The Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences is committed to be a pioneer in challenging established thinking and championing new ideas through high-quality research. We stress the real-world impact of our research through with international, national and local collaborations.
We are host to leading research within and between disciplines and are proud of the depth, breadth of our research. In REF2021 three of our eight subjects were top ten ranked.
We are committed to a research culture that stimulates innovation and excellence in a supportive and inclusive environment. We have a strong programme of activities to develop this further.
The Faculty is home to a diverse range of research centres. You can find out about some of them here.
CeMore initiated the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences, arts, humanities and sciences. It was the first such centre (founded in 2003 by John Urry and Mimi Sheller) and continues to be at the heart of this burgeoning global field.
CeMoRE (the Centre for Mobilities Research)
CASS is a Centre designed to bring a new method in the study of language – the corpus approach – to a range of social sciences.
In doing it provides an insight into the use and manipulation of language in society in a host of areas of pressing concern, including climate change, hate crime and education. By providing fresh perspectives in such problems, we are helping to develop new approaches to challenging practices such as hate speech both in terms of raising awareness and of informing policy makers and other stakeholders of how such language may be used to wound and offend.
CASS (the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science)
The Centre for Child and Family Justice Research is co-hosted by the School of Social Sciences and School of Law and works in close collaboration with the Data Science Institute. Critical to our work is collaboration with a range of national and international policy and practice organisations.
The Centre for War and Diplomacy provides the historical context and strategic analysis to inform understanding of today's geopolitical challenges. Based in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University, it promotes discussion across disciplines through research, teaching, consultancy and public events.
We are a globally recognised open and exploratory design-led research lab at Lancaster University, one of the top ten universities in the UK. Founded in 2006, we apply our exploratory research to address the complex challenges identified by industry, public and private sectors, national and international governments.
Established in 2014, the Regional Heritage Centre promotes and celebrates the rich social and cultural heritage of North West England by engaging with the regional community.
The Richardson Institute is the oldest peace and conflict research centre in the UK, based in the School of Global Affairs at Lancaster University.
The Wordsworth Centre was established in 1987 by Professor Keith Hanley. It is currently co-directed by Sally Bushell and Simon Bainbridge. Its primary aim is to promote interest in Wordsworth and the Lake District at an undergraduate, postgraduate and wider level. It is also interested in exploring wider questions about poetry and landscape, poetry and conservation, and in looking ahead from Romantic poetry to the present day.
Lancaster’s Digital Humanities Centre brings together internationally recognised centres of excellence in the spatial humanities, corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), and combines these with broad expertise across the digital humanities as a whole.
The Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Lancaster University Management School have a joint Research Ethics Committee (FHASS-LUMS REC) that oversees ethical review of proposed research in all Departments of both Faculties.
Research Ethics Committee
Lancaster University is home to a dynamic postgraduate community. All departments, institutes and centres in the Faculty have a lively, collaborative culture. Find out more about our postgraduate community and the specialist short courses we provide to support your studies.
Faculty postgraduate community
