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.

• Fatema Abdoolcarim – '"Hum": A Film about Loss and the Longing to Return’
• Yewande Adeniran- 'From Lagos to London: Reimagining the Black Body across the Nigerian Diaspor'                           
• Liliana Bajger – ‘Spheres of Presence and Absence’
• Alexandra Bennett – ‘Modernist Afterlives: Temporality and Experimentation’
• 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’
• 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’
• Mrs Johanna De Vree - 'From Sight to Vision: Tracing the Development of the Sensory Image from Late-Medieval to Early Modern English Devotional Lyric'
• Imogen Durant – ‘The Progressive Verse of ASJ Tessimond and Dawson Jackson’
• Susan Finlay – ‘The Director of Interpretation’
• 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’
• James Green – ‘Reading Medievally in 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegans Wake”
• Selina Guinness – ‘The Ethics of Countenancing Self and Other in W.B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen’
• Charlotte Haines – ‘The Nine Lives of Jeopardy Jones’
• Lucy Hanks – ‘Mediated Expression: Self-Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Women's Manuscripts’
• Louisa Hann – ‘AIDS, Neoliberalism and Political Theatre after Angels in America’
• Emily Harless – ‘It's Monstrously Religious: Medieval English Mysticism and the Containment of Monstrosity’
• David Hartley – “Fly' and the Fantastic Acoustic: Narrative Constructions of ASD in Speculative Fiction and Film’
• Ian Hartnell – ‘Queering the Flâneur: Masculinity, Urban Life and Negative Affect in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst’
• Tessa Harris – ‘The Winifred Stories’
• David Hobbs – ‘Prison Writing & Post-War British Culture’
• Natalie Ilsley – 'Migrant Women and Creative Arts: Building Resilience in Glasgow and Stoke-on-Trent'
• Joanna Jones – ‘D.H. Lawrence and the French Cultural and Literary Tradition: Presentations of Male Bisexuality and Androgyny’
• 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’
• 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’
• Pippin Major - 'Fish Quarry Deep, a novel, and 'Real Weirdness: New Weird and Anxiety About Reality Age of the Internet"
• Kimberley Mather - 'The boundaries of female masculinity in autobiography and life narratives'
• Zoe Miller – ‘The Female Form: Violated Metaphors of Modernism’
• 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’
• Gillian Redfern – ‘Back to the Future? Look North - It's Positively Medieval’
• Joseph Reed – ‘Ekphrasis and the Economic Order. Wealth, Power and Art in the Work of Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner, Tom McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq’
• 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'
• Izabela Rudnicka - 'New Transmedia Adaptations of Classic Literature’
• José Saleiro Gomes – ‘Loss, Memory and Futurity in AIDS Poetry’
• Sabine Sharp – ‘Utopia and Dystopia: Reimagining Gender and Sexual Categories in Feminist Science Fiction’
• 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’
• Philip Sulter – ‘Violence, Vulnerability, and Corporeality: Tracing a "Trans-Global" History of Effect in Selected Fictions of the War on Terror’
• 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’
• Stephanie Warner – ‘Anxiety, Melancholy and the Experimental Lyric’
• Charlotte Wetton - "A working woman's topography: working class female poets' responses to land and labour in England 1730 - 1789' and `Gig"
• Mariah Whelan – ‘This Continuous Performance’
• Hilary White – ‘Accommodating the Mess: New forms for the Novel in Experimental British Women's Fiction in the 1960s and '70s’
• Fay Winfield – ‘Postcolonial Readings of Empire in BBC Adaptations of Victorian Novels’