Undertaking a PhD allows you to develop in-depth knowledge and make a meaningful contribution to your chosen field. With expert guidance from a single supervisor or two co-supervisors, you'll carry out an extensive independent research project on a topic of your choice and produce a thesis of up to 100,000 words. This degree presents the opportunity to gain expertise in your area of interest while also honing a range of transferable skills. On graduating, you'll be very well prepared for specialist career paths both within academia and beyond. If you study full time, you'll usually complete your PhD in three years. You can fit your studies around other commitments by studying part time, in which case your PhD will take five years to complete. Whether you study full time or part time, you'll have the option to spend an additional year writing up, depending on how your research is progressing.<br><br>The Postcolonial Research Group (PRG) is an inclusive group of scholars, both established and emerging, whose work covers a wide range of topics relating to the globalised present as well as the colonial past. The group is the latest iteration in a long and rich history of postcolonial studies at the University of Leeds, beginning with the establishment of Commonwealth literary studies in the 1960s. Two of Africa's most distinguished writers, the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka and the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, are alumni of the School. Every two years, the School holds a Ravenscroft Lecture in honour of Arthur Ravenscroft, one of the founders of Commonwealth literary studies. We also host Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, one of the leading journals in the field, in conjunction with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. We have a vibrant community of postgraduate research students from across the world whose interests span cultural, historical and geographical contexts of the postcolonial field. We offer supervision across a broad range of specialisms and recent PhD projects have explored life writing after Empire, animist poetics in African literature and representations of ageing in Caribbean and Maori literary texts. Find out more about our postgraduate research offering on the research degree pages.