English Literature, Language and Creative Writing – (Ph.D.)

PhD supervision draws upon our established areas of research expertise which are:

• American literature and culture: fiction and poetry from the nineteenth century to the present; early and contemporary film; modernism and postmodernism; globalisation

• Children’s literature: from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries

• Colonial and postcolonial studies: South Asian, African and Caribbean, and diasporic writing during and after empire; postcolonial theory

• Digital media: sensor-based interactivity with media; mobile media; user experience and ethnographic study of technology; new media installation and exhibition; public screens; physical computing; exhibition design

• Eighteenth-century and Romantic studies: Trans-Atlantic and early American literature; women’s writing; eighteenth-century and Romantic fiction, especially Austen, Blake and Scott; political writing of the 1790s; children’s literature; second-generation Romanticism, especially Shelley

• Film and television: national and transnational cinemas (Hollywood, British, French, Spanish, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Chinese); stardom; gender; popular genres; the origins of cinema, audiences and documentary film

• Modernism: European, American and African-American modernisms; haptic modernism; modernism and the archive; Virginia Woolf; First World War

• Modern and contemporary British writing: postwar British fiction; black and British Asian literature; postwar British film; detective fiction; psychoanalysis, memory and trauma theory; Holocaust literature; war and culture

• Nineteenth-century and Victorian studies: the nineteenth-century novel; British decadence; childhood and children's literature; transatlantic literature and politics; periodical publishing; women's writing; early nineteenth-century poetry; republicanism, radicalism and literature

• Performance and film

• Poetry

• Renaissance and early modern: Tudor literature; rhetoric; the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; Civil War writing; forms of life-writing; manuscript studies and the history of the book; women’s writing; literature and colonialism

• Script

• Prose