Kent offers an excellent environment for postgraduate study in French literature, thought, culture, society and the visual arts from the 18th century to the present. On this PhD programme you benefit from spending a year at Kent's Paris School of Arts and Culture, to immerse yourself in French culture and language. Overview A PhD in French enables you to undertake a substantial piece of supervised research in the subject that makes an original contribution to knowledge and is worthy of publication. A PhD, also known as a doctorate, is a requirement for a career as an academic or as a researcher. In addition, it has become a qualification valued by many employers who recognise the skills and commitment a PhD requires. Employers also recognise that a PhD indicates excellent research and critical thinking capabilities, discipline and outstanding writing skills. The Year in Paris furthers your linguistic skills and cultural understanding through living in the city for an extended period of time. Over the duration of the PhD, you produce an original piece of research of up to 100,000 words, in English or in French. Previous doctoral theses have included ‘Deleuze and Anti-Humanism: The Sense of Deleuze's Spinozism’, ‘Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres’, ‘Photobiographies: pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux)’, and ‘De l'abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett’. The Department of Modern Languages offers supervision from world-class academics with expertise in a wide range of disciplines, able to support and guide you through your research. Your progress is carefully monitored to ensure that you are on track to produce a thesis valued by the academic community. Throughout your programme, you are able to attend and contribute to research seminars, workshops, and research and transferable skills training courses. The University of Kent is an ideal location to study French. Canterbury is the closest British university city to mainland Europe, and our proximity to the Channel ports and Ashford International station means you can be in Paris in just a couple of hours. Our Paris School of Arts and Culture is located at Reid Hall in a historic corner of Montparnasse, where authors and philosophers such as Barthes, Beauvoir and Derrida have lectured, and provides an ideal location from which to explore the city. You may be eligible for a fully-funded PhD scholarship to support your studies with us. The PhD in French at Kent can be funded through the Graduate Teaching Assistantship (GTA) scheme, or through the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE) collaborative doctoral partnerships. Please indicate in your application if you want to be considered for any of these programmes, and explain your eligibility for the chosen scheme. For the full list of scholarships available within the School, please see our postgraduate scholarship page. National ratings In the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, modern languages and linguistics was ranked 3rd for research quality, 3rd for research output and in the top 20 for research intensity, research impact and research power in the UK. Our submission was the highest ranked nationally to include modern languages – a testament to our position as the UK’s European university. An impressive 100% of our research was judged to be of international quality and the School’s environment was judged to be conducive to supporting the development of world-leading research.