English Studies, PhD, University of Nottingham

About English Studies, PhD - at University of Nottingham

Medieval Studies

Research areas include:

• Old English language and literature


• Middle English language and literature


• Older Scots literature


• Old Norse-Icelandic language and literature


• History of the English language


• Semantics and lexicography


• Onomastics (place- and personal names)


• Runology and epigraphy


• Viking Age studies


• Early medieval cultural studies (especially disease and gender)

Modern English Language

Research areas include:

• Stylistics and literary linguistics


• Literature and language teaching


• Cognitive approaches to literary text study


• Cross-cultural pragmatics


• International Englishes; language, culture and teacher development


• Language and identity; sociolinguistics


• Vocabulary description, acquisition and pedagogy


• Lexicology


• Spoken discourse study


• Corpus linguistics


• Grammar in spoken and written text (the School is home to the five-million word CANCODE corpus of spoken English)


• Thinking skills in English teaching


• Psycholinguistics


• Motivation, affect


• Language learning


• Bilingualism, language and gender.

Modern English Literature

Research areas include:

• Early Modern Literature, including drama, poetry, prose and contemporary adaptations and appropriations Eighteenth-Century literature


• Romantic literature (including women writers and Byron)


• 19th century literature (including Wilde)


• 20th century literature (including Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Coetzee, McEwan, Eliot and others)


• Colonial and postcolonial writing (particularly the literature of British India)


• Contemporary fiction


• Contemporary poetry


• Literary, regions and regionalism


• Literature, landscape and environment


• Theories and histories of literary criticism and aesthetics


• Theories and practices of textual editing (including histories of the book, genetic critics and electronic editions)

Drama and Performance

Research Areas Include:

• Practice-based as well as traditional PhD study


• Medieval, Renaissance, Restoration and 18th century drama, 19th and 20th century and contemporary theatre and performance

English Studies research opportunities

The School is particularly interested in opportunities for collaborative work with other Schools, for example the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, to provide supervision in other areas, including virtual performance. In addition, research opportunities are developed through the good relationship between the School and local professional theatres, including the Nottingham Playhouse and the Djanogly Theatre in the University's Lakeside Arts Centre.

Entry requirements for this course

Contact University of Nottingham to find course entry requirements.

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