PhD Translation and Intercultural Studies

Our PhD Translation and Intercultural Studies programme will enable you to carry out a significant piece of original research under the supervision of our academics.

The Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies (CTIS) at Manchester has the largest concentration of translation studies specialists in the country. It attracts visiting scholars and postgraduate students from a wide range of countries and backgrounds.

By collaborating with experts in fields such as literary studies, linguistics, intellectual, social and cultural history and theory, CTIS provides unique opportunities for doctoral researchers in translation studies, both in core areas of the discipline and at its interdisciplinary cutting edge.

CTIS provides an excellent environment for research and organises regular scholarly events for the benefit of postgraduate students. These include a series of weekly seminars which attract a large national audience of researchers, students and practitioners. The seminars, delivered by invited speakers, form an important part of students' initiation into scholarly research, while also offering valuable opportunities for informal contact with leading academics.

The Centre also provides specialist research training for doctoral students in the form of masterclasses.

International conferences and symposia which CTIS has organised in Manchester and in which PhD students have participated include:

Research Models in Translation Studies II (2011);
Citizen Media: New Mediations of Civic Engagement (2013);
New Perspectives on Translation: Insights into the Performative and Cognitive Work of Translators (2014);
Researching Translation in the Context of Popular Culture: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives (2015);
Genealogies of Knowledge: Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space (2017);
International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI) (2018).
The Centre houses the world's first and largest computerised corpus of translated text. The Translational English Corpus and the necessary software for processing it are freely available to the research community on the CTIS website.

CTIS is also home to Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space , a large AHRC-funded project exploring how translation has impacted the transformation of key concepts in political and scientific thought as these concepts have travelled across centuries, languages and cultures.