Current PhD students

PhD students in English Literature and Creative Writing pursue a wide range of different topics, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the contemporary novel. Here's what some of our current students are researching.

• Yewande Adeniran - 'From Lagos to London: Reimagining the Black Body across the Nigerian Diaspora'
• Thameena Alam - 'Decolonalisation and South Asian Migration Narratives: Rethining Utopia, Dystopia and the Postcolonial'
• Meaghan Allen - ‘“I’ll Know Your Blood Slayer”: A Sanguinary Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Medieval Inheritance’.
• Callum Arthurs - 'The Chivalrous South: White Southern Masculinity'                          
• Liliana Bajger – ‘Spheres of Presence and Absence’
• Abigail Bleach – ‘Looking for Home at the End of the World: A Study of Belonging in Old English Environmental Literature’
• Sarah Bolger – ‘Frustrated Autonomy in Female Identity Formation: Irish Women Writers and Gendered Subordination in Twenty-First Century Fiction’
• Rebecca Brookes - 'Total Liberation?: Feminism, Socialism and Red Rag (1972-1980)'
• Emily Burns – ‘Radicalism to Revolution: Tracing Trends of Change in the Poetry Columns of the Chartist Press (1838-1842)’
• Chad Campbell – ‘A Contemporary Poetry of Witness’
• Elia Cugini - 'Cynical Sociality and Bad Kinship in Contemporary Audiofiction'
• Seerat Fatima - 'Humanizing 'Bharat Mata': Trauma and the Nationalist Project in South Asian Postcolonial Literature and Film'
• Andrew Gillon - 'Kings Among Men: Monarchical Masculinity in Early Modern Drama'
• Madeleine Gray – 'What a Heartfelt, Clever, Little Book! Postmillennial Women’s Creative Metacriticism and Gendered Modes of Critical Reception’
• Thomas Grocott - 'Cinema and the Encounter with the Anthropocene'
• Dyuti Gupta - 'Studying the Intricacies of Silence in Select Written and Oral Narratives of Nurses Who Served during World War One'
• Duncan Hamilton - "Peace, Law and Order!' The Traditional Radicalism of Thomas Cooper'
• Emily Harless – ‘It's Monstrously Religious: Medieval English Mysticism and the Containment of Monstrosity’
• Madeleine Harke - 'The Influence of Romantic Medievalism in the 1840s on Popular History Writing in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century'
• Ian Hartnell – ‘Queering the Flâneur: Masculinity, Urban Life and Negative Affect in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst’
• David Hobbs – ‘Prison Writing & Post-War British Culture’
• Alexander Hodgson - Representing the Recent Past: Post-Thatcher Fictions of the 80s'
• Joseph Hunter - 'Deep Lanes: A Novel/Trauma and Description in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996)'
• Natalie Ilsley – 'Migrant Women and Creative Arts: Building Resilience in Glasgow and Stoke-on-Trent'
• Rebecca Irvin - 'Natural and Unnatural Bodies: Contemporary Folklore and Embodied Female Experience'
• Yichun Jiang - 'The Book of Freedom/Literary Fictional Space and the Boundaries of Ethnography'
• Billy Kahora – ‘The Constitutions’
• Imani Khaled – ‘Influence of Eastern Travel Accounts on the Western Depiction of the New World’
• Susan Kinnear – ‘A Re-Balancing Act: Cultural Pioneering in New Zealand Literature, 1905 to 1969’
• Rachel Kirkwood – ‘Stand Still in the Light: 17th Century Quakers' Metaphorical Conceptualisation of the Interface between the Human and the Divine’
• Paul Knowles - 'Haunted Pasts and Possible Futures in Ecogeographical Short Fiction: Crisis and Chronotope'
• Samuel Lamplaugh - 'Theory Contra Prose: Responding to the Nostalgic Turn in Contemporary British Psychogeography'
• Lili Liu - Speaking the Unspeakable: Insidious Trauma and Lesbian Representation in Post-socialist China'
• Millicent Lovelock – ‘Qualifying Universality: The Influence of Collective Spaces on Women’s Literary Practice’
• Adam Lowe - 'TBC'
• George Lynch - 'Fantasies of Flight: Reimagining Publicity in Precarious Culture'
• Kimberley Mather - 'The boundaries of female masculinity in autobiography and life narratives'
• Zoe Miller – ‘The Female Form: Violated Metaphors of Modernism’
• Ellie Milne-Brown - 'Making New Worlds: Productive Connections and Nonsequential Futurity in Queer and Trans Experimental Speculative Fiction'
• Seren Morgan-Roberts - 'Transnationalising Early Modern Kingship: James VI and I's Basilikon Doron and Continental European political thought'
• Eva-Maria Mosser - ‘The Concept of Spatiality: A Contrastive Analysis of Travelogues and Captivity Narratives as forms of Travel Literature’
• Clare Patterson - 'The North is a Different Country'
• Natasha Pick - 'Reimagining the Ocean: Queer Time and Climate Crisis'
• Patrick Roberts - 'Cat & Fiddle: A Novel - The Ecogothic and the North of England in David Peace's Red Riding Quartet (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983) and Andrew Michael Hurley's Devil's Day and Starve Acre'
• Lydia Roy - 'Reading Vulnerability in the Novels of Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and Kathy Acker'
• Izabela Rudnicka - 'New Transmedia Adaptations of Classic Literature’
• José Saleiro Gomes – ‘Loss, Memory and Futurity in AIDS Poetry’
• Emma Shaw – ‘Pedestrian Resistance: Walking Women and Women Writers, 1907- 1951’
• James Slattery – ‘Taking Back Desire: Visions of Queerness and Capitalism in Time’
• Martin Thompson – ‘Prepare the Canons! Mary Ward and her Followers at the Vanguard of ‘Life-Editing’’
• Natalie Timms - 'Treading the Unpath: How Walking Literature Could Inform Critical Engagement with Text'
• Eleanor Ward - ‘Writing about Disability Through Poetry - Tensions Between Social and Medical Understandings of the Body in Women's Contemporary Poetry’
• Ellen Sophie Werner - 'Early Modern Cultures of Reading in North West England'
• Charlotte Wetton - "A working woman's topography: working class female poets' responses to land and labour in England 1730 - 1789' and `Gig"
• Hilary White – ‘Accommodating the Mess: New forms for the Novel in Experimental British Women's Fiction in the 1960s and '70s’
• Megan Wilson - 'Investigating the Lesbian Period Drama'
• Fay Winfield – ‘Postcolonial Readings of Empire in BBC Adaptations of Victorian Novels’
• Xinyu Xu - "In Illness this Make-Believe Ceases': The Embodied Experience of Illness and Modernist Writeres on the Boundaries of Empire'