Funded PhD Studentship Opportunity: Join the PromPrint Team!
We’re delighted to announce a special opportunity to join the PromPrint team as a PhD research student.
The Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex seeks to appoint a postgraduate research student to our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project, ‘Promiscuous Print: Legal Deposit Libraries, Rejected Texts, and New Methods for Negative Bibliography’.
The scholarship covers PhD fees, research costs, and a tax-free stipend in line with the UKRI level (£21,383 for 2026/27) for a period of three years’ full-time study beginning in October 2026.
An ERC project hosted by the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab (SHL Digital) and led by Principal Investigator Dr Hannah Field, PromPrint uses digital tools and quantitative analyses to uncover the rejects of legal deposit: the printed texts excluded from the ostensibly universal archive promised by copyright libraries.
Taking a case study approach oriented around UK copyright libraries between 1836 and 1914, the project asks questions including: which textual forms and genres do deposit libraries reject? How and why does this change over time? More broadly, the research seeks to drive forward our understanding of how literature is canonized and forgotten, collected and destroyed.
The postgraduate researcher will be part of the PromPrint research team, which also includes PI Dr Field, postdoctoral researcher Dr Milan Terlunen, and Research Software Engineer Dr Nicolas Seymour-Smith. The PhD project will focus on the relationship between obscenity and deposit. While the project is hosted by the English Literature programme at the University of Sussex, along with SHL Digital, we are open to applications from researchers in all humanities disciplines
The PhD project will focus on the relationship between obscenity and deposit. Pornography was a publishing phenomenon in nineteenth-century Britain. Moreover, as Sarah Bull notes, there were frequent attempts to define obscenity ‘as a single category of print’, covering not just porn but also sexological treatises and other medical materials. Against this backdrop, key questions for the postgraduate researcher will include:
How did deposit libraries preserve or suppress obscene texts in this period?
What is the relationship between deposit and individual library protocols for managing a broader range of controversial books (e.g., ‘Private Case’ at the British Museum Library, ‘Arc’ at Cambridge, ‘Phi’ at Oxford)?
In what ways did deposit and copyright contribute to the definition of obscenity itself?
What is gained by understanding which obscene materials are missing from copyright library holdings?
How can data on rejected books contest or revise existing histories of gender, sexuality, medicine, and publishing?
Deadline: 27 February 2026. Find more information and how to apply.
The British Museum: the interior of the reading room, in use. Wood engraving by G. F. Sargent. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.