Doctoral research on diversity in the UK film industry and well-being in coastal towns will be among the first “focal award” projects supported under a new model for arts and humanities PhD funding.

Announcing the recipients of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)’s new “doctoral focal awards”, the funder  about 200 PhDs would be funded across 10 university consortia over four cohorts from October 2026.

Among those chosen as university consortia leads are Bangor, Oxford Brookes and Swansea universities, the universities of Hull, Liverpool, Leeds, Loughborough and Roehampton and the Glasgow School of Art and King’s College London.

Overall, more than 30 universities and 100 non-higher education institutions will be involved in the new clusters, said the AHRC.

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The focal awards will replace the AHRC’s Centres for Doctoral Training under efforts to harmonise awards across UK Research and Innovation’s research councils over the next few years. In the new system students can suggest a topic for funding under the doctoral landscape awards or apply for a focal award which is based on themes set by the funding council.

In the AHRC’s case, the two focal award themes are “arts and humanities for a healthy planet, people and place” and the “creative economy”.

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Many of the institutions named as consortia leads were not  among the 50 winners of doctoral landscape funding that will receive three PhD awards a year. These include Bangor and Swansea universities, the universities of Hull, Loughborough and Roehampton and Glasgow School of Art.

Announcing the consortia awards on 3 July, the AHRC’s executive chair Christopher Smith said they would “support cohorts of students in centres for excellence for strategically valuable areas such as health and the creative economy”.

“In the future, this approach will allow us, in consultation with the sector, to provide support where it is needed to disciplines across the arts and humanities, vital skills and digital humanities. But the scope for individual projects is wide and autonomy for researchers remains as important as ever,” he said.

The focal awards, he continued, “exemplify AHRC’s approach to doctoral training and our ambition for a sustainable portfolio providing support for training, investigator-led research, strategic direction and building the infrastructure necessary for people and ideas for the future of arts and humanities”.

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Among the focal awards is a partnership with the Natural Environment Research Council co-funding the “living well with water” award given to Hull.

The focal award announcement follows criticism over the revamp of the AHRC’s doctoral funding structures, which will see doctoral training partnerships replaced at the end of the next academic year with broader regional partnerships. Fewer PhD awards will also be funded,  from 425 a year to 300 by 2029-30.

There have been concerns that too much of the remaining funding will go towards thematic “focal awards”, decided by academics, rather than the landscape awards, which typically reward curiosity-driven research ideas from PhD applicants.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com