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.

• Thameena Alam - 'Decolonalisation and South Asian Migration Narratives: Rethining Utopia, Dystopia and the Postcolonial'
• Meaghan Allen - ‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me¿/'The hardest thing in this world is to live in it¿: The Female Martyr-Topos in Medieval Hagiography and Contemporary Gothic/Horror’.
• Luam Anderson - ‘An irreverent Present: Techniques in Contemporary Fiction Interfacing with the Past’.
• Callum Arthurs - 'The Chivalrous South: White Southern Masculinity'        
• Joseph Burton - ‘With Shape and Purpose: Sensing the Presence and Absence of Tool-use in Early English Medieval Literature and Material Culture’.
• Elia Cugini - 'Cynical Sociality and Bad Kinship in Contemporary Audiofiction'
• Grace Dutt - ‘Paper Empire: Literature, the Travelers Cheque, and the Redescription of American Imperialism, 1891-1958’.
• Seerat Fatima - 'Humanizing 'Bharat Mata': Trauma and the Nationalist Project in South Asian Postcolonial Literature and Film'
• 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 – ‘Re-visioning Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe as Anachronic Text in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries’
• Sgianach Hindhaugh - ‘Publishing the Post-Colonial: 1960s-present’.
• 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)'
• Heena Hussain – 'Liberal Imperialism in post 9/11 Hollywood fantasy films'
• 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'
• Imani Khaled – ‘From Monsters to Accessories: Collecting Human Curiosities in Early Modern Europe’
• Paul Knowles - 'Haunted pasts and Possible futures in Ecogeograpical short fiction: Crisis and Chronotope.'
• Samuel Lamplaugh - 'Theory Contra Prose: Responding to the Nostalgic Turn in Contemporary British Psychogeography'
• Thomas Lee - TBC
• Christine Lehnen - ‘A Trojan War for the Twenty-First Century: Mythos, Violence, and Affect’
• Millicent Lovelock – ‘Why were we all writing like this now?¿ Social Media Feminism, Genre, and Contemporary Women¿s Fiction and Television’
• 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 – ‘Modernist Metaphors of Sexual Violence’
• 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'
• Magdalena Müllerová - ‘African American Women and the Frontier Myth in the 20th Century’
• Teodora Noszkay - ‘Zones of Obscurity: Representations of Social and Vegetal Reproduction under Patriarchal Capitalism’
• Clare Patterson - 'The North is a Different Country'
• Natasha Pick - 'Reimagining the Ocean: Queer Time and Climate Crisis’
• Daniel Pope - ‘Critical Irrealism in 21st Century LIterature’
• 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’
• Naomi Sutton - ‘How Hollywood Became the Bad Guy: The role of the Hollywood Left in the Politics of the Establishment (1980-1989)’
• Samson Thoburn - ‘New Negroes in Detroit: Boomtown Black Identity and the Trials of Ossian Sweet’
• Gwynneth Thomas - ‘An Historical Overview of Postcolonial Literary Studies in Australia from 1970 to the present’
• Natalie Timms - 'Treading the Unpath: How Walking Literature Could Inform Critical Engagement with Text'
• Amy Todd -  ‘Total Liberation: Feminism, Socialism and Red Rag’
• Barnaby Walsh -  ‘Self Portrait as Someone Else/Transness in 1920-1960s Fiction’
• 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"
• Jennifer White – ‘Threading Experience Through Imaginative Material': Working Class Women and Experimental Forms, 1964-present’
• 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'