Greater opportunities for postgraduates through AHRC awards.

University bucks trend to secure major awards

The University of Exeter has achieved a historic number of postgraduate awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The funding body awarded a five year Block Grant Partnership of 119 postgraduate awards worth over £4.2 million.

This exceptional result comes at a time of increased competition for postgraduate funding from the AHRC, and provides a substantial injection of funding over the next 5 years which will provide skills and experience that is relevant to a wide arena

Dr Michael Wykes, the Research and Knowledge Transfer Manager from the University of Exeter commented, ‘We have secured a total of 119 awards: 76 Doctoral Awards, 33 Research Preparation Masters, and 10 Professional Preparation Masters. This represents not only the achievement of our previous historic number of awards, but actually an improvement on them, which is a significant success.’

The award will fund 119 more postgraduate students in subjects ranging from Cultural and Film Studies to Creative Writing and Law. The University of Exeter have been awarded Doctoral Awards in all bar one of the subjects which were requested, including successes in the two areas where there was no previous track record. Classics and Ancient History were highlighted by the AHRC as particular strengths as were Middle Eastern Languages and Culture.

Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Research, Professor Robert Van de Noort said, ‘The AHRC award comes at a time when the University is rapidly expanding its postgraduate activity and when the number of applications to do MA’s and PhD’s at Exeter continues to grow rapidly. This award will enable us to appoint more postgraduate students in the Arts and Humanities, a long-standing area of research strength in Exeter.’

Date: 5 March 2009