Tomorrow's leading academic or a professional with an expertise in East Asia. Either way, Sheffield will help you to realise your ambition as a full-time, part-time, or remote location PhD student. Our social science research training, quality research opportunities, and high standards of physical infrastructure, including online access to vernacular newspapers and databases, attracts a range of outstanding students annually. But what is unrivalled is the quality of the teaching and research environment the Sheffield team provides. It is what led the Higher Educational Funding Council for England to designate our taught programmes as 'excellent' - the highest accolade given - and our successful bid with our counterpart at the University of Leeds to become the country's Centre of Excellence on East Asia, the White Rose East Asia Centre. The Sheffield degree is a three-year research degree of normal registration. As such, it is particularly flexible, with classroom work for in-house students tailored to the needs of the student for research as well as transferable skills. We are recognized as an outlet for scholarships offered by the Economic and Social Science Research Council and the Arts and Humanities ‘block grant’ scheme. With funding from the ESRC and the AHRC, other scholarships, or private funds, some of our students enter the job market with a Ph.D. after only three years of study.