Find a supervisor
The first step in the application process is to find a supervisor with expertise in your specific research area.

The School of English hosts a broad spectrum of researchers with expertise across linguistics, literature, creative writing and film, literary linguistics, theatre, and the intersections between these fields.
Find a PhD supervisor by subject area
- Creative Writing
Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema Dr Agnes Lehoczky Modernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist Ágnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays. - Film
Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema Professor David Forrest British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place. - Language and Linguistics
Professor Susan Fitzmaurice Historical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes. Professor Joanna Gavins Stylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics Dr Kook-Hee Gil Syntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition. Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-Fernandez Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing. Professor Nigel Harwood Academic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design. Dr Valerie Hobbs English for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Corpus Linguistics, Language Teacher Education, Reformed Christian Discourse. Professor Jane Hodson Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film. Dr Chris Montgomery Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes. Professor Emma Moore Identity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change. Dr Jane Mulderrig Critical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly. Dr Robyn Orfitelli Syntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology Dr Ranjan Sen Phonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology. Dr Richard Steadman-Jones History of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric. Dr Gareth Walker Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction. Dr Sara Whiteley Stylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis Dr Graham Williams Historical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography. - Literature
Professor Frances Babbage Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts Dr Veronica Barnsley Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature Dr Anna Barton Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture;
Nonsense LiteratureProfessor Joe Bray Stylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature. Dr Madeleine Callaghan Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry. Dr Logan Collignon Cold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film. Dr Katherine Ebury Modernism; literature and science; animal studies; law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies. Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema Professor David Forrest British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place. Professor Joanna Gavins Stylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry Professor Jane Hodson Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film. Dr Michael Kindellan 20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy Dr Hamish Mathison Robert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature. Professor Robert McKay Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies Dr John Miller Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing Dr Marcus Nevitt Cheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant. Professor Adam Piette War Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry. Dr Jonathan Rayner Australasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films. Dr Amber Regis Victorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies. Dr Emma Rhatigan Early Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne Dr Tom Rutter Early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science. Professor Cathy Shrank Early Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism. Professor Andrew Smith Nineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science. Dr Richard Steadman-Jones Empire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality. Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge Old English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama Professor Brendan Stone Literature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory. Professor Rachel Van Duyvenbode African American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies Dr Duco Van Oostrum American Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture. Professor Sue Vice Modern and Contemporary Literature; Holocaust Studies; Film. Dr Meredith Warren Bible and Literature/culture; Classics and Literature/culture; Gospel of John; Revelation; Early Judaism; Senses in Antiquity
Dr Sara Whiteley Stylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception Professor Angela Wright Romanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing. - Theatre and Performance
Professor Frances Babbage Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts Dr Carmen Levick Physical Theatre; Shakespeare in Performance; Contemporary European Theatre. Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge Medieval and sixteenth-century English, Dutch, and French drama
Next steps
Once you have found a suitable supervisor, please email them to gauge their interest and availability to supervise your project. You should provide information on your proposed research, to make sure that it is in an area they are able to supervise.
After that, your next step is to work on your PhD Supporting Statement and Research Proposal.
At any stage, you can email englishpgr@sheffield.ac.uk for information about the application process.
Information about supervision
PhD students in the School of English have two supervisors and a personal tutor.
- Primary supervisor
The primary supervisor provides academic guidance on all facets of the research. They supervise your work, offering constructive and timely feedback, and guide the project to help you to complete it within the tuition fee paying period. They will also help you to engage with the wider research community, to build peer support and to present or publish your work.
- Secondary supervisor
The secondary supervisor provides guidance, feedback and support on your academic progress, with a particular focus on key milestones to support timely submission. They also take the lead in supporting your researcher/professional development.
- Personal tutor
The personal tutor provides pastoral advice and referral to specialist support. They also support students in relation to matters such as Leave of Absence applications, Change of Candidature, and other major pastoral issues.
- Supervision meetings
For full-time research students, we expect supervisory meetings to be held around once a month. Allowing for holidays, this means 10-12 supervisory sessions per year. For part-time students, we would expect 5-6 meetings per year.