The University of Hull Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area, the ‘green-blue humanities’.
It equips a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward, transforming our understanding of our relationships with water and shaping future research agendas, methods, and approaches within and between disciplines.
Applications open for our PhD Scholarships
We welcome applications to seven PhD Research Scholarships with the Centre for Water Cultures, as well as an Open Call for Research Proposals from applicants:
Animal psychology, climate change and public engagement
Cultural responses to the challenges facing small scale fisher communities around the UK
Dissecting the climate, water and health nexus for people with disabilities
Great Flood Stories and What They Teach Us: Applying Lessons from Cross-Cultural Diluvial Traditions
Narrative Waves: Unveiling the power of class-based, place-attachment to water through creative, intergenerational storytelling for climate action
Uncovering the hidden wetland histories of the Humber Estuary from the Late Iron Age to the Early Medieval Period
Water, music, and environmental beliefs and behaviours
Open Call for Proposals under the Water Culture Centre's Three Research Strands
Closing date: 24 January 2024
Research strands
Living With/out Water
Living With/out Water adopts interdisciplinary approaches to exploring how Western, non-Western and Indigenous communities have experienced, managed, and learned to live with and without water in risky green-blue environments from the earliest peoples to today’s coastal communities. This strand of our work focuses on the material and political implications of living with/out water, exploring how water has been governed and managed, gendered and racialised, and examining histories of risk and resilience in comparative perspective.
Imagining Water
Imagining Water examines the belief systems, folklores, and fictions that have arisen alongside, and in response to, experiences of living with water in coastal, estuarine, and delta communities, exploring water as a source of creativity that helps shape the identity of these water cultures worldwide, and throughout history. Embracing a range of media – from poetry to policy documents, film to music, Indigenous myths to video games – our research asks what these representations tell us about community and creative responses to living with water and the challenges and opportunities this involves.
Building Water Futures
Building Water Futures thinks forward through the arts and humanities to help better understand how communities can live with water in today’s uncertain climate futures. Working with high-risk communities in coastal zones and estuaries worldwide, we assess opportunities to engage communities with water challenges and increase uptake of resilience actions through community arts, learning histories, digital education, citizen inquiry methods and other creative solutions.