New collaboration agreements between the Faculty of Arts and universities in the US and the UK
A range of international collaboration agreements have improved opportunities for the faculty’s PhD students to study abroad at several British and American universities. Vice-dean Anne Marie Pahuus, who is the head of the faculty’s graduate school, hopes that the agreements will be perceived as a signal confirming the faculty’s commitment to increasing the number of PhD students taking a joint degree.
The faculty has entered into three new collaboration agreements with the University of Southern California (USC); the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA); and the White Rose University Consortium, which is a PhD partnership between the British universities in York, Sheffield and Leeds.
The aim is to increase the number of PhD courses run jointly by the Faculty of Arts and its international partners. The agreements will also improve the opportunities of the faculty’s PhD students to study abroad. This is because in future PhD students from the Faculty of Arts will be able to apply to study at these five universities without paying any university fees.
“The agreements will make a big difference to our PhD students. At the moment they have to spend a lot of time and energy simply gaining access to international research environments, after which they also have to pay fees charged by the universities in question,” explains Pahuus.
More joint degrees
The Faculty of Arts has already awarded a number of PhD degrees and enrolled current PhD students in a collaboration with the University of York, and the new agreements represent a chance to increase these activities.
“I hope that closer collaboration will also mean that more PhD students choose to do joint degrees involving both the Faculty of Arts and the universities who are parties to the new agreements. Both applicants and supervisors should at least be aware that these opportunities now exist,” adds Pahuus.
The collaboration agreements with the universities in California have been inspired by an existing agreement with the University of California in Santa Cruz focusing on joint PhD degrees in the field of the Anthropocene. They are also the fruit of long-term collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Anthropology at the School of Culture and Society, with honorary doctor Professor Cheryl Mattingly from the University of Southern California being a key figure in these efforts. But the new agreements have been reached at faculty level, which means that they will benefit all the departments at the Faculty of Arts.