Director’s Welcome

The Scottish Graduate School for Arts amd Humanities (SGSAH) launched in 2014. The world’s first national graduate school for the arts and humanities, it remains the only such graduate school in the world. SGSAH is a partnership of 16 HEIs, working together and sharing our resources to enrich the doctoral training environment and enhance the doctoral experience.

As a partnership organisation, our ambition has been to provide more than 1750 arts and humanities doctoral researchers across Scotland with unsurpassed access to the best expertise, resources, and training opportunities available across our membership and in collaboration with our industry partners.

Working together, we aim to nurture and inspire a future generation of enlightened leaders committed to generating and mobilising new insights across scholarly, professional and public communities. Now more than ever it is vital that our doctoral researchers are alert to their influence and impact as knowledge makers, co-creators and connectors and guided in their actions by what SGSAH stands for: Respect, Integrity, Creativity, and Collaboration.

As the founding Dean/Director of SGSAH, it has been a privilege to work with colleagues across Scotland to build an organisation that in a relatively short time has delivered significant impact on the landscape of doctoral training. The extent of partnership working across our 16 HEIs, from co-supervision to shared training to new doctoral peer networks is unprecedented. The enthusiasm and generosity of our industry supporters – from the Highlands & Islands to the Borders – has been crucial to our success. Across the span of just five years we have offered our doctoral researchers opportunities to undertake interdisciplinary research methods training facilitated by leading scholars across and beyond the arts and humanities; to take up exciting internships across the creative, heritage, and third sectors; to design innovative training in collaboration with peers across Scotland; and to access flagship skills development events including our annual Summer School.

In 2014, we launched SGSAH with an ambitious plan. We hope that our 5-Year Anniversary Review demonstrates that this plan – a paper document – has become a dynamic, living reality. We continue to be ambitious of the difference we can make to our doctoral researchers’ experiences, but also ambitious of the differences our highly skilled doctoral researchers can make across and beyond Scotland. SGSAH is, at its heart, an organisation that builds bridges.

SGSAH’s achievements thus far have been dependent on the generosity and ongoing support of our main funders, the Scottish Funding Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, our 16 Higher Education Institution members, our industry supporters and our academic and professional administrative colleagues. We are grateful for all the contributions – and quite often really hard graft – we receive on a daily basis.

Of course, without our doctoral researchers, SGSAH would not exist. So I end this introduction by thanking that community: for their dreams and aspirations, their insights and creativity, their care and compassion, their enthusiasm and engagement. Five years is enough time for someone to start and finish their PhD; enough time to witness them becoming a Dr and taking the next step in their post-doctoral journey, whatever that might be and wherever it might take them; enough time to celebrate the publication of their first monograph and smile inwardly at the news that they are supporting future doctoral researchers. As I said, it has been a privilege to be the founding Dean/ Director of SGSAH. Thank you.

We begin our next five years with ambitious plans for even more collaboration across members and partners, further enhancing the quality of the doctoral experience in Scotland. We hope you’ll join us on our continuing adventure.

Professor Dee Heddon, Director