International PhD Summer School
The Prato Academy is an international PhD summer school run jointly by Monash University and the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester. Each June, doctoral researchers from across disciplines gather at the Monash Prato Centre to socialise their research, build networks, and grow research confidence.
Twenty minutes from Florence, Prato pairs striped-marble cathedrals and Renaissance palazzi with one of Europe's most multicultural communities. It is the perfect setting to step outside the everyday routine of the PhD and see your research with fresh eyes.
In 2027 the Academy returns for its next edition — a week of workshops, walks, shared meals, and conversations that turn a city of makers into a campus. Applications open to doctoral researchers of all disciplines.
2023 to 2026, held in the open. Step inside any edition to walk its room of photographs.
Dr Vince Dziekan
Program Director
Monash University
Prof. A. Rossi
Program Co-Lead
Institute for Digital Culture, University of Leicester
Dr M. Innes
Presenter — Creative Technologies
Monash SensiLab
K. Berger
Presenter — Future Systems
Ars Electronica Futurelab
Exposure to radically unfamiliar ways of working — enough friction to make a conventional research habit visible.
A transnational, interdisciplinary cohort assembled so that connections outlast the week itself.
Confidence built by putting research in front of peers early, often, and without the safety of a finished argument.
A three-day workshop on practice-based research into, for and through digital culture — configured as three tracks (embodied knowledge, situational knowing, purposeful know-how) and moving from the Prato Centre out into Prato and Florence.
The second Academy took art as a way of thinking rather than a set of objects — studio work in Prato, field studies in Florence, and a week's reading of the Venice Biennale as a research site.
The third Academy treated performance as a research method — seminar work at the Prato Centre, a headphone soundwalk through the city's industrial periphery, and a day of live work inside Centro Pecci.
The fourth Academy asked how research communities are actually built — collaborative mapping and making at the Prato Centre, LEGO and drawing as thinking tools, and a day of collective reading at Centro Pecci.