PhD Gender and Sexuality Studies

The GSS PhD draws on expertise from many different UCL departments to provide postgraduate research students with specialist supervision. The PhD cohort is coordinated by UCL GSS and the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII), which provides students with peer support and training throughout their doctoral research.

PhD students benefit from a research culture forged through connections to other research programmes at SELCS-CMII, for example Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonialism and Health Humanities. UCL GSS holds regular postgraduate research seminars, where students present their work in progress, access career training, and work collaboratively on peer critique.

Our PhD students frequently benefit from connections to other faculties and departments through their supervisors, such as specialist training and workshops, social networks and opportunities to present their work to different audiences.

GSS students have the opportunity to gain valuable teaching experience through paid employment as Postgraduate Teaching Assistants from their second year on. Doctoral researchers contribute their growing expertise to shape discussion seminars, workshops and a range of other activities supporting the Gender, Society and Representation MA as well as other PG Taught Programmes at CMII.

For information about how to apply see the Gender and Sexuality Studies MPhil/PhD.

Meet our research students.

Current PhD Research

The (in)visible father: lesbian motherhood and artificial insemination in Britain from the seventies to late eighties (Samuel Vermote)
Being Queer and Jewish: a Cross-Cultural Study of Ethno-Religious Experiences and Divides (Mie Jensen)
Temporalities in Tension: Reimagining the ‘Sexual Migrant’ from a Temporal Standpoint (Arthur Davis)

Selected Past PhD Projects

Mapping Intimacy: The South Asian Beauty Salon in London and the Production of Diasporic Space (Dr Nandita Dutta)
Queer Identities in Conflict: Experiences of Providing and Receiving Lgbtq+ Asylum Support in England and Germany (Dr Aydan Greatrick)
On the Foreskin Question: Circumcision and psychoanalysis (Dr Jordan Harold Osserman)
Out of Soho, Back into the Closet: Re-Thinking the London Gay Community (Dr Marco Venturi)
Mapping Intimacy and Pleasure in a Beauty Salon: First-generation migrant women from South Asia in London (Nandita Dutta)

Funding

For a comprehensive list of the funding opportunities available at UCL, including funding relevant to your nationality, see SELCS-CMII Funding, Scholarships and Prizes.

Careers

A research degree in Gender and Sexuality Studies from UCL is excellent preparation for a broad variety of careers in both the private and the public sectors, as well as academia.

Learn more about how UCL can support your career goals.

“During my PhD, I felt fully supported yet independent to shape my own research. In the third year of my PhD, I received a Beacon bursary from UCL, a public engagement grant that helped me conduct a series of workshops in beauty salons on awareness of gender equality, intimate-partner violence and sexual and reproductive health. Since submission of my thesis, I have been working as a Research Associate in the School of Management, University of Bath, showing that there are no boundaries between disciplines. Dr Nandita Dutta, India