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  6. AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with Museum of the Home

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with Museum of the Home

Queen Mary University of London with the Museum of the Home (Soundscapes of Domesticity: Music and Lived Experience in Non-Elite English Homes, 1780-1870)

The deadline for applications is: 17:00pm BST, Friday 23 May 2025

Interviews will be held during the week commencing: Monday 2 June 2025

Queen Mary University of London and the Museum of the Home are pleased to announce the availability of a fully-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from October 2025 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme. The studentship is funded for four years full-time, or up to eight years part-time.

Project overview and key aims

This project will explore the significance of music to lived experiences in non-elite English homes from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on examples of different types of home from working-class cottages to petit-bourgeois households, lodging houses and institutional homes, it aims to provide understanding of the role played by music in relation to three key areas of domestic experience: (i) how music was entwined with embodied domestic practices and how it shaped expressive responses, emotional capacities and movement within the home; (ii) how music enabled and sustained familial relationships and other domestic social interactions; and (iii) how music connected homes to the places around them, and the commercial, social, cultural and political networks of the wider world.

Alongside a PhD thesis presenting original new research on a neglected area of historical and musicological investigation, the findings of the project will contribute to the Museum of the Home’s redisplay of its eighteenth and earlier nineteenth-century period rooms. The production of musical soundtracks for museum visitors and the organisation of a ‘Festival-Symposium’ on ‘Music in the Home’, with contributions from researchers, curators and musicians, will be additional outputs.

This project will be jointly supervised by Alastair Owens (Professor of Historical Geography), and Matthew Ingleby (Lecturer in Victorian Literature) at Queen Mary; and, at the Museum of the Home, by Louis Platman (Curator and Research Manager) and Gaynor Tutani (Creative Programming Officer).

Possible topics for investigation

The appointed PhD student will determine the types of domestic space and kinds of music that will be researched (within the period 1780–1870), and we envisage a thesis based around three to four different ‘case studies’ that enable these questions to be addressed. Preliminary investigation has suggested several potentially fruitful areas of enquiry: domestic singing (of glees, hymns, ballads) in labourers’ homes in new working-class northern towns; the home as a site for expressing, through music, dissent (e.g. religious) and political views (e.g. labour struggles, approbation for class or community causes, anti-colonial discourses), privately or with like-minded others; how the rhythms of domestic life were shaped and disrupted by music and sound from outside the home: street performers and ballad singers, the ‘rough music’ of protest, marching bands, wailing drunks, church bells and bird song; the role of music in everyday domestic routines and relationships, such as whistling to accompany household chores, or singing before meals, to lovers during leisure times, or to children before bed times; homes as a site of musical learning, education and moral instruction in nurseries in private homes or as part of key routines in institutional homes; the role of music in shared and transient homes such as piano-playing and singing in lodging houses. The exact focus of the research will be decided by the student in consultation and with guidance from the supervisory team, and in discussion with Museum of the Home colleagues so that the examples align with the interests of the Museum and the priorities of the period room redisplay programme.

Methodology and source materials

This PhD will necessarily deploy a variety of methods and sources to address the chosen topics and research questions. Within existing scholarship there is a division between historical accounts that attempt to reconstruct domestic musical practice from textual evidence and material sources, and studies that are based on analysis of the representation of music in literature. The supervisory team for this project spans historical-geographical/social history, literary and curatorial approaches, enabling the student to work confidently across different types of historical evidence. There is also scope for using performance methodologies to reconstruct and explore past domestic soundscapes.

A wide range of sources has been identified to support the research including: the ‘material culture’ related to domestic music-making (collected music books, printed manuscripts, instruments) housed in several metropolitan and regional collections; inventories; domestic guidance and advice manuals; newspapers and periodicals; business records relating to the suppliers of printed manuscripts and instruments; diaries and personal papers; literary and artistic representations of music in the home; records of residential institutions; court records (e.g. the Old Bailey Online where there are frequent references to music in domestic settings). The searchable online Cecilia database provides descriptions of music collections in the UK and there will be relevant materials in the Museum own collections.

Training and career development opportunities

The successful candidate will have access to a wide range of training and development activity at Queen Mary, via its Doctoral College, membership of the AHRC London Arts and Humanities Partnership and within the graduate programmes of the Schools of Geography and the Arts. The candidate will join a lively community of PhD students, many of whom are working collaboratively with arts and heritage organisations.

The appointee will also be affiliated with the Centre for Studies of Home – a collaborative and cross-disciplinary research hub, co-led by Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home for studying home in the past, present and future. The Centre’s members span staff and PhD students from a range of disciplines and backgrounds at Queen Mary and the Museum and its activities include workshops, seminars, conferences, public events, hosting international visitors and running a postgraduate study day.

At the Museum of the Home the candidate will enjoy the unique experience of joining a cohort of nine PhD researchers from several different universities working on topics about home and domestic life: three students commenced their research in 2024, three will do so in September 2025; and a final three will be recruited to start in 2026.

The candidate will also have desk space at the Museum during the entire duration of their PhD. This will bring the added benefit of fully embedding the student into the working environment of the museum, enabling them to gain an invaluable professional insight into areas of work, such as: 

  • Curatorial practice: exhibition development and design, museum text writing, community engagement, research skills for museum displays, object acquisition; 
  • Collections care: object handling training, preventative conservation, object packing and storage, documentation and cataloguing;
  • Developing and delivering learning programmes.

The candidate must complete a 3–6-month work placement as part of the project. This may be at the Museum of the Home or another relevant cultural institution. During the placement students will gain vital first-hand experience of working within the culture and heritage sector and develop skills that will aid the dissemination of their research and support their own professional development.

 Details of the award including stipend

CDP doctoral training grants fund full-time studentships for four years or part-time equivalent up to a maximum of eight years.

The award pays tuition fees up to the value of the full-time home UKRI rate for PhD degrees. Research Councils UK Indicative Fee Level for 2025/2026 is £5,006. The award pays full maintenance for all students both home and international students. The UKRI National Minimum Doctoral Stipend for 2025/2026 is £22,780 (including London Weighting of £2000/year), plus a CDP maintenance payment of £600/year. The Doctoral Stipend is not taxed.

The student is eligible to receive an additional travel and related expenses grant during the course of the project courtesy of the Museum of the Home worth up to £1,000 per year for 4 years.

The successful candidate will be eligible to participate in events organised for all Collaborative Doctoral Partnership students who are registered with different universities and studying with cultural and heritage organisations across the UK.

International students are eligible to apply for studentships but will be expected to pay the difference between the home and international fee rate themselves (as the studentship will only cover fees at the home rate, plus the stipend; see below for further information).

Eligibility

  • The studentship can be studied either full or part-time.
  • This studentship is open to both Home and International applicants (though see below for details on fees).
  • To be classed as a home student, candidates must meet the following criteria:
  • Be a UK National (meeting residency requirements), or
  • Have settled status, or
  • Have pre-settled status (meeting residency requirements), or
  • Have indefinite leave to remain or enter

Further guidance can be found here.

International students are eligible to receive the full award for maintenance as are home students. They will need to pay themselves the difference between what the AHRC provide to the university for tuition and the charge made by the university for tuition fees for international students studying for a doctoral degree in Humanities. Queen Mary’s overseas fees rate for a full-time postgraduate research student in the humanities in 2025-26 is £23,750. On this basis, the difference payable in 2025-26 will be c.£18,744. A similar amount will be payable per annum throughout the remaining period of registration.

We want to encourage the widest range of potential students to study for a CDP studentship and are committed to welcoming students from different backgrounds to apply. We particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian, and other Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds as they are currently underrepresented at this level in PhD and Museum contexts. 

Applicants should ideally have, or expect to receive, a relevant Masters-level qualification by the time of taking up the appointment, or be able to demonstrate equivalent experience in a professional setting. Suitable fields include, but are not limited to: music and musicology; social and cultural history; home studies; literary studies; museum, heritage and cultural studies; historical geography. We welcome applications from those with professional and performance backgrounds in the music, arts and heritage sectors.

The studentship offers a distinctive opportunity to undertake a collaborative doctorate with a university and a museum. As such, students should demonstrate their interests and aptitude for exploiting the unique possibilities of a studentship that will allow them to develop career-enhancing skills in heritage and public engagement, and to contribute to the cultural and intellectual life of both institutions.

As a collaborative award, students will be expected to spend time at both the University and the Museum of the Home.

All applicants must meet UKRI terms and conditions for funding.

How to apply

Candidates wishing to be considered for this award must apply using the Queen Mary University of London’s online application portal by 17:00pm BST on Friday 23 May 2025. Before filling out the online form, we advise preparing and collating the additional documents that you will be required to upload:

  1. Undergraduate and (if applicable) postgraduate degree transcripts
  2. Proof of English language competency (if applicable). Please see here for further information
  3. A Curriculum Vitae (CV)
  4. Two references (ideally, academic references)
  5. Personal Statement (max. 1,500 words) explaining why you are interested in researching this topic, including relevant skills, insights or expertise you would bring to the project and how you think you would develop it to reflect your own interests. In writing your statement, please consider the information provided about the project above. (Note: this ‘Personal Statement’ replaces the requested ‘Research Proposal’ and ‘Statement of Purpose’)
  6. A sample of writing. This could be a piece of academic writing (e.g. a dissertation or extended essay), or a text written in the course of recent professional work.

Apply here: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/applying-for-a-phd/

The successful candidate’s ‘home’ school will be Geography. Please select Geography > PhD Full-time Geography-Semester 1 (September Start) or PhD Part-time Geography-Semester 1 (September Start) and follow the instructions.

We also ask all applicants to complete a voluntary EDI monitoring form here. All responses are anonymous.

We anticipate holding interviews during the week commencing Monday 2 June 2025.

For more information, or an informal discussion, please contact Alastair Owens (a.j.owens@qmul.ac.uk)

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