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School of Events, Tourism & Hospitality Management

Research

Update: A recent review of event management research over the past decade places the School’s UK Centre for Events Management (UKCEM) among the world’s leaders.


Dealing with the present - helping to shape the future

Our School conducts research to advance knowledge and inspire new perspectives on responsible leadership of events, tourism and hospitality organisations.  We seek to gain impact via our teaching, research and collaborative working with our stakeholders.  We do this through a variety of approaches including communication of our work in top journals and industry sponsored PhD Impact Bursaries.

At a time of international crisis, we are concerned to focus our efforts initially on the challenges of recovery.  In addition, we aspire to act as a positive influence on the kind of tourism, events and hospitality sectors that subsequently emerge in the new normal following COVID-19.  As a result, our research will increasingly coalesce around the following themes:

  • Recovery and the future development of tourism and events - This theme encompasses the economics of tourism and events, public policy interventions and stakeholder recovery, and the potential of AI and other technologies to manage the sector
  • Responsible tourism, events and sustainable development - This theme encompasses sustainable environmental management, response to climate change, shaping responsible consumer behaviour and questions of social justice associated with events and tourism
  • Effective management of events, tourism and hospitality organisations - This encompasses key management challenges facing public, private and not-for-profit organisations
Post Covid-19: Policy and Practice Reflections

Academic staff in the School have been considering what their research and engagement with practitioners might contribute to contemporary debates on events, tourism and hospitality management policy and practice.  Several of these are captured in a series of short videos.  They reflect individual academic interests but also a wealth of experience from working with international agencies such as the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), the OECD Tourism Secretariat and the International Conference and Convention Association (ICCA) to national and regional agencies and private companies.  Naturally, the videos do not provide comprehensive recommendations. Instead, their purpose is to stimulate ways of thinking about the problems that events, tourism and hospitality organisations face at present.

 

We seek to create an intellectually stimulating and collegiate research environment that is led by Subject Heads and a strong Professoriate.  We also benefit significantly from the involvement of visiting professors, visiting fellows and visiting scholars.  We are currently reviewing the Visiting Scholar Programme.  Our internationally diverse team contains award winning researchers, from a UNWTO Ulysses Medal holder to various national PhD student prize winners. Working alongside our academic staff we have a dynamic community of more than twenty PhD students.

We encourage our researchers to find novel ways of working as part of local, national and international teams and to develop strategic relationships with key stakeholders.  In our view, insights of greatest social and public value are likely to emerge from innovative inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches to projects that bring together diverse interests.

The importance of rigour inflects our research culture. The standard of our work was officially recognised in the last national assessment of research, The Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014). We were ranked second out of more than 50 universities in Unit 26: Sport and Exercise Sciences, Leisure and Tourism for research power, a measure of quality and volume.

More recently, the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities placed us 42nd in the world in its subject ranking for Hospitality Management and Tourism

Our research has been funded by a variety of international, national and local organisations. In recent years, these have been as diverse as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), employer associations and NGOs in various parts of the world.

Please contact us if you would be interested to learn more about research collaboration.

UK Centre for Events Management

Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Management

We'd Like to Invite visiting scholars to come and work with us. it's a great opportunity to share knowledge.

Find out more

Research Students

Alistair Palferman
Alistair Palferman
Alistair is investigating absorptive capacity in the event sector. This involves understanding the underlying processes of external knowledge absorption and how it is transformed and exploited as innovations which can ultimately enhance competitive advantage
Conor McTiernan
Conor McTiernan
Conor’s research examines the role of trust in inter-organisational knowledge transfer within Irish tourism and event networks.
Emmy Yeung
Emmy Yeung
Emmy's PhD research focuses on the connections between authenticity issues and the use of augmented reality in cultural heritage contexts.
Jase Wilson
Jase Wilson
Jase has a deep passion for photography, mountaineering and climbing, and very adventurous travel. Jase will be teaching modules in the areas of responsible tourism. His research interests include; Tourism development, tourism in the mountains, Himalayan Tourism, dark tourism.
Xavier Font

“Being able to do my PhD at Leeds Beckett by publication was excellent - it gave me the flexibility I needed to combine my full time work with getting a qualification, and I was able to use my previous publications towards it. Leeds Beckett had staff that had experience on this format of PhD and were able to advise me well on how to prepare a credible PhD submission."

Xavier Font

PhD by published work