PhD Study

Doctoral Research with Built Heritage

A PhD with us is a research degree, not a taught course. You design and lead the project yourself, working with at least one of our members in your Supervisory Team and with the wider group as your research community.

We supervise across the following themes

• Living and intangible cultural heritage: craft, festivals, ritual and everyday practice, and the stories that keep a place alive. 
• Historic environment and high street policy: how research on the historic environment feeds into planning, high street and heritage policy. 
• Contested space, justice and postcolonial heritage: the politics of urban space, spatial justice, and heritage in the Global South. 
• Conservation philosophy and critical heritage theory: the ideas and values that underpin how and why we conserve the historic environment. 
• Fieldwork methods: anthropology, drawing, walking and movement-based research, and participatory work with the people and places we study. 
• Listed building conservation, adaptation and reuse: the practical work of adapting, reusing and retrofitting listed and historic buildings. 
• Media, image and immersive space: media archaeology, cinema, lighting and exhibition design, and how digital tools now shape space. 
• Histories, typologies and morphology: building types and their history, from textile warehouses to Garden Cities, New Towns and Japanese architecture. 
• Urban futures and systems: smart cities, urban engineering and the liveability of the places those systems produce. 

Before you apply, look at our Researchers page. Find the researcher whose work sits closest to yours and start there.

Research degrees are awarded through Manchester School of Architecture at Manchester Metropolitan University.

What to send us

Write to the member you’ve identified with a short proposal, no more than two pages, covering:

• Your topic, in a sentence or two.
• The question you’re asking, and the gap in knowledge it addresses.
• Your method and framework – how will you gather and work through your research?
• What the research will produce.
• Who the work is for, and which fields or debates it speaks to.
• Why Built Heritage, and which of our themes, projects or people it builds on.

Tell us your intended start date (our intake runs September to October), and where you stand on funding: a studentship, another funded route, or self-funded.

Applying

Entry requirements, fees, deadlines and English language requirements are set by the University: see the postgraduate research overview.

When you’re ready to apply, the University’s guide to applying for a research degree takes you through the formal process step by step.