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 Diaspor'
- 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’
- Seerat Fatima - 'Humanizing 'Bharat Mata': Trauma and the Nationalist Project in South Asian Postcolonial Literature and Film'
- Susan Finlay – ‘The Director of Interpretation’
- 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’
- Eleanor Green – ‘Queering Intercourses in Beckett and Contemporary Theory’
- 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'
- 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'
- 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'
- Stian Kristensen – ‘Contemporary Responses to HIV and AIDS in Gay Male Literature’
- 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’
- 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’
- 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’
- Nell Osborne – ‘Towards a Theory of Writing: Gender, Subjectivity and Poetics in the Work of Ann Quin’
- Clare Patterson - 'The North is a Different Country'
- Gillian Redfern – ‘Back to the Future? Look North - It's Positively Medieval’
- 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’
- Jean-Marie Sherry – ‘Black Plumes and Nonsense: Victorian Responses to Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' and its Place in Victorian Grief Narratives and Mourning Culture’
- 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’’
- Eleanor Ward – ‘Writing about Disability Through Poetry - Tensions Between Social and Medical Understandings of the Body in Women's Contemporary Poetry’
- 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’