Find a PhD supervisor

Once you've identified the subject area you wish to research, you will need to find a supervisor for your project. All Doctoral Researchers are provided with a lead supervisor, who will act as the main source of academic supervisory support and research mentoring during your time as a Doctoral Researcher at the University.

Start your search

Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡ for supervisors below to see who you think may be a great fit for your research area. Once you have identified they are able to offer appropriate supervisory support, you can start to reach out to staff using the contact details provided on their profile. 

Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡ results for “environmental history”

Professor Joy Porter

Professor Joy Porter

Professor of Indigenous and Environmental History
University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡ 125th Anniversary Chair
Principal Investigator, Treatied Spaces Research Group

Department of History

Professor Porter has a strong track record helping ECR and PGR colleagues advance their careers. She has supported a significant number to achieve positions in U.K. and U.S. Universities. She has also supported students and ECRs to attract fellowships, travel awards and other funding from the AHRC, Fulbright US-UK, government bodies and North American and European universities.
She welcomes PGR enquiries linked to:
Global Indigenous Environmental History, Culture and Literature ...

Dr Jonathan Willis

Dr Jonathan Willis

Associate Professor in Early Modern History

Department of History

I am interested in supervising research projects on most aspects of the social, cultural and religious history of early modern England, especially in areas relating to the reformation, theology, popular religion and belief, religious practices, puritanism, parish religion, music, the material culture of the parish church, and histories of emotion and mental illness.

I have been/am currently involved in supervising MA dissertations, MRes theses and PhD theses on the following topics: ...

Dr Hiroki Shin

Dr Hiroki Shin

Associate Professor in History of Energy and Environmental Humanities
125th Anniversary Fellow

Department of History

Dr Shin welcomes enquiries about potential postgraduate projects on all aspects of energy history, environmental history and modern economic history.

Dr Simon Jackson

Dr Simon Jackson

Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History

Department of History

I offer postgraduate supervision in the colonial, international and global history of modern France and its empire, on empire in the twentieth century Mediterranean and in the comparative history of European empire.

I currently supervise or co-supervise several PhD students:

Gemma Jennings (Patriarchy and Poverty? A Transnational Analysis of the Social Implications of the Oil Industry between France and Algeria)
Tomoki Yamada (The League of Nations Mandates System as a ...




Dr Shirley Ye

Dr Shirley Ye

Lecturer in Asian History

Department of History

Previous MA thesis topics that I have co-supervised include Sino-British economic relations and a comparative study of Roman imperial cults and Japanese overseas shrines.

I welcome inquiries from students on PhD supervision on China, East Asia, and the wider world in any time period. Current PhD topics I am co-supervising include postcolonial urban architecture and memory in Hong Kong (funded by AHRC Midlands 3 Cities Consortium), and the public history ...

Dr Rosie Day

Dr Rosie Day

Associate Professor in Environment and Society

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences


Dr Day welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral researchers in her areas of interest:

environmental justice / energy justice
energy poverty
energy geography
environmental knowledges
older age, especially in relation to environmental or energy issues












Professor John Kenneth Colbourne

Professor John Kenneth Colbourne

Professor, Chair of Environmental Genomics
Director, Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ)

School of Biosciences

The Environmental Genomics group is recruiting postgraduate students to pursue PhD studies in the following research areas: 

  • Molecular mechanisms of developmental plasticity & acclimation 
  • Pioneering the use of genomic signatures for environmental health protection 
  • Forecasting environmental health threats on populations using Daphnia egg bank genomics 
  • Biostatistical and computational methods of analyzing high dimensional data and gene networks 
  • Population genomics 
  • Heritable basis of condition-associated molecular responses and adaptive tolerance to stress ...

Dr David Smith

Dr David Smith

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Archaeology

Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology

Past PhD students supervised by David have worked on analogue studies of the plants and insects from hay meadows (with Dr Pam Grinter) and the Palaeoentomology of estuarine deposits at Goldcliff, Gwent (with Dr Emma Tetlow).

At present, David is co-supervising the PhDs of:

Shelagh Norton - who is working on the archaeology and the past environments of the Berth Hillfort, Shropshire and other ‘marshforts’ in the British Isles.
Zena ...




Professor Henry Chapman

Professor Henry Chapman

Professor of Archaeology

Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology

Henry can supervise postgraduate study in the areas of later prehistory, wetland archaeology, landscape archaeology and the application of digital and spatial technologies within heritage.

He currently supervises students researching digital approaches to conflict archaeology, the landscape archaeology of European bog bodies, predictive modelling of centres of power in Bronze Age Anatolia using GIS, valuing archives in the 21st century, the landscape archaeology of Neolithic causewayed enclosures, and the archaeology ...

Professor Dominique Moran

Professor Dominique Moran

Professor in Carceral Geography

School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Carceral Geography

Dr Archie Dunn

Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Archaeology

Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies

  • Late Roman and Byzantine archaeology; archaeology of the later medieval Aegean world
  • Regional histories and economic history of the Byzantine world

Find out more - our PhD Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡.

Professor Chris Thornhill

Professor of Law

Birmingham Law School

Chris has supervised PhDs on many legal topics, including: Constitutional Reform in Kenya; Constitutional Reform in Egypt; the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in National Constitutional Law in South America; the Global Right to Food; the History of International Criminal Law; Military Law and Legal Reform in China; Constitutional Law and Populism in Poland and Brazil; Constitutional Reform in Scotland; Constitutional Reform in Turkey; Constitutional Reform in ...

Dr Jorge Caamaňo

Dr Jorge Caamaňo

Reader in Cellular Immunology

Department of Immunology and Immunotherapy

Jorge supervises doctoral research students in the following areas:

  • Signalling pathways involved in the development of secondary lymphoid organs and inflammation.
  • Induction of gene expression by members of theTumour Necrosis Factor Receptor family (TNF-R) and the NF-kB transcription factors during immune responses and disease.
  • The role of the NF-kB transcription factors during cell transformation.

In the last few years three PhD students have successfully completed a PhD under his supervision. ...

Dr Juliano Sarmento Cabral

Dr Juliano Sarmento Cabral

Associate Professor for Biodiversity Modelling and Environmental Change

School of Biosciences

Potential students to postgraduate supervision should be interested in one or more points:

  • Eco-evolutionary and biogeographical topics (e.g. evolutionary rescue, diversity gradients)
  • Environmental change and human impacts (e.g. habitat conversion, climate change, exploitation)
  • Computational work and mechanistic modelling (e.g. programming languages like R and Julia; agent-based models)
  • Tropical and species-rich systems
  • Range dynamics of plant and animal species

Dr Minjie Cai

Dr Minjie Cai

Associate Professor in Human Resource Management

Department of Management

Minjie is experienced in supervising PhD research and would consider prospective PhD supervision on the following subject areas, specifically in relation to frontline services work and emotional labour.

  • Sociology of work: skills and value creation/extraction in the labour process; organisational and technological change; gender and race representations.
  • Industrial relation: resistance and activism at work; labour organisation in response to deregulation, informalisation and precarity; trade unionism and the state.
  • Human resource ...

Professor Davide Calebiro

Professor Davide Calebiro

Head of the Department of Metabolism and Systems Science
Professor of Molecular Endocrinology
Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and Co-Director of the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE)

Department of Metabolism and Systems Science

Davide Calebiro acts as primary and secondary supervisor for basic scientists and clinical research training fellows and is a supervisor in the MRC IMPACT Doctoral Training Programme.

Dr. Katie Callicott

Dr. Katie Callicott

Academic Tutor

School of Education

  • Applied Educational and Child Psychology Doctorate
  • MSci Psychology and Psychological Practice

Dr Chris Callow

Dr Chris Callow

Senior Lecturer in Medieval History

Department of History

I would welcome research students on a wide range of issues in the history and archaeology of early medieval western Europe, especially the Vikings and medieval Iceland and Scandinavia. Research proposals on social, cultural or economic history within particular medieval regions or communities would also be possible. I have published on the writing of history in the middle ages and would be interested in supervising similar topics on medieval narratives. ...

Professor Melanie Calvert

Professor Melanie Calvert

Professor of Outcomes Methodology
NIHR Senior Investigator

Department of Applied Health Sciences

Professor Calvert is interested in supervising doctoral researchers on the following subjects:

  • Outcomes Research
  • Patient reported outcomes in clinical trials or routine practice.

Current students

  • Harjeet Bhachu 
  • Aimee Jackson
  • Konrad Maruszczyk
  • Harjeet Bhachu 
  • Ellie McDermott

Graduated students

  • Samantha Cruz-Rivera   
  • Mohammad Tallouzi
  • Nicola Anderson 
  • Grace Turner
  • Derek Kyte
  • Adrian Gheorghe
  • Poorva Jain
  • Helen Kirkby
  • Matthew Richardson
  • Puvan Tharmanathan
  • Olalekan Lee Aiyegbusi
  • Janet Jones
  • Rebecca Mercieca-Bebber (University of Sydney) 

Studentships ...

Dr Steven Cammiss

Associate Professor in Law

Birmingham Law School

I am interested in supervising students in the broad fields of Criminal Justice, Policing and Law and Language. Previous students have completed their doctorates on subjects such as identifying vulnerability in police custody, the history of jury trial, and incitement to commit genocide.

Dr Adrian Campbell

Dr Adrian Campbell

Associate Professor
Convenor of Masters in Public Administration and Masters in Public Administration and Development

International Development Department

He has been lead supervisor for the following PhDs (year of graduation in brackets):

  • John Mwita (2004)
  • Fikret Radjabov (2009)
  • Alan Phelps (2010)
  • Molefe Phirinyane (2011)
  • Kashif Rathore (2012)
  • Alexander Kalgin (2014)
  • Amrit Rai (2015)
  • Ourathai Yosinta (2016)

He was co-supervisor for the following

  • Duncan Leitch (2014)
  • Tutik Rachmawati (2015)
  • Yogi Suwarno (2016)

He is currently the lead supervisor for the following PhD students:

  • Sabarinath Krishnan
  • Paul Lewis
  • Mohammad Roudo ...

Dr Courtney J. Campbell

Dr Courtney J. Campbell

Associate Professor in Latin American History
Joint Director of the University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡ Brazil Institute

Department of History

Brazilian History
Latin American History
U.S.-Latin American Relations
Race and Gender in the Americas


Dr Meghan Campbell

Dr Meghan Campbell

Reader in International Human Rights Law

Birmingham Law School

Gender Equality
International Human Rights Law
Socio-Economic Rights
Enforcement of Rights


Professor Alexander M. Cannon

Professor Alexander M. Cannon

Professor of Ethnomusicology

Department of Music

I welcome applications from research students interested in any of the following areas: Vietnamese music; traditional music of Asia and its diasporas; music and climate change; creativity theory; musical sustainability; intangible cultural heritage; and queer ethnography.