Space Stories at the National Archives

About the Project

The Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space (LCHS) has been awarded up to £10m for 10 years to transform the academic landscape when it comes to our understanding of Space through the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The LCHS will support cohorts of interdisciplinary postdoctoral and doctoral researchers alongside Leicester’s existing staff and Centre collaborators to develop new intellectual insights, innovative new methodological approaches, and build new collaborations. LCHS is based at Space Park Leicester, where the Centre’s researchers work alongside research scientists, start-up space companies, business and governmental bodies.

As part of this vibrant programme, we are seeking to recruit a fully funded PhD student to join our team of researchers working across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Leicester.

Supervisors:

• Dr Ben Parsons bp62@le.ac.uk
• Keith Mitchell (National Archives)

Project Description:

This fully funded PhD placement will offer the successful applicant a unique opportunity to work collaboratively with The National Archives (TNA) and the University of Leicester’s Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space (LCHS). It invites submissions for research projects that will focus on the relationship between archival and fictional materials concerned with outer space. Projects should aim to engage in depth with TNA’s extensive holdings of space-related documents, which touch on various aspects of the history of astronomy and space science, in order to bring them into dialogue with the cultural imagination and its sense of worlds beyond our own.

September 2026 start