Find a supervisor

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

A group of PhD students work at their computers
Off

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 EllisTwentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Dr Agnes LehoczkyModernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist Ágnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays.
Film
Dr Jonathan EllisTwentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Professor David ForrestBritish Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.
Language and Linguistics
Professor Susan FitzmauriceHistorical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes.
Professor Joanna GavinsStylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics
Dr Kook-Hee GilSyntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition.
Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-FernandezSecond/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing.
Professor Nigel HarwoodAcademic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design.
Dr Valerie HobbsEnglish for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Corpus Linguistics, Language Teacher Education, Reformed Christian Discourse.
Professor Jane HodsonLiterary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.
Dr Chris MontgomeryDialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes.
Professor Emma MooreIdentity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change.
Dr Jane MulderrigCritical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly.
Dr Robyn OrfitelliSyntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology
Dr Ranjan SenPhonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology.
Dr Richard Steadman-JonesHistory of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric.
Dr Gareth WalkerPhonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction.
Dr Sara WhiteleyStylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis
Dr Graham WilliamsHistorical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography.
Literature
Professor Frances BabbageContemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts
Dr Veronica BarnsleyPostcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature
Dr Anna BartonNineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture;
Nonsense Literature
Professor Joe BrayStylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature.
Dr Madeleine CallaghanRomantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.
Dr Logan CollignonCold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film.
Dr Katherine EburyModernism; literature and science; animal studies;  law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies.
Dr Jonathan EllisTwentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Professor David ForrestBritish Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.
Professor Joanna GavinsStylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry
Professor Jane HodsonLiterary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.
Dr Michael Kindellan20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy
Dr Hamish MathisonRobert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Professor Robert McKayTwentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies
Dr John MillerVictorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing
Dr Marcus NevittCheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant.
Professor Adam PietteWar Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry.
Dr Jonathan RaynerAustralasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films.
Dr Amber RegisVictorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies.
Dr Emma RhatiganEarly Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne
Dr Tom RutterEarly modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science.
Professor Cathy ShrankEarly Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism.
Professor Andrew SmithNineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science.
Dr Richard Steadman-JonesEmpire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality.
Dr Charlotte SteenbruggeOld English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama
Professor Brendan StoneLiterature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory.
Professor Rachel Van DuyvenbodeAfrican American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies
Dr Duco Van OostrumAmerican Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture.
Professor Sue ViceModern 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 WhiteleyStylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception
Professor Angela WrightRomanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing.
Theatre and Performance
Professor Frances BabbageContemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts
Dr Carmen LevickPhysical Theatre; Shakespeare in Performance; Contemporary European Theatre.
Dr Charlotte SteenbruggeMedieval 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.

Find a PhD

Search for PhD opportunities at Sheffield and be part of our world-leading research.