Doctoral Training in the Social Sciences

The University of Oxford’s Social Sciences Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) is one of 21 centres across the UK accredited by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for its research training excellence, and will play a key part in the ESRC’s newly-created national Doctoral Training Network.  It has been awarded 45 ESRC studentships per year for the next five years, providing opportunities for academically outstanding students to benefit from the research preparation Masters and doctoral training we provide across a wide range of social science disciplines and inter-disciplinary subject areas, including: Anthropology, Economics, Area Studies, Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies, Education, Geography and the Environment, Social and Economic History, International Relations, Management and Finance, Migration Studies, Politics, Psychology, Social Policy and Intervention and Sociology.

Social Sciences at Oxford provides the academic home to a strong and international graduate student body of some 1,200 postgraduate research students who benefit from a unique academic environment. This includes:

• Innovative and internationally excellent research and supervisory expertise across a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields
• Rigorous research training of breadth and depth, grounded in a student’s main discipline or subject, and with opportunities to access a wide range of advanced and specialist training available across the social sciences
• An emphasis on fostering interdisciplinarity, so that students not only have strong expertise in their main discipline, but can work effectively in an interdisciplinary context
• Comprehensive research and professional skills training opportunities as part of a DTC-wide Academic and Professional Development Programme
• A strong and internationally diverse social science community of academics, researchers and students that fosters inter-disciplinary interaction
• Contact with the many leading scholars and practitioners from institutions around the world that visit the University and collaborate on a wide range of research initiatives