The late Jason Arday claimed to be supervising 15 Ph.D. students. That figure comes from the September 2025 Carter-Ruck letter sent on his behalf. The same letter said he had “examined over 35 PhD theses as an external examiner.”
Rehana Awan’s 2025 Open University EdD thanks Alison Davies, Naomi Watson and Arday and explicitly calls all three her supervisors. Sasha Henriques’s January 2026 Cambridge Ph.D. repository record lists Jason Arday as an adviser, and the underlying thesis materials identify him as one of the Ph.D. supervisors.
Arday’s January 2020 CV listed only two Ph.D. supervision assignments, Christopher Jones at Durham as third supervisor and Sohil Alqazlan at Warwick as second supervisor. And The New York Times reported last month that when Cambridge appointed him in 2023, he had moved between universities without remaining at one long enough to oversee a normal three-year-plus doctorate from beginning to end. Cambridge nevertheless required a “proven successful track record” of Ph.D. supervision for the post.
I see two Arday-examined Ph.D. theses that are receiving substantive public scrutiny right now.
Damilola Folayan, Cambridge, 2025. Her own professional biography says Arday and Laura Serrant examined the thesis. Benjamin Ryan and Colin Wright published a detailed attack on its academic rigor on September 2, focusing on its three interviewees, autoethnographic material and “Critical Poetic Inquiry.”
Rebecca Loy, Liverpool, 2023. Liverpool’s repository confirms Searching for Critical Consciousness; in the Pursuit of Freedom. Loy herself publicly thanked Arday as her external examiner and said he gave her “overwhelmingly positive feedback.” Ryan began circulating the thesis today, September 4, highlighting the six personally known interviewees, including her aunt.
I just found two additional completed doctorates for which the graduates themselves identify Arday as an examiner: Bonita Corrie-Lunn’s Oxford Brookes Ph.D. on antisemitism in British football and Fezile Sibanda’s Sussex Ph.D., Echoes of Empire: A Collective Story of Black Brit-ish Academics Working in Higher Education Institutions in England.
