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'
Afaf Al-Humaidi – ‘Cosmopolitanism and Islamic Feminism’
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'
Katharina Boeckenhoff - 'Border Crossings and Constructions of Sexuality in Modernist Fiction'
Sarah Bolger – ‘Frustrated Autonomy in Female Identity Formation: Irish Women Writers and Gendered Subordination in Twenty-First Century Fiction’
Christina Brennan – ‘Palimpsest and Protest: Genre, Activism and Resistance in Post-Iraq War Literatures’
Emily Burns – ‘Radicalism to Revolution: Tracing Trends of Change in the Poetry Columns of the Chartist Press (1838-1842)'
Lucy Burns – ‘Twentieth-Century Dream-Poetry’
Chad Campbell – ‘A Contemporary Poetry of Witness'
Julie Casanova – ‘Time, Space and Female Identity: The Aesthetics of Displacement in Victorian Women's Poetry’
Federica Coluzzi – ‘The Origins and Development of the English Hermeneutic Tradition and Hermeneutical Appropriations of Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia between the Mid-Victorian Age and Early Modernism (1860-1935)’
Kathryn Dixon – ‘A Feminist Study of Barbara Hepworth'
Imogen Durant – ‘The Progressive Verse of ASJ Tessimond and Dawson Jackson’
Susan Finlay – ‘The Director of Interpretation'
Zoe Gosling – ‘Mathematics and Modernism’
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'
Laura Hair – ‘The Construction of a Gendered Shame Complex in Edna O'Brien and John McGahern’
Lucy Hanks – ‘Mediated Expression: Self-Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Women's Manuscripts’
Louisa Hann – ‘AIDS, Neoliberalism and Political Theatre after Angels in America’
David Hartley – “Fly' and the Fantastic Acoustic: Narrative Constructions of ASD in Speculative Fiction and Film'
Tessa Harris – ‘The Winifred Stories'
David Hobbs – ‘Prison Writing & Post-War British Culture’
Joanna Jones – ‘D.H. Lawrence and the French Cultural and Literary Tradition: Presentations of Male Bisexuality and Androgyny’
Billy Kahora – ‘The Constitutions'
Rosemary Kay – ‘Fictionalising Real People in Creative Media and Literature: How Creating Characters based on Real People Influences the Quality and Validity of a Piece of Imaginative Fiction'
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’
Katherine Lowe – ‘Collaborative Printing in Early Modern England (1500-1550)’
Usma Malik – ‘Translating Memory Narratives'
Eva-Maria Mosser – ‘The Concept of Spatiality: A Contrastive Analysis of Travelogues and Captivity Narratives as forms of Travel Literature’
Nathaniel Ogle – ‘Narrative Parallax: A Novel and Critical Dissertation Exploring Multiple Narrative Perspectives'
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'
Izabela Rudnicka - 'New Transmedia Adaptations of Classic Literature'
Laura Ryan – ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance’
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’
William Simms – ‘Modern Obscenities: Modernist Texts in Court’
Philip Sulter – ‘Violence, Vulnerability, and Corporeality: Tracing a "Trans-Global" History of Affect in Selected Fictions of the War on Terror’
Laura Swift – ‘Monstrous Bodies and the Uncanny City: Early Capitalism in Ben Johnson's London’
Grace Timperley – ‘The Young Hero in the Middle English Inheritance Romance, 1250 – 1510’
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'
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’