Teaching and research excellence
All of the eight discipline areas within the School are judged to be of international standing as measured by the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Two - Music, and Religions and Theology, achieved the highest rating of 6* while the remainder all scored 5.
This research excellence naturally finds its way into the teaching that takes place within the School. Students can choose from 33 undergraduate programmes and 25 masters schemes, as well as structured research training and personal supervision for doctoral students.
All the educational programmes offered are designed to teach people how to think rather than what to think, and students often report that they find the courses both challenging and rewarding. This feedback is backed up by recent assessments by the Quality Assurance Agency in which the School's subjects consistently scored 23 or 24 out of a maximum of 24 points.
Committed to the University's agenda for 2015, the School views research as its top priority. Being both ambitious and strategic each discipline has developed a research strategy, while at School level a Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA) has been established. CIDRA's remit is to provide innovative leadership between different disciplines. It delivers this remit in a variety of ways: prioritising specific research themes in a given time-frame, organising seminars, workshops and a prestigious lecture series, developing interdisciplinary MA courses and encouraging external funding for interdisciplinary research projects.
The School is supported in its research strategy by rich resources within the University- in the collections of the John Rylands University Library, the Race Relations Archive, the Manchester Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery, while the study of Drama and Music has a purpose built space - the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama. Thie Centre houses the John Thaw Studio Theatre, the Lenagan Library and the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall - as well as audio-visual facilities and workshop and practice spaces. A new electro-acoustic studio was opened in 2007.
The School receives major external research grant income, most notably from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In 2005 alone the School won three major funding bids from the AHRC, accumulatively receiving £1.3 million. These funded projects take their place among a number of other high profile projects within the School.
SAHC Research Bulletin 2010
- SAHC Research Bulletin 2010 (, 2,890 KB)