Re-performing Story Archives

This Research & Knowledge Exchange Doctoral Project brief summarises our priority areas of research interest under the heading of: Re-performing Story Archives: Discovering, Transforming and Enacting Cornwall’s Writers

We welcome all research degree applications aligned with and in response to this brief.

Cornwall is a rural-industrial landscape and has been a popular tourist destination for centuries, inspiring writers from those passing through, those on tour, ideological settlers and Cornwall-born writers alike. For many years the Cornish landscape was considered so remote to outsiders that it became a vehicle for the impossible, magical and Other in literature, including for popular novelists such as Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Daphne du Maurier. This doctoral proposal encourages candidates to consider the distinctive nature of Cornwall, its writing and writing cultures, and especially encourages proposals drawing on the wealth of archival materials held by Falmouth university library services. 

The candidate might like to explore our rich unique archival collections relating to theatre and performance in Cornwall including the Bill Mitchell Archive, The Kneehigh Theatre Archive, the Nick Darke Archive, and The Wildworks Archive. Or they might consider fiction, poetry and non-fiction writing in Cornwall for instance the material we have in the 

Cornish Poetry Collection, the Gorsedh Kernow Bardic Collection, the John Rowe Collection, and the Patrick Gale Archive. Candidates will likely have their own creative practice and respond to archival material in experimental and innovative modes. 

As well as original archival research this PhD could be an interdisciplinary project with practice and the practice-based element might involving creative writing, theatre-making, interactive digital storytelling, or indeed any creative arts practice; or the project could have an educational component. This could be a focussed project using a specific writer’s archive, or it could engage more broadly with a range of archives and their respective museum and heritage sector representations.   

Projects deriving from this brief are expected to sit within the Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy and the following Department.

All successful research degree project proposals must emphasise a clear alignment between the project idea and our Research & Knowledge Exchange strategy.