Postgraduate research

Postgraduate researchers in English Literature and Creative Writing pursue a wide range of different topics. Explore the research of some of our current PhD students.

Some of the PhD theses our students have recently completed:

• Gillian Redfern – ‘Back to the future? Look north - it's positively medieval’
• Natalie Armitage - ‘The voodoo doll as historical and cultural artefact’
• Daisy Black - 'Comic appearances of women as agents of spiritual instruction in late Medieval and Early Modern drama and art'
• Clara Bradbury-Rance - 'The queer lesbian spaces of contemporary cinema'
• Lucy Burns – ‘Twentieth-century dream-poetry’
• Edmund Chapman - ‘Afterlives: Benjamin, Derrida and literature in translation’
• Yulin Chen - 'The invention of history: The engagement and construction of the past by lesbian writers of the late 20th century'
• Stephen Gordon - 'The theatre of death: Ghosts, perception and the funerary performance'
• Alexandra Lester-Makin - 'Embroidery and its context in the British Isles during the early medieval period (AD 450-1100)'
• Charlotte Haines – ‘The nine lives of Jeopardy Jones’
• Ben Moore - 'Invisible architecture: Ideologies of space in the nineteenth-century city'
• Valerie O'Riordan - 'Short story cycles in the twenty-first century: Time and memory in the work of Jennifer Egan, Davd Vann and Keith Ridgway'
• Tasneem Perry - 'Contemporary resident Sri Lankan writing: Inherent hybridity, enforced essentialism'
• Arbaayah Ali Termizi - 'Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the eighteenth century'
• Burcu Alkan - 'Intellectual heroes and intellectuality in social realist novel of twentieth century world literature'
• M Letizia Alterno - 'A narrative of India beyond history: Anti-colonial resistance and post-colonial negotiations in Raja Rao's works'
• Fran Alverez - 'A comparative analysis of the palaeography of the manuscripts containing the bilingual version of the RSB written in England'
• Kate Ash - '"Off quhat nacioun art thow?": The enigma of national identity in the middle ages'
• Elizabeth Aucott - 'Interactivity in experimental fiction, hypertext and online gaming environment'
• Anita Auer - 'Language standardisation and prescription in the eighteenth century: the subjunctive in English and (Austrian) German'
• Yousef Awad - 'Cartographies of Arab women identities: Resistance, diaspora, and transnational feminism'
• Alan Boyle - 'The Gaelic League, policies of the Irish government in 1922'
• Erinn Campbell - 'Rhizomes, realms and narrative strategies in The Canterbury Tales'
• Alison Cort - 'Recent and current change in the modal verb'
• Kai-Yeung Fung - 'Fyodor Dostoevsky and the representation of epilepsy in the 19th century urbanity'
• Stella Halkyard - 'Wales and Welshness imagined and represented in visual culture, film and Welsh writing in English, 1936-53'
• Liam Haydon - '"I sing"? Narrative techniques in epic poetry'
• Michael Hazzelby - 'Situation critical: The situationist international, Herbert Marcuse and aesthetic resistance to 1960s consumer culture'
• Matthew Helmers - 'How is the homosexual subject conceptualized?'
• Angela Lait - 'Work trauma and spiritual recovery: The search for solace in late-capitalist literature'
• Chia-Jung Lee - 'Between reality and reflection: Subjectivity as self and language as other'
• Danielle Nunn-Weinberg - 'Clothing and textile references in sixteenth-century Lancashire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire wills and Inventories'
• Rebecca Pohl - 'Alternative constructions of space and sexuality in recent British fiction: Sexing the labyrinth'
• Hannah Priest - 'Monstrous subjectivity in Middle English and Anglo-Norman verse'
• Sabine Sharp – ‘Utopia and dystopia: Reimagining gender and sexual categories in feminist science fiction’
• Adam White - 'The literary Clare'.
• Jessica White - 'Women's relationships in post-war Britain'