Current Funded PhD Opportunities

Successful applicants will receive a 3.5 year fee waiver + £5K research expenses per project. Each project will work on The Irene Champernowne Archive. This is a large collection of documents and artefacts related to the life and work of Irene Champernowne (1901 - 1976), a pioneering British psychotherapist influenced by the theories of Carl Jung who championed creativity and the arts as important aids for recovery from mental illness. The archive is housed by Special Collections and more information on the archive is available here. 

The projects will start in September 2026. Applicants are invited to apply for one or more of the projects outlined below (each project will support one PhD student). To apply, please complete the application form by 5pm on 31st January 2026. Applicants should have a good first degree (2:1 or equivalent); a Masters level qualification and have English as their first language or an overall IELTS grade of 7.5 with a minimum score of 7.0 in each component. The form also requests applicants provide:

• An indication of which project they are applying for
• Details of past and current research qualifications
• A statement of research interests and their relevance to the project applied for
• Names of two academic references

Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by 31st March 2026. Any questions about the application process should be directed to the School’s Director of Research, Emma Moore (e.moore@sheffield.ac.uk). Any questions about the individual projects should be directed to the supervisors of those projects. 

Additional information regarding PhD fees and funding

Project 1. Therapeutic Communities

In contrast to psychoanalysis, counselling or psychotherapy taking place, more often than not, in a consulting room in an urban space, therapeutic communities function on the basis of a group, outdoors, in retreats or more remote locations, in forests or residential compounds. Therapeutic communities also exist in contradistinction to the institution and the asylum and the ‘mortification of the self’ (Goffman, 1961) historically practiced there, instead imagining therapeutic interventions that focus on autonomy, creativity, and support. 

The University of Sheffield holds the Irene Champernowne archive, a large collection of documents and artefacts related to the life and work of Irene Champernowne (1901–1976), a pioneering British psychotherapist influenced by the theories of Carl Jung who championed creativity and the arts as important aids for recovery from mental illness. Champernowne set up and led the Withymead Centre in Devon, one of the first therapeutic communities in the UK. The Centre delivered a treatment model based on Jung’s theories and methods, and blended together art, music and dance-movement therapy with clinical support, in a community environment that sought to create lasting rehabilitation.  

The proposed PhD project should make use of the archive and include work on the Withymead Centre; the rest of the project on the concept of therapeutic communities can include any other case studies to broach the subject and research the following questions and areas of interest:

• how is the idea of a therapeutic community articulated materially, socially and politically;
• how is therapy performed and how does it function in therapeutic communities, including, for example, through the use of psychedelics;
• how do therapeutic communities reflect changing attitudes to mental health, and what is the relationship between therapeutic communities and the concept of ‘wellness’;
• can therapeutic communities decolonise therapy or do they further entrench the link between therapy and whiteness;
• can therapeutic communities imagine the more-than-human

Supervisors: Dr Logan Collignon; Dr John Miller

Project 2. The Aesthetics, Theory and Practice of Multispecies Art-Therapeutic Imaginaries: Withymead and Now

The Withymead Centre was a place where more-than-human encounters were understood to enable moving from illness, imagined as a kind of death, to healthy life. Memories, descriptions, images and publicity materials in the Champernowne Archive featuring cows, dogs, swans and the abundant garden suggest the role of multispecies entanglements in Champernowne’s vision of therapy. Animals abound in patients’ art practice and in her writings: as creative material to be worked with as therapy, as symbolic resources for understanding patients’ psychology, and as forms of life that people must emulate in order to heal. 

The continuation of this psychotherapeutic legacy in contemporary ecological thought needs to be better understood. In environmental humanities scholarship, there is an increasing prevalence of therapeutic vocabularies, which interpret artworks as agents of a transformation towards ‘healthy’ human-nature relations in the context of climate crisis. Simultaneously, in therapeutic settings, there is a growing confluence of creativity-based and animal-assisted approaches – but these have received little scholarly study. 

This interdisciplinary PhD project will situate the Champernowne Archive within a broader analysis of the aesthetics, theory and practice of contemporary therapeutic human-animal imaginaries. By developing a relationship with an external partner with expertise in combining arts and animal-assisted therapy practice, the project will bring together the cultural history and theory of psychotherapies, the linked role of creative and animal-assisted practice in contemporary wellbeing settings, arts-based research with archives, and environmental humanities approaches to human-animal relations. 

Objectives:

• To explore how understandings of animal-assisted and art therapies might be informed by contemporary scholarship on human-animal relations
• To explore contemporary practice that imagines and portrays transformations in human-animal relations as a form of healthy recovery based on a therapeutic encounter with nonhuman animals mediated by literature/art
• To examine how these contexts draw on cultural-historical roots and psychotheapeutic-theoretical trajectories that can be revealed by the Champernowne archive

Supervisors: Professor Robert McKay (School of English); Dr Jessica Bradley (School of Education)

Project 3. ‘Mother and Healer’: Irene Champernowne, Rudolf Laban and the Development of Art Therapy in Britain

Rudolf Laban was an Austro-Hungarian choreographer and movement specialist who developed the discipline of dance analysis through a specialist notation system known as Labanotation. His interest in pioneering modern dance, and recognising the close relationship between movement and mental health, shaped his work in advancing dance therapy as a way of expressing emotions that would otherwise be difficult to verbalise.  He is well known in the UK not only through his theoretical and practical work but also through the establishment of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, formerly known as the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, in New Cross, South East London. This educational and therapeutic space initiated Laban’s long-standing legacy in Britain and offered other artists and psychologists the opportunity to engage fully with movement therapy. One of his close collaborators, whom he called ‘mother and healer’, but also ‘friend and co-fighter’ was Irene Champernowne, a pioneering British psychotherapist who founded the Withymead Centre in Devon, ‘a Jungian community for the healing arts’ (Stevens, 1986).

The principal aim of this PhD research is to actively and creatively engage with the Champernowne archive, held by the University of Sheffield Library Special Collections and Archives section, in order to explore Champernowne’s close relationship with Laban. Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to:=

1. Irene Champernowne’s contribution to and role in the development of Laban’s Art of Movement Guild;
2. The influence, use and impact of Laban’s techniques in the art therapy workshops at Withymead;
3. Irene Champernowne’s crucial contribution to the early development of British Art Therapy through the establishment of Withymead as an experimental centre for psychotherapy through the arts, with particular focus on movement and dance therapy. 

This PhD project would contribute extensively and decisively to knowledge in the fields of art therapy, dance and movement and psychoanalysis, ensuring a better understanding of the role of Irene Champernowne in the early development of art therapy in Britain, and firmly placing early British art therapy training within the wider scope of European practice.

Supervisors: Dr Carmen Levick; Prof Frances Babbage 

Additional information regarding PhD fees and funding