In the RAE 2008, 95% of the work submitted by English - including work by colleagues in Communication, Film and Media - was judged to be of international standard, with 60% judged to be either 'internationally excellent' or 'world-leading'. Our research outputs were rated extremely highly, with 20.5% being judged 4*, making us the twelfth best performing department in the country, as measured by publications. We also had an excellent research environment score of 3*.

English - Creative Writing - Communication, Film and Media - English Language and Intercultural Communication

English

Dr Jeannette Baxter: 20th Century literature; modernism and 'new modernisms'; contemporary fiction; literature and the visual arts post 1900; literary surrealism; literature and memory; life-writing; holocaust literature; East-Central European literature.

Professsor Sarah Annes Brown: the influence of Ovid on English literature and the creative reception of Shakespeare's plays. Her most recent book is A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (MUP, 2012). She would welcome enquiries from students interested in these, or related, areas, and is currently researching the presence of classical texts in contemporary poetry and fiction, particularly science fiction.

Dr John Gardner: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century literature and culture; poetry; relationship between text and image; literature and politics; radicalism; Romantic period drama; literature and technology; nineteenth century newspapers and magazines.

Professor Eugene Giddens: Renaissance Drama, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, James Shirley, children's literature, Lewis Carroll, history of the book, textual editing, illustrations for children.

Professor Farah Mendlesohn: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fan Cultures and genre history.

Dr Leah Tether: publishing, digital media and medieval literature (particularly French).

Professor Val Purton: Victorian literature, in particular the works of Dickens and Tennyson, medieval, and Post-Colonial literature.

Dr Tory Young: modernism, contemporary fiction, theories of influence and intertextuality, the influence of modernism on contemporary fiction, intimacy in contemporary fiction, second-person narration in contemporary women's writing, narrative theory, gift theory.

Professor Rowland Wymer: Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, science fiction, literature and religion, literature and witchcraft, literature and suicide, critical theory, Derek Jarman, arthouse cinema.

Creative Writing

Dr Una McCormack writes science fiction, and TV tie-in novels based on long-running franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. She is interested in hearing from students with an interest in science fiction, particularly women's science fiction; and fanfiction/transformative works.

Laura Dietz's research includes work on creative writing and science, evolutionary and cognitive approaches to literature, reputation and legitimacy in post-print publishing environments, and the novel, especially innovative forms. She welcomes PhD enquiries on these and other topics in writing.

Dr Colette Paul is interested in supervising Creative Writing projects, critical or practice-led, on any aspect of the short story. My other research areas include: Creative Writing pedagogy, short story theory, and contemporary short story writers, with a particular focus on Alice Munro.

Communication Film and Media

Dr Sean Campbell's work focuses on issues of identity politics and popular culture. He would be keen to supervise research students in the following areas: popular music; popular culture; Irish studies; migration/ethnicity.

Dr Joss Hands would be keen to supervise research students in the following areas: Network politics and democracy; Protest, activism and social media; New uses of alternative and radical media; Digital Culture and society; Critical theory and philosophy of technology.

Dr Tanya Horeck would be keen to supervise research students in the following areas: Violence and cinema; crime films; documentary film and theory; gender and sexuality onscreen; popular cinema.

Dr Tina Kendall's work focuses on the materiality, ethics, and affects of extreme cinema, with a view to theorizing marginal, in-between, or unpleasurable aspects of cinematic spectatorship. She is particularly interested in supervising in the following areas: The 'new extremism' in contemporary cinema; 'Attention economy' and contemporary cinema; Theories of affect, visceral spectatorship, and unpleasure; 'New materialist' approaches to film

Dr Nina Lübbren welcomes research students in nineteenth-century European painting, including artists' colonies and academic painting, Bollywood cinema, and visual narrative.

Dr Patricia MacCormack is interested in supervising PhDs in the areas of Continental Philosophy (Deleuze, Irigaray, Serres, Guattari, Lyotard, Bataille and others), ethics, Sexuality, Gender, Feminism, Queer Theory, Animal Studies, Transgression, Film philosophy, horror film and spectatorship.

Dr Milla Tiainen would be very interested in supervising in the following areas: Sound and music in the media; new materialist and feminist media and cultural theory; theories of affect, the body and multisensory experience; performing arts and new or 'alternative' media.

Dr Simon Payne would be interested in supervising PhD projects concerning Avant-Garde Film; projects concerning cinema and the visual arts; and practice-based PhDs in the field of Film and Media Studies. His work can be seen on his personal website.

Sarah Gibson-Yates' research interests are in creative practice and theoretical investigations into the formation, use and perpetuation of narratives - particularly narratives of self - within social and other multi-modal forms of new media and to what extent does the way we use and employ narratives on a daily basis (both on and offline) affect the way we construct identity for ourselves and others?

English Language and Intercultural Communication

Dr Bettina Beinhoff's interests are in the areas of sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, phonetics and phonology, and specifically in the influence of social factors on second language acquisition processes, the negotiation of identities in cross-cultural and intercultural settings, the structure of non-native speaker accents of English and the interrelation of production and perception in acquiring second language speech.

Dr Melanie Bell is interested in the empirical study of language: experimental, corpus-based and computational approaches to phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics. My own research has focused on the syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics of compound words in English. Other interests include discourse in the professions, especially nursing, and the teaching of spoken English

Dr Andrzej Cirocki is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching. He publishes extensively in the area of ELT. His research interests are: ELT methodology, foreign language learning, constructivism in glottodidactics, learner autonomy, materials development, extensive reading, classroom research and teacher training. He welcomes proposals for PhD research projects in the above listed areas.

Sarah Fitt's research interests are in the areas of semantics, language change, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, discourse analysis, the influence of motivation and the age factor in the second language acquisition process as well as culture and identity and in ELT methodology, teacher training and foreign language learning.

Dr Alicia Peña-Calvo collaborates in research with the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) in the area of language acquisition and learning in bilinguals within a cognitive framework: She welcomes proposals in language acquisition, teaching and learning of languages, materials design and biligualism and multigualism.

Dr Sebastian Rasinger is an Applied Linguist who is interested in 'the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue' (Brumfit 1997: 91). His primary research interests are in the sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism, migration, and ethnic and cultural identities. He is also interested in the representation of minority groups more generally (linguistic, ethnic, religious, sexual) in public and media discourse, using methods derived from both corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, and is happy to consider proposals in these areas.

Professor Guido Rings has published within different areas of postcolonial literature and cinema, inter-culturalism and cultural studies. His research interests include the wider spectrum of 19th, 20th and 21st century Romance (French, Italian and Portuguese) as well as contemporary German literature and film. Proposals are welcome in postcolonial narratives, including novels on migration and migrant cinema and Hispanic, French, Italian and Portuguese literature, theatre and cinema.