Film PhD

Your Ph.D. at Lancaster could focus on one of a wide range of topics within Film Studies or on a subject that crosses different disciplines. As a Ph.D. student, you will normally be supervised by a team of two supervisors who will ensure that you receive focused critical feedback and encouragement throughout the program. In some cases, the second supervisor will be based in a different discipline within the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA), or a different department within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in order to ensure that you have the most appropriate supervisory team for your chosen project.

We have supervised Ph.D. projects on an exciting variety of topics that extends from global cinema history and cultural politics to contemporary philosophy and film and media theory. These have included: the history of made-for-TV movies in the US; affect theory and first-person documentaries from the 1980s and 1990s; stardom, fandom, and real-person fanfiction; distracted spectatorship and the franchise film; theatre and film in post-marital law Taiwan; terrorism, power, and global media; cultural symbolism in Indonesian documentary; Gothic fantasy and the films of Guillermo del Toro.

You can take your Film Studies Ph.D. at Lancaster either in the standard format of a written thesis or as a project that combines the written thesis with creative practical work. Many of our academic staff are engaged with practice-based research in the fields of film, theatre, art, and design, and we have a dedicated team of technicians to support you as well as workshops, editing suites and technical resources for our students.

As a Ph.D. student based in the LICA and part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), you will be part of a multidisciplinary community of research students, able to participate in seminars, reading groups, conferences, and research training courses. We also offer opportunities to study for a certificate in higher education teaching.