// Call for Applications: PhD studentship for AHRC-funded project with National Museums NI / Deadline: 20 April 2026 //

Queen’s University Belfast (School of Arts, English and Languages) in partnership with National Museums NI, is offering a position for a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship, fully funded (fees and living allowance) by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, to conduct research leading to a PhD on the theme: “Rewind, Play and Fast Forward: Tracing the evolution of Irish-English from sound archive to web“.

It will be supervised by colleagues at National Museums Northern Ireland, Newcastle University and Queen’s University, Belfast. The project builds directly on the “Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech”, initiated in the 1970s and now fully digitised. It adopted a highly innovative methodology for the time (particularly the use of analogue tape-recording and the collection of data from three age groups living in communities all over Ireland). The studentship project will locate and re-record a sub-sample of the original survey respondents recorded as children (aged 9-12). The goal is to create an unprecedented record of how individual linguistic repertoires developed and adapted across decades of societal change. Naturally, a key benefit will be the enhancing of scientific knowledge about how language variation and change operates, but the project also has a wide range of other applications. In particular, its capacity to observe and preserve the dynamics and living heritage of Irish-English over time allows the collaborators to develop best practices in transforming static sound archives into dynamic, growing web-based resources that connect past and present voices across generations in museum and heritage contexts.

Start date: 1 October 2026 

Application Deadline: 20 April 2026 at 5pm 

Applications received after this date cannot be considered. Candidates will be notified of the outcome of their application by the end of day on the 1 May 2026. 

Interviews will take place on 12 May 2026. All interviews will be online. 

Full details can be found here: https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ael/Study/FundingScholarships/#ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-partnership-studentship-with-national-museums-ni-5511000-1