Staff research interests

This page gives an overview of the research interests of staff offering postgraduate supervision; for further details, click on the highlighted names. For the research interests of other staff members, see our staff list for links to their personal homepages.

Dr Devorah Baum 's interests include the revival of religion, the influence of religion on contemporary literature and philosophy, the relationship between religion and violence, hermeneutics, critical theory, Jacques Derrida, Jewish literature and philosophy, and post-war American literature. She would be happy to supervise postgraduate work in these areas.

Dr Stephen Bending would be interested in supervising PhD or MRes dissertations in any area of the eighteenth century, but especially on garden history, travel and the country house, antiquarianism, and eighteenth-century fiction.

Dr Stephen Bygrave has published on the Enlightenment; Romanticism, especially poetry; literature and the history of education; rhetoric; and critical theory. He is prepared to offer supervision in all of these areas.

Dr Julie Campbell's publications include work on Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster, and Vladimir Nabokov. Her interests include modern and contemporary drama, especially British and American; American road novels and films; and modern and contemporary novels, including the work of Irvine Welsh, Annie Proulx, T. C. Boyle and Barbara Kingsolver. . She would be prepared to offer supervision in any of these areas.

Professor Emma Clery has research interests in the development of the novel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the novels of Jane Austen in particular; women’s writing in all genres; Gothic literature in all genres; gender history, especially representations of masculinity; political economy and literature; reception theory and the history of the book. She would be happy to offer research supervision in any of these areas and on other aspects of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Dr Gillian Dow has research interests in translation and reception history, including the reception of French literature in Britain and the cross-channel migration of ideas in the period 1780-1830. Her work to date has focused on European women writers and readers of that period. She has an interest in Jane Austen and contemporary literature and culture, and in the rise of the novel in the 'long eighteenth century' more generally. She would be happy to supervise projects in all of these areas.

Dr David Glover has published on Irish literature; American literature; gender studies; Victorian and Edwardian writing; early modernism; popular literature, including Gothic writing and crime fiction; and critical theory. He would welcome applications for postgraduate study in any of these areas.

Dr Mary Hammond teaches nineteenth-century literature and culture with a specialism in book history, and has particular research interests in the history of reading and the publication and circulation of Victorian and Edwardian popular texts. She welcomes applications for MPhil/PhD work on any aspect of Victorian and Edwardian print culture.

Dr Michael Hammond 's interests lie in the transnational nature of Hollywood from the silent period to the present day. This includes issues of globalization, reception, exhibition, genre, and the migration of production personnel. He would welcome PhD proposals in any of these areas

Professor Clare Hanson's current research is in the area of medicine and culture. She also has long-standing research interests in women's writing and the short story. She would particularly welcome research proposals in the field of medicine and culture.

Piers Hugill's research interests include 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics; rhythm, prosody and metrical studies; poetics of translation; Henri Meschonnic; and creative writing (poetry).

Dr Alice Hunt teaches Renaissance literature and culture. Her research focuses on drama, politics and religion from the early Tudor period to the seventeenth century, looking in particular at the impact of the Reformation on plays and ceremonies. She is the author of The Drama of Coronation: A Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England, and is currently working on a chapter on Marian literature for the forthcoming Handbook to Tudor Literature. She would welcome supervising research in sixteenth-century literature, drama, religion and politics, particularly topics focusing on the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I.

Aamer Hussein writes short fiction, novellas, literary criticism, and essays, and translates from Urdu and Italian. His research interests are in early and mid-twentieth century fiction in Italian, French, Spanish; Literatures of National Liberation and Independence; Middle and Far Eastern literatures in translation; Modern South Asian Literature; Islamic philosophy. He serves on the board of Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT).

Dr Stephanie Jones is interested in literary and legal narratives of the Indian Ocean, and more broadly in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature. She has worked on East African literatures, literatures of the South Asian diaspora and postcolonial theory. She is also interested in Australian literatures.

Professor Ros King would be interested in supervising PhD theses and MA/MRes dissertations in the following areas: music and poetry; language, sound and gesture; drama and performance; staging and theatre history; literature, religion and politics in sixteenth-century England; Shakespeare; Tudor interludes and other pre-Shakespearean drama; Jacobean drama; textual editing; the arts in education; and literature and material culture. As Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, she is committed to interdisciplinary research, and welcomes applications from suitably qualified students wishing to combine work in English and any of the other disciplines offered by the university.

Dr Gail McDonald welcomes applications for postgraduate study of twentieth-century writing, particularly in the period 1900-1950. She has a special (though not exclusive) interest in American culture and history of this period.

Professor John J. McGavin has published on medieval English and Scottish drama, Chaucer, and the history of rhetoric. He is the author of Chaucer and Dissimilarity and Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early-Modern Scotland, and is currently editing the Records of Early Drama in Scotland. He welcomes applications for postgraduate study of early Scottish and English drama and ceremony, and has a particular interest in the interpretation of primary records of drama, theatricality and play.

Dr Nicky Marsh welcomes applications for postgraduate study of contemporary British or American fiction and poetry. She has particular interests in: experimental or late modernist writing, gender and feminism, democracy and the public, literary economics.

Professor Peter Middleton's main interests are in modern and contemporary poetry, particularly poetry and performance, relations between different schools of contemporary American and UK poetry, and poetry’s position in wider cultural histories (ranging from visual art to cultural memory, and the sciences). For full details of the areas in which he would be happy to offer supervision, see his homepage.

 Professor Bella Millett has recently completed an edition of the thirteenth-century Middle English rule for women recluses, Ancrene Wisse, for the Early English Text Society, and is currently working on twelfth- and thirteenth-century preaching in England. Her main research interests are in medieval English literature, particularly devotional writings and the literature of preaching, and in the place of England in the 'Twelfth-century Renaissance' and 'Medieval Reformation'.

Dr Stephen Morton works on colonial states of emergency, Anglophone literatures from Canada and South Asia, postcolonial theory, critical theory, poetics, and politics, and visual culture. His publications include studies of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Salman Rushdie, and a co-edited collection of essays on Foucault and Terrorism.

Dr Marianne O'Doherty has interests in medieval travel writing and its reception; contacts between the Latin West and non-Christian cultures; medieval literary and imaginative engagements with the East; textual connections between Italy and England; medieval books, readers, and reading.

Karen Seymour has interests in Modernism, women's writing (English and American
late nineteenth and twentieth century), African American writing, contemporary fiction, and children's literature.

Dr Sujala Singh's research interests include post-colonial literatures and theory, popular culture, feminism and contemporary fiction. She has published on writers such as Salman Rushdie, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Amitav Ghosh, and is currently working on a book titled Postcolonial Children: Representing the Nation in South Asian Literature.

Dr Barry Sloan's principal research interests are in nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish writing, with a particular focus on the interactions between literature, history and religion.

Rebecca Smith's first three novels are published by Bloomsbury. She is currently working on a fourth. She teaches creative writing and welcomes proposals for PhDs based on fiction for adults or children.

Dr Lena Wahlgren-Smith's interests are in the field of Latin literature and include medieval letter-collections, editorial technique, multilingualism (both Roman and medieval), and neo-Latin pastoral poetry.

Professor Linda Ruth Williams teaches and researches on film, and is interested in all aspects of classical Hollywood and post-classical American cinema. She has research interests in popular genre cinema, censorship, stardom, gender and sexuality – please see her homepage for full details of recent publications and activities. She would welcome research proposals in any area of US or British cinema, particularly in the period since 1960.