Dear colleagues, 

The start of a new academic session always provides us with an opportunity to take stock, reflect on and firm up our plans for the year ahead. 

With a new President and Vice-Chancellor joining us, it certainly feels like a period of fresh beginnings, and I hope you will participate in the consultations for the Manchester 2035 strategy, particularly on the theme areas of accelerating our research impact and funding which you can find here. You can find out more about the in-person and online workshops to give our thoughts and ideas on all five themes, and the online feedback form, at the Manchester 2035 web page. 

As we have seen in the October Foundation Day celebrations and in our recent hosting of the Times Higher Education (THE) World Academic summit, Manchester has an ambition to be at the forefront of international work to redefine the role of universities in a changing and volatile world, and our research endeavours will be part of this. 

Over the last year we have revisited our existing Faculty research themes to also include our expanding work in AI (through a major £4.3 million Presidential Strategic Investment in staffing and in postgraduate researcher (PGR) awards), and our post-Covid society theme transition to one of Adaptive Societies. We have identified a number of priorities for the year ahead and aim to enhance our research awards to meet the 8% target increase, from an existing position of strength: the Faculty recorded its highest ever total for new research awards in 2023/2024, with over £34.2m of external funding. 

Our congratulations to all new award winners including Elisa Belotti (Sociology, SoSS) for an award from the ESRC on Secondary Data Analysis and Alice Sverdlik (GDI, SEED) for a UKRI award for ‘The Urban Futures project - Toward health equity, inclusive governance, and climate adaptation in African informal settlements’. In addition, I am pleased that, as a consortium with Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University, we are also now partners in the North Wales and North West cluster for the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network. 

Our REF 2029 preparations are on track, and we look forward to welcoming the first cohort of senior research mentors from our Advanced Research Mentoring programme to be delivered in partnership with 64 Million Artists this autumn. This is part of our broader mission to improve researcher support and development across all career stages. 2024/2025 also sees an enhancement to our post-doctoral offer, with additional Simon and Hallsworth Fellowships posts and more post-doctoral appointments generated by an exciting University investment, which will be announced in the autumn. 

Professor James Evans will lead our developments in the post-doctoral portfolio, as part of embedding our plans for improved succession and workforce planning in the researcher space. This autumn, Research England will be publishing further details on the People, Culture and Environment (PCE) element of REF 2029 which will further shape our planning to create and sustain a research environment at Manchester in which all our researchers can thrive.  

The Doctoral Academy will continue to play a key role in contributing to our vibrant research environment and in developing a strategy which better reflects the changing nature and expectations of postgraduate study in the UK. Crucial to this is our planning for improving our PGR completion rates and our plans for both more effective supervisor training and doctoral career development opportunities. 

I also wanted to use this opportunity to give some focus on the excellent work we are taking forward in Business Engagement and Civic and Cultural Partnerships. Earlier in 2024 under the leadership of Professor Richard Almendinger, the Faculty Business Engagement & Knowledge Exchange (BEKE) team launched the latest iteration of our faculty Business Engagement & Innovation strategy. This sets out where the team will focus its efforts in helping to generate new opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborative research and knowledge exchange projects with non-academic partners. 

The strategy has been informed through discussion with each of our Schools and identifies various thematic areas where we have a critical mass of research expertise aligned to priority areas for partners in business, public and charitable sectors. Building on work with the Creative Manchester Platform, our thematic focus areas currently include Digital Trust & Society, Place Making & Smart Cities, CreaTech, FinTech & The Law and technology Initiative (LaTi), Health Inequalities, and most recently, Fashion & Retail. Targets set in the strategy include delivery of several Innovation Labs and showcase events to demonstrate our research expertise, expand networks and provide a platform for developing collaboration with external partners. We would also like to increase the number of impact acceleration account (IAA) and Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) applications led by Humanities academics. 

In addition to prioritising certain focus themes, the strategy makes recommendations as to how we build and develop existing external partnerships and create new ones, focusing also on increasing civic and cultural partner engagement; increasing joint initiatives across disciplines; and how we might better identify, understand and address existing and emerging barriers faced by colleagues to BEKE engagement. 

Returning to REF 2029, we will continue this year to develop and fine-tune our impact case studies, and the Research Review Exercise (RRE) in the opening months of 2025 will further enhance our knowledge base of the range and quality of research being produced across the Faculty. We have another Humanities Strategic Investment Fund (HSIF) call in progress, and aim to continue to provide responsive support and development frameworks for the brilliant research our colleagues are carrying out across the Faculty. 

Best wishes, 

Professor Maggie B Gale 

Vice-Dean for Research, Faculty of Humanities