As you may know, college recently established the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre (CVTRC), co-directed by Dr Akil Awan (History) and Dr John Morrison (Law and Criminology).
The CVTRC at Royal Holloway aims to carry out inter-disciplinary, and methodologically rigorous, research on all forms of conflict, violence and terrorism. The research will analyse, inter alia, the act of violence itself; the motivations and rationale of violent actor(s); the contemporary and historical contexts in which violence takes place; violent spaces; the antecedents of violence; the social, political and other consequences of violence; representations of violence in news media, film, and literature; memories of violence and commemoration; and conflict resolution and peace-building efforts.
This inter-disciplinary approach is reflected in the academic backgrounds of the Centre fellows. While the Centre will be housed jointly within History and Law, the Centre staff will include academics from a range of additional departments including PIR, Economics, Geography, and ISG.
The principle aims of the centre include:
- To carry out innovative inter-disciplinary research on violence, conflict and terrorism.
- To serve as a hub to attract grant funding, both for conventional research bids, but also for bids that require a demonstrable ‘centre of research excellence’.
- To provide an intellectual home to the growing cohort of PGT and PGR students studying war, violence, conflict and terrorism. These include the MSc Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Law and Criminology); MA History: Histories of Conflict and Violence pathway (History); the MSc. in International Security (PIR), in addition to the numerous PhD and MRes students supervised on these topics across RHUL.
- To attract new cross-college PhD students.
- To host conferences, symposia, workshops and guest speaker events.
- To launch an open-access journal.
- To establish a web and social media presence, that would help disseminate both current and new centre-driven research activities.
- To serve as a hub for engaging with policymakers, practitioners, and publics.
We are inviting Postgraduate Research Students across the college who work on the broad themes of war, violence, conflict and terrorism to join the centre as Doctoral Research Fellows, subject to approval by your academic supervisor.
We would love to have you join, and in return you would get a personalised profile page on the site, which is currently in development. We would also use the website and social media feed to highlight and showcase any projects or publications for you. We are keen for this not to be an onerous association, so beyond that, your involvement with the centre would entail as little or as much as you wanted.
What we would require is an email with a short statement of interest and the following information attached:
· Profile photo (head and shoulders)
· Institutional affiliations
· Bio, including a short overview of your research project (up to 200 words)
· Relevant Publications
If you have any questions, please address them to me directly for now at
deon.chorleyrhul.ac.uk