Wellcome Trust doctoral studentship, Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University

Philosophy of medicine: music and embodiment

The Centre for Medical Humanities, School of Medicine and Health offers a fully funded three year doctoral scholarship in philosophy of medicine to consider the nature of the relationships among music, embodiment, health and well-being.

Music’s therapeutic potential is widely sought within formal clinical ‘music therapies,’ which are the subject of a considerable body of educational, psychological and health services research; the neurological substrates of musical experience are also investigated by neuro-scientific research. However such researches are relatively disconnected from philosophical understandings of music and of embodiment. As part of its five-year Wellcome Trust Strategic Award programme ‘Medicine and Human Flourishing,’ the Centre for Medical Humanities wishes to pursue philosophical understandings of the experience of music in the context of embodiment, and into the nature and meaning of musical experience and its relation to our sense and experience of our own embodied nature. Existing educational, health services and neurological research may be reconsidered in relation to the philosophical work as it develops.

Applications are invited from candidates with a first-class degree in Philosophy and relevant interests pertaining to music, embodiment and well-being. The work will be primarily supervised by Professor H Martyn Evans (Professor of Humanities in Medicine, Centre for Medical Humanities) in association with Professor Max Paddison of the Department of Music, whose research interests include philosophy of music and music therapy.

Further details about the research opportunity are available from Professor Evans (h.m.evans@durham.ac.uk). Further information about the work of the Centre for Medical Humanities is available at www.dur.ac.uk/cmh and information about work on music therapy at the Department of Music is available from Professor Paddison (m.h.paddison@durham.ac.uk) or at the Department’s website www.dur.ac.uk/music.

Applications must be made on line. Full details available from: http://www.dur.ac.uk/school.health/postgraduate/apply/

Closing date for receipt of applications: 31st August 2009