PhD Studentship - World-Leading Scholarship in English

University of St Andrews - School of English

The University of St Andrews is pleased to offer a full scholarship funded by St Leonard's Postgraduate College, to support an exceptional student undertaking doctoral research in the following project:

Exporting the Nation: Making the Commonwealth, Re-making Men

Accepted start dates: September 2026

Value of award (per year)
The scholarship will comprise a full tuition fee award and an annual stipend paid at a rate set by the University of St Andrews. For 2025-2026, the stipend is £19,775 p.a., with an annual uplift published by the University each academic year.

Duration of award
Up to 3.5 years (full-time) or 7.0 years (part-time). Scholarship holders will be expected to have submitted their thesis for examination by the end of that period. The award term excludes the continuation period and any extension periods.
The stipend will be paid pro-rata to part-time students.

The Project

This research project investigates the powerful residual appeal of the British empire at the very point of its collapse. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Britain continued to invest in its overseas territories, and actively encouraged emigration by the white middle-classes to the newly imagined Commonwealth. In fiction and film, this global ‘new’ world was conceived as a space in which an exhausted nation could be revived, most commonly through tropes of man-making struggle. From the repair of wounded veterans to the training of cadets, the Commonwealth offered an antidote to austerity and a set of tests though which new forms of white masculinity might be forged. Narratives imagining outbound Commonwealth migration proliferated throughout the period. They were popular, influential, and numerous, and have received almost no scholarly attention. This project will address that gap, exploring the narrative fiction of an overlooked period – 1945-1965 – better to understand the stories of self and nation that shaped modern Britain.

The successful applicant will have considerable scope to determine the final focus of their research thesis, but it is anticipated that the project will embrace narratives across multiple media, examining (for instance) historical fiction that uses the past to access former colonies, as in John Masters’ popular India-set novels; fictions of development and extraction, such as Hammond Innes’s bestselling Campbell’s Kingdom (1952), in which the conquest of the Canadian wilderness is also the conquest, and resurrection, of the wounded male self; or cinematic attempts to refigure empire through ‘neutral’ plots – as in Where No Vultures Fly (1951), an Ealing Studios adventure reimagining the white colonial settler as a game warden. The investigation will be designed to interrogate the process and the consequences of storytelling: how the plotting of risk and reward, often in counterintuitive situations, facilitated the construction of acceptable masculinities and fantasies of post-war British identity.

Contact

Informal enquiries regarding this scholarship may be addressed to Professor Gill Plain (gp3@st-andrews.ac.uk) and Dr. James Purdon (jjp5@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Funding

The scholarship will comprise a full tuition fee award and an annual stipend paid at a rate set by the University of St Andrews. For 2025-2026, the stipend is £19,775 p.a., with an annual uplift published by the University each academic year. The duration of the award is up to 3.5 years (full-time) or 7.0 years (part-time).