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'