Doctoral training at
Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales
Welsh Cultural Heritage Consortium
This summer we are excited to launch our new collaborative doctoral landscape award. This award builds upon our previous CDP4 partnership with the National Library of Wales and National Botanic Garden of Wales and brings us together with Cadw and the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales to deliver an expanded and cohesive collaborative doctoral research training programme in Wales.
Our 12 research hubs, situated across Wales, create opportunities for researchers who are geographically isolated from university towns and campuses. They care for, and hold, a diverse national collection of artefacts and natural history specimens, books, periodicals, archives, maps, sound, film, artwork, broadcasting, photographs (including a historic aerial collection), digital datasets, over 2.5 PB of born digital archival holdings, and over 6 million digitised items.
Our sites include a 400-acre heritage landscape, an open-air museum, museum gallery space, working industrial museums, historic properties from prehistoric tombs to ruined castles and working houses, live traditional craftmanship and a legal deposit library.
We have four priority research areas:
1. Everyone is represented: how can we interpret collections and engage new audiences to tell new stories and re-tell familiar stories through new voices?
2. Healthy places: how can cultural heritage support people, places and nature to thrive?
3. Digital access to collections: how can digital tools and methods improve the creation, accessibility and availability of data and collections, as well as their interpretation and the types of stories told?
4. Conservation: how can we manage decisions about conservation in contexts of widening participation and collection use, climate change adaption and landscape-scale change?
We seek research projects that address these themes and strongly align with our areas of work and organisational values. Typically, we will expect the supervisory team for each project to comprise of a total of 4 supervisors: 2 from a university and 2 from our consortium.
Through our partnership, topics of research, EDI action plan, and programme of student cohort events we seek to support a vibrant, diverse, and connected doctoral research training culture in Wales.
We will award 18 PhD studentships across four funding calls in Summer 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029 for projects commencing in October 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030.
Expressions of Interest
If you are an academic based at a Higher Education Institution or a staff member at one of our consortium partners, expressions of interest are now open for the Collaborative Doctoral Landscape Award. We will be awarding 5 studentships, starting in October 2026, in this first round.
Please submit your expression of interest via our online form by Friday 9 October 2026.
Briefing events
We will be hosting briefing events on:
The briefing events are an opportunity for staff at each of our organisations, and university researchers interested in developing PhD projects with us, to learn more about our consortium and its aims as well as begin developing potential collaborations.
To sign up for the briefing event, please use the links above.
Timeline for funding
- July 2026: Briefing
- Friday 9 October 2026: EOI deadline
- Friday 27 November 2026: Full proposal deadline
- January 2027: Panel review
- February – May 2027: Advertising
- June 2027: Interviews
- October 2027: Commencement of studentships