• Full-time or Part-time
• Programme starts: September 2025
• Application deadline - 14 October 2024
• Application portal open - 2 September - 14 October 2024

Focus

Our focus is on subject areas within Fine Art at the Slade and on interdisciplinary research between the Slade and disciplines offered by UCL. Within this focus, we currently support, and actively encourage, research projects that address pressing questions and concerns for ‘now’. In doing so, we acknowledge contemporary art and art research’s situatedness in a period of radical transition – some might call it crisis – where massive worldly shifts, from micro to macro, are resulting from conflict, migration, calls for social justice, developments in technology, ‘post-truth’, pandemic, the climate emergency.

How can art and art research – with its permeable disciplinary boundaries; capacity to readily register, adapt, and respond to context; ability to communicate through means and modes across the sensorium – participate in the thinking and making needed now to usher us into possible futures? More than that, how can art and art research engage with the radical potential of the imagination to effect and potentially transform these future possibilities, working across disciplines, as needed, to do so?

Related to this, see: UCL Grand Challenges: Our themes

Ethos

Intrinsic to Slade doctoral research is a commitment to searching beyond established canons of knowledge-formation, to include voices and methods less recognised within traditional scholarship. Contemporary art-making is attuned to the possibilities this brings. As a practice-led discipline, art emphasises materiality alongside imaginative potential, and allows aural, visual, and haptic modes of experience to carry and convey knowledge. Slade doctoral researchers work in archives, through community formations, on site, and in the studio. They make films, writing, paintings, sound works, textiles, performance, installations, site-based and socially-engaged art. Our artist researchers are both situated and mobile, mucking into the ‘stuff’ of the world and imagining out of this both new and possible worlds.  

In the pursuit of doctoral research at the Slade, the emphasis will always be on art.

So, and regardless of the pathway chosen to pursue research (see below), we will encourage and support the development of your research through a wide range of artistic practice, and we will champion its communication through inventive modes of exhibition, documentation and writing.

The doctoral research community at the Slade is committed to anti-racism, which we understand as predicated on core values of equity, transparency, and reciprocity. Informed by this, the aim in any research exchange will be to create the conditions needed for everyone to speak their mind; to share their work and ideas; to create and co-create meaning.

Aims

The aims of doctoral research at the Slade are to:

• advance the highest quality of artistic research that demonstrates ambition, breadth of vision and creativity;
• further such high-quality research through a wide range of artistic practice, and communicate this through inventive modes of exhibition, documentation and writing;
• make original contributions to knowledge through artistic practice, and further the understanding of artistic research itself;
• search beyond established canons of knowledge formation to champion and promote voices and methods less recognised within traditional scholarship;
• encourage a diversity of research outputs through, for example, exhibitions, performances, film and video, art-writing, print-making, new media, collaborations, publications, workshops, site-specific work, interventions;
• affirm the importance of Fine Art research while also exploring the possibilities of interdisciplinary research with other departments and faculties at UCL;
• engage with the radical and transformative potential of the imagination to effect change, working across disciplines, as needed, to do so;
• develop ways of making, thinking, doing and being that contribute to the research culture of the Slade, the UCL community, and wider fields of art and academia;
• encourage the sharing of research with national and international research institutions and wider publics.

MPhil/PhD Degree Pathways

The Slade offers a choice between the following three options within the PhD programme:

• Practice-led Thesis: a thesis of studio practice that makes an original contribution to knowledge accompanied by a written component of normally 15,000-30,000 words (with a maximum of 40,000) or 10,000-15,000 words (a maximum of 20,000) for the MPhil.
• Practice-related Thesis: a written thesis of 60,000-80,000 words with studio practice that together make an original contribution to knowledge (or 35,000-45,000 words for the MPhil).
• Written Thesis: a written thesis of 80,000-100,000 words that makes an original contribution to knowledge (or 50,000-60,000 words for the MPhil).

Registration and Length of Study

The length of the PhD is normally 3 years full-time or 5 years part-time.

Researchers register initially for an MPhil and are required to upgrade to a PhD between 9 and 18 months (full-time) or between 15 and 30 months (part-time). You must be registered for a minimum period of 3 years (full-time) or five years (part-time) before you are eligible to apply for Completing Research Status (CRS). The CRS period is a further 1 year (full-time) or 2 years (part-time) registration without fees, during which time you must submit the thesis and hold the final viva examination.

What to Expect

Doctoral research is independent and driven primarily through the work you do with your supervisors. Throughout your degree, you are required to do the following:

• Continually update and maintain your UCL Research Log.
• Regularly engage in PhD Supervision, including completing and submitting work ahead of time for consideration during each supervisory session.
• Complete and submit a Supervision Report after each supervisory session.
• Complete appropriate Doctoral Skills Training, including but not limited to training provided by the UCL Doctoral School Skills Programme.
• Complete and submit an Annual Progress Report as the basis for discussion in your Annual Review Panel.

As members of the Slade doctoral research community, you will participate in the Slade Doctoral Programme where you expected to do the following:

• Attend the Slade Art Research Forum.
• Present/exhibit research in the Slade Art Research Forum three times in total throughout active registration, including the formal Upgrade presentation/exhibition (this means you will present three times across three years for full-time and five years for part-time).
• Attend Skills Workshops for Practice Research in Year 1 (FT) and Years 1-2 (PT).

As well, you are encouraged to:

• Attend and initiate research activities in the Slade.
• Attend the weekly all-School Contemporary Art Lectures and Staff Talks, and to engage in Slade cross-School events.
• Seek out research events across UCL and LAHP that are relevant to your specific research.
• Be active participants in exhibitions, performances, events, conferences, and publishing both within and beyond UCL.

Research Environment

The Slade School of Fine Art’s practice-led research culture facilitates an ongoing commitment to individual excellence in art research while also supporting research with other artists, curators and researchers, which increasingly addresses pressing societal and cultural challenges.

Our research aligns to five main areas of expertise:  

• Materials and Materiality comprises research into materials, in particular pigments and paints supported by the Materials Research Network.
• Histories and Cultures draws together researchers exploring the impact of historical perspectives on contemporary art practice and research.
• Media and Performance research explores analogue and digital Fine Art Media technologies, including moving image, sound, internet and installation researchers.
• Environments and Publics is concerned with research into place and publics, urbanism, sustainability, well-being and ‘the commons’.
• Dark Studies includes the Dark Universe Studies Centre (DUSC) where fugitive thinking and alternative forms of sociality draw on the black radical tradition and experimental practice. Research in this area evokes the dislocated subject of language and representation, channelled through performance, political writings, fictional provocations and processes of documentation.

See Research at Slade.

The Slade MPhil/PhD places great emphasis on interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary connections, and Slade researchers network regularly with doctoral researchers across UCL and the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP). You will also be encouraged to join research centres and networks relevant to your specific topic within and external to UCL, and to organise research events using funding through UCL Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) and the Global Challenge Scheme.

Degree Benefits

Doctoral researchers benefit from the Slade's central London location and proximity to other external research institutions, galleries and museums. Practice-led students in full-time attendance are allocated shared working space and all students have access to workshop facilities.

Slade doctoral researchers have access to the School-wide lecture and visiting artists programme as well as an extensive range of research groups and skills courses throughUCL Doctoral School, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and London Arts and Humanities Research Partnership (LAHP).

The Slade offers doctoral researchers the opportunity to work as postgraduate teaching assistants (PGTA) on the BA Fine Art, BFA Fine Art and the interdisciplinary BASc programme in UCL Arts & Sciences. These Teaching Assistantships are supported by training and mentoring at the Slade and UCL Arena. They are available to apply to on a competitive basis.

Head of the Slade Doctoral Programme / Departmental Graduate Tutor (Research): Prof. Kristen Kreider
Slade Research Tutor / PGR Admissions Tutor: TBC

Primary supervisors are members of Slade staff, all of whom are practising artists or scholars in the history and theory of art, with national and international profiles. Secondary supervision is also available from renowned scholars and specialists across UCL and partner LAHP institutions.

Previous, current and potential second supervisors across UCL include: Dr Chiara Ambrosio (Philosophy of Science), Professor Nishat Awan (UCL Urban Laboratory) Prof. Daniel Brett (Engineering), Prof. Robyn Carston (Linguistics), Dr Marquard Smith (IOE), Prof. Penelope Haralambidou (Bartlett), Prof. Rodney Harrison (Archaeology), Prof. Mark Midownik, (Institute of Making, Engineering), Dr James O’Leary (Bartlett School of Architecture), Prof. Sophie Page (History), Dr Aaron Parkhurst (Anthroplogy). External supervisors include: Dr Jeff Scheible (Kings College London).

For further information, see our fees and funding section for information about tuition fees, funding, scholarships and bursaries.

You can apply to spend a period of 3 to 12 months at UCL undertaking research which is complementary to the Doctorate/PhD project at your home university.

Please see the UCL Visiting Research Students page for further details.

To apply

• Complete the form on the UCL Visiting Research Students page.
• After you have submitted the formal UCL application in Portico and a UCL Application Number had been generated, please complete and submit the Visiting Research Student Supplementary Information Form (Word doc) to slade.tlo@ucl.ac.uk.

If you have any further questions, please contact slade.tlo@ucl.ac.uk.

Visiting Research Affiliates

We are able to host a small number of excellent visiting researchers, international scholars and artists whose research interests align closely with our research themes and priorities, as outlined the Research at the Slade webpage. Please see our Research Affiliates page for further information.