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PhD Supervision - Areas of Interest

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  Jenn Ashworth

  Fiction - the novel / short story collections. I am particularly interested in projects that engage with a 'sense of place' (including the no-place of cyberspace), first person fiction and the instability / unreliability this mode of story-telling engenders, that cross over with memoir and autobiographical writing, or use epistolary forms. I am also interested in LDS fiction and fiction that engages with religion and religious experience more generally.
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  Brian Baker

  20th century American literature,Science fiction, particularly post-World War 2, Masculinity in fiction and film, The city in fiction and film, especially London fictions, Popular and genre fiction.
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  Sally Bushell

  I am interested in receiving proposals from doctoral students in two main areas. My recent research has been concerned with place, space and poetry/ poetics - largely, but not exclusively, in relation to Romantic literature and the Lakes, so I would welcome studies in this area. I am also very interested in the study of textual process and the draft materials which precede the published work. I would therefore welcome projects on textual criticism, genetic criticism and the study of manuscripts for nineteenth or twentieth century literature where relevant. I have a secondary interest in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. More traditionally I am able to supervise projects on Romantic writers, particularly Wordsworth.
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  Jo Carruthers

  Englishness, national and diasporic identities; Judaism and Protestantism and literature; the Bible and Literature; place and space; Victorian literature.
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  Kamilla Elliott

  late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century literature and culture, especially interdisciplinary projects involving verbal and visual representations adaptations (especially but not limited to literature and film); theories of adaptation
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  Helen Farish

  Dr Farish would particularly welcome proposals on:Poetry and genderPoetry and autobiographyTwentieth century American poetry
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  Alison Findlay

  Alison would welcome proposals from potential doctoral students wishing to work on any aspect of Renaissance drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century These could include a wide range of projects, from (i) single-author studies e.g. Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Webster, Ford, Brome (ii) comparativestudies focussing on the work of two or more writers in a genre or topic (e..g. pastoral drama by Shakespeare, Fletcher and Lady Mary Worth, ideas of the soul in Shakespeare and Donne, domestic tragedy by Heywood, Ford, Midlleton and Elizabeth Cary) (iii) scholarly editions of plays from the periodby male or female dramatists(with the potential to developa proposal to the Revels Plays) (iv) aspects of theatre history from the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries up to the present In connection with her co-direction of the Quaker Project, she would also welcome doctoral proposals from those wishing to study aspects of early quaker writing (either scholarly editing or broader discursive analysis, especially with relation to location).
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  Michael Greaney

  Joseph Conrad Modern and Contemporary BritishFiction
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  George Green

  I am interested in the West and the Western, fantasy and science fiction including the graphic novel, anything Irish, and longer fiction in general.
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  Keith Hanley

  He is interested in interdisciplinary approaches, especially in literature, politics and the visual arts, but his principal fields to date have been Wordsworth and Ruskin, most recently in relation to religion, medicine, the Gothic, visual culture, and education. He would be keen to work with research students who shared his present focus on sacred geographies, Romantic anti-capitalism, cultural tourism and travel writing.
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  Zoe Lambert

  I am interested in supervising projects in short stories, linked short story collections, 'novels in stories' and 'in between' forms. I am interested in writing that has a political focus, as well as novels that merge genre and literary fiction.
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  Lindsey Moore

  I would be particularly interested in supervising PG research in the following areas: Arab women's writing in English, French or translation from Arabic;  South Asian and South Asian diaspora literatures; Postcolonial women's writing; Migrant, expatriate and travel writing.
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  Graham Mort

  Composition in fiction and poetry, especially with transcultural emphasis
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  Liz Oakley-Brown

  Liz would especially welcome research students working on the following aspects of sixteenth-century writing and culture: embodiment, outlaws, queenship, spatiality, travel, the cultural politics of translation, adaptation, historical phenomenology. Supervised Postgraduate Research: Charlotte McCool, 'The Politics and Poetics of Thomas Wyatt's "endless maze"' (2009-10, AHRC funded MRes); MA dissertation topics include 'Framing Pyramus and Thisbe in Middle English Literature'; 'Violent Death in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama' 'Shakespeare and Ruskin' (with Andy Tate) Current PhD Students Helen Davies 'Unravelling the 'Disabled' Body in Early Modern England' (2012- Peel Studentship) Rachel White 'Occult Networks in Early Modern England 1550-1650' (2012- AHRC funded)
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  Lynne Pearce

  Lynne Pearce welcomes applications from students working in the fields of: cultural theory, feminist theory, romance studies and mobilities research.
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  John Schad

  Victorian literature; Modernism; life-writing; place-writing; literary theory; critical-creative writing; religion and literature; experimental criticism.
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  Catherine Spooner

  Catherine has previously supervised two Ph.Ds to completion and currently has ten Ph.D students working on the following topics: - Religion, femininity and the Gothic; - The language of vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; - Masculinity and violence in contemporary Gothic fiction; - Affectivity, pain and the body in Gothic drama and film; - Folk devils in contemporary American Gothic; - Dandies in cult television, 1960s-present; - New media technologies and hauntings; - Gothic in contemporary children's fiction; - Young adult Gothic femininities in contemporary adaptations of fairy tale; - Gothic influences on Grunge music. Catherine also runs the Contemporary Gothic Reading Group, which meets once a fortnight to discuss texts chosen by the participants and is open to all postgraduates and staff across the university. She welcomes Ph.D applications related to any aspect of Gothic literature and culture, or to literature and fashion, and is happy to consider interdisciplinary proposals.
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  Andrew Tate

  I welcome proposals on contemporary fiction (British and American); literature and theology; Douglas Coupland; nineteenth-century religion.