Doctoral Training Programme success

Future postgraduate researchers at the School of Music have been awarded substantial funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in support of postgraduate study.

The South, West and Wales Consortium, in which Cardiff University is joined with seven other universities – Aberystwyth, Bath, Bath Spa, Bristol, Exeter, Reading and Southampton - has been awarded £14.2M from the AHRC over the next five years for a Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) which will deliver postgraduate supervision, training and skills development from 2014 onwards. Students accepted onto the programme will benefit from collaborative supervision, drawn from two universities. This provides a supervisory framework within which students can access the most relevant expertise and resources on offer across the partnership.

Four applications from the School of Music have been successful under this programme and the researchers involved will commence their postgraduate studies later this year, two of whom will be based at the School and two of whom will be co-supervised by academic staff at the School. The successful students are:

• Kate Neale: Distant Cousins: Music, Identity and Community in the Cornish Diaspora
• Sinibaldo De Rosa: The Alevi Semah as Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Vicky Jassey: Bataleras on the Frontline: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of Gendered Performances in Cuba
• Martin Humphries: Composing in the Community: Creating a Language of Authentic Expression within the Context of Amateur Music

Dr John Morgan O'Connell, the School's Director of Research stated: "These interdisciplinary research topics are well-placed to take advantage of the wealth of expertise within the School of Music, including expertise in ethnomusicology (especially in the areas of Celtic studies, Islamic studies, African and Afro-Cuban music), cultural musicology (especially in the areas of music and diaspora, and music and gender), and contemporary composition. Two of the four students – Kate Neale and Martin Humphries - completed relevant undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Cardiff University and  their doctoral research builds upon this educational background."