[K.P. Corrigan]

Please see below a link to an advertisement for a fully-funded PhD position supervised by colleagues at National Museums Northern Ireland, Newcastle University and Queen’s University, Belfast. The successful candidate will work on the AHRC-funded project “Rewind, Play and Fast Forward: Tracing the evolution of Irish-English from sound archive to web.” 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

Please do share with anyone who might be eligible/interested! Thanks.

All the best,
Karen

Prof. Karen P. Corrigan, Hon MRIA (Director of Research in Linguistics)
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics,
Percy Building,
Newcastle University,
Newcastle, NE1 7RU, UK

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