman
Director of Manchester Museum
nicholas.merriman@manchester.ac.uk
- Assessing acquisition & disposal rates of museum collecting
- Archaeological archives: use and exploitation
- New uses for natural history collections (e.g. engaging audiences around sustainability)
- Models and miniatures in museums
- Archaeology and minority ethnic participation
Helen Rees Leahy
Director of the Centre for Museology
helen.rees@manchester.ac.uk
- The operation of the art museum, including practices of collecting, classification and display
- The operation of the art market in the production the museum canon and of narratives of 'heritage', including the use of fiscal mechanisms for the transfer and retention of cultural property
- The production of personal and cultural memory in the museum
- The collection and display of decorative arts, textiles and fashion
- Art, ethics and law, including issues of restitution, retention and theft
- The intersections of 'heritage' and the ownership of elite property
Louise Tythacott
Lecturer in Museology
louise.tythacott@manchester.ac.uk
- The collection, classification and representation of Chinese and Asian artefacts in museums
- The aestheticisation of non-Western objects and the politics of representing ethnographic collections in museums
- Colonialism and collecting
- Material culture, identity and restitution, particularly in relation to Chinese objects
- Chinese Buddhist deity iconography
- Surrealism and non-Western art