Postgraduate research

Postgraduate researchers in English Literature and Creative Writing pursue a wide range of different topics. Explore the research of some of our current PhD students.

Some of the PhD theses our students have recently completed:

• Gillian Redfern – ‘Back to the Future? Look North - It's Positively Medieval’
• Natalie Armitage - ‘The Voodoo Doll as Historical and Cultural Artefact’
• Daisy Black - 'Comic appearances of women as agents of spiritual instruction in late Medieval and Early Modern drama and art'
• Clara Bradbury-Rance - 'The Queer Lesbian Spaces of Contemporary Cinema'
• Lucy Burns – ‘Twentieth-Century Dream-Poetry’
• Edmund Chapman - ‘Afterlives: Benjamin, Derrida and literature in translation’
• Yulin Chen - 'The Invention of History: The Engagement and Construction of the Past by Lesbian Writers of the Late 20th Century'
• Stephen Gordon - 'The Theatre of Death: Ghosts, Perception and the Funerary Performance'
• Alexandra Lester-Makin - 'Embroidery and its context in the British Isles during the early medieval period (AD 450-1100)'
• Charlotte Haines – ‘The Nine Lives of Jeopardy Jones’
• Ben Moore - 'Invisible Architecture: Ideologies of Space in the Nineteenth-Century City'
• Valerie O'Riordan - 'Short Story Cycles in the Twenty-First Century: Time and Memory in the Work of Jennifer Egan, Davd Vann and Keith Ridgway'
• Tasneem Perry - 'Contemporary Resident Sri Lankan Writing: Inherent Hybridity, Enforced Essentialism'
• Arbaayah Ali Termizi - 'Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the Eighteenth Century'
• Burcu Alkan - 'Intellectual Heroes and Intellectuality in Social Realist Novel of Twentieth Century World Literature'
• M Letizia Alterno - 'A Narrative of India Beyond History: Anti-colonial Resistance and Post-colonial Negotiations in Raja Rao's Works'
• Fran Alverez - 'A comparative analysis of the palaeography of the manuscripts containing the bilingual version of the RSB written in England'
• Kate Ash - '"Off quhat nacioun art thow?": The Enigma of National Identity in the Middle Ages'
• Elizabeth Aucott - 'Interactivity in experimental fiction, hypertext and online gaming environment'
• Anita Auer - 'Language standardisation and prescription in the eighteenth century: the subjunctive in English and (Austrian) German'
• Yousef Awad - 'Cartographies of Arab Women Identities: Resistance, Diaspora, and Transnational Feminism'
• Alan Boyle - 'The Gaelic League, policies of the Irish government in 1922'
• Erinn Campbell - 'Rhizomes, Realms and Narrative Strategies in The Canterbury Tales'
• Alison Cort - 'Recent and current change in the modal verb'
• Kai-Yeung Fung - 'Fyodor Dostoevsky and the representation of epilepsy in the 19th century urbanity'
• Stella Halkyard - 'Wales and Welshness imagined and represented in visual culture, film and Welsh writing in English, 1936-53'
• Liam Haydon - '"I sing"? Narrative Techniques in Epic Poetry'
• Michael Hazzelby - 'Situation Critical: the Situationist International, Herbert Marcuse and Aesthetic Resistance to 1960s Consumer Culture'
• Matthew Helmers - 'How is the homosexual subject conceptualized?'
• Angela Lait - 'Work Trauma and Spiritual Recovery: The Search for Solace in Late-Capitalist Literature'
• Chia-Jung Lee - 'Between Reality and Reflection: Subjectivity as Self and Language as Other'
• Danielle Nunn-Weinberg - 'Clothing and Textile References in Sixteenth-Century Lancashire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire Wills and Inventories'
• Rebecca Pohl - 'Alternative Constructions of Space and Sexuality in Recent British Fiction: Sexing the Labyrinth'
• Hannah Priest - 'Monstrous Subjectivity in Middle English and Anglo-Norman Verse'
• Sabine Sharp – ‘Utopia and Dystopia: Reimagining Gender and Sexual Categories in Feminist Science Fiction’
• Adam White - 'The Literary Clare'.
• Jessica White - 'Women's Relationships in Post-War Britain'