phd opportunity: idea transformer

RCA and Tate are delighted to offer the following Arts and Humanities Research Council fully-funded PhD studentship: ‘Idea Transformer: a History of Curatorial Innovation at Tate Modern’.

The successful candidate will be expected begin the studentship on 1 October 2023 on either a full-time or part-time basis and will be required to spend time at both RCA and Tate Modern, gaining access to resources and services across the two institutions. They will be part of a wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.

This PhD studentship will investigate Tate Modern’s curatorial models and their histories. We invite proposals that interrogate notions of transhistoricity, transnationality and transmediality through and beyond the evolution of Tate Modern’s collection displays.

Applicants should identify a particular focus, approach and/or range of areas of curatorial practice to be researched. These may include, but are not limited to, the ways in which displays have related and responded to shifting acquisition strategies and to the wider programmes of exhibitions, commissions, learning activities etc., the critical responses they have elicited over the years, connected strategies of knowledge dissemination through interpretation and research initiatives, and how they compare to those of other Tate sites or similar collecting institutions.

We are open to developing the research project with the candidate, with an understanding that a ‘complete’ history of Tate Modern would be beyond the scope of a single doctorate, and welcome focused proposals that seek to address current issues facing curatorial practice through the analysis of an area of the Tate Modern’s dense and layered history.

The project will be co-supervised by Dr Ben Cranfield (Senior Tutor, Curating Contemporary Art MA) and Valentina Ravaglia (Curator, Displays and International Art, Tate Modern).