The University of Reading has announced the Mary Bryden Studentship in Beckett Studies for commencement in September 2026 or January 2027. Supported by an endowment from the late Professor Mary Bryden’s Estate, the PhD studentship offers an annual subsistence stipend of £13,500 for 3 years full-time study, or part-time equivalent. The scholarship will also cover full-time UK/Republic of Ireland tutorial fees of £5238 fees.
The studentship is open to highly qualified applicants proposing to study any aspect of Samuel Beckett’s work towards a Ph.D. at the University of Reading. Preference will be given, given the provenance of the studentship, to candidates who are planning to undertake part of their research at the world-leading archive of Beckett materials, housed at the University’s Special Collections.
The successful candidate will be based at the Samuel Beckett Interdisciplinary Research Centre at the University
The closing date for applicationsis 30th June 2026.
Full details available to download below
Professor Mary Bryden died in 2015; she was a loved and respected faculty member in French Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, of which she was a sometime Head. Mary’s research specialities lay chiefly in the sphere of twentieth-century French literature, philosophy, and culture, and she worked intensively on Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, T. E. Lawrence and Thomas Merton. Her books include Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust (jointly with M. Topping), and a number of edited books, such as Samuel Beckett and Music, and Beckett and Animals.
The Samuel Beckett Society 