Leeds arts research centre

Bringing together creative practitioners and academics across Leeds Beckett University.
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The Leeds Arts Research Centre (LARC) at Leeds Beckett University brings together researchers with shared interests and ambitions across broad areas of creativity and professional practice within the arts and popular culture. Specific areas covered include Art and Design, Music, Drama, Dance, Architecture, Creative Technologies, Film, and Performing Arts. 

The majority of staff currently work within the Leeds School of Arts. 

The centre formally launched in the autumn of 2017, indicating a recognition by our university of the potential for substantial research development and growth within the area. The centre has a strong core of both experienced and early career researchers and provides a visible, outward-facing ‘research home’ and identity for these staff and their research students. 

The work being undertaken encompasses more traditional academic outputs such as journal articles and monographs alongside exciting and innovative practice-based research. Much of the latter is high impact, engaging with external bodies and individuals to produce work which challenges and changes lives.

The centre is led by Simon Morris, Professor of Art, and Robert Shail, Professor of Film. 

Professor Morris's own research centres on radical artistic reworkings of text as material object, whilst Professor Shail's work focuses on masculinity in British cinema and children's films. For them both, LARC has been a labour of love.

Spatial Practices

Spatial practice is often approached from within tight disciplinary and professional boundaries.

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach by integrating knowledge and methods from multiple fields.

You’ll draw on architecture, interior, and landscape, as well as: art, performance, choreography, history, public policy, criminology, health, and creative technology, to critically interrogate the ways in which space is thought, represented, produced, and used. 

LARC is the home to 143 academics and their research. What matters to us at Leeds Beckett University is not so much the work we do individually but what our research allows others to do: its impact on local, national and international communities. We are a recognised centre of excellence for practice as research in the arts that make a positive difference to the lives of others.

Study with us

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Study for a research degree at Leeds Beckett and you'll join a thriving academic community in an inspiring and supportive environment.

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