My primary research interests are in colonial and postcolonial literatures from India and Africa, with a particular focus on alternative and global modernisms and writing interested in children, youth and development.

I am currently completing the manuscript of my first monograph, Postcolonial Children: Infancy and Development in South Asian Fiction in English. The book considers the figure of the child in fiction that deals with anti-colonial activism, Indian independence and the postcolonial state, looking at writers including Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Attia Hosain, Shashi Deshpande and Nadeem Aslam.

I am also beginning a new project called ‘Youth and Health in Postcolonial Literatures: India, Nigeria, South Africa’, a comparative analysis of the concept of youth that seeks to make connections between Postcolonial Studies and the growing field of Medical Humanities.

I am a founding member of The Northern Postcolonial Network, which supports knowledge exchange and networking amongst scholars working on postcolonial topics across the north of England and organisations and community groups with intersecting interests. We build sustainable relationships with groups and communities through research, public engagement and creative workshops in which we can explore issues including migration, asylum, human rights and inclusive pedagogy. Details of our past events and future activities can be found here www.northernpostcolonialnetwork.com

I am a member of The British Association of Modernist Studies, the Modernist Studies Association and the Postcolonial Studies Association.

Research interests

I welcome research students working in any area of literary stylistics (especially narrative style and point of view), as well as those working on any aspect of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literature and culture (especially the novel from 1740 to 1818).

At Sheffield I have supervised PhDs on the following topics: Jane Austen´s use of narrated perception, the autobiographical fiction of the Brontes, the narrative style of Cormac McCarthy and 19th Century Adaptations of Shakespeare.

Research interests

My research interests are the Cold War and Cold War weapons systems; genre fiction/film; theories of technology; the poetics of space.

My first book, titled Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2014. The project maps the technological unconscious of the American Cold War and is concerned with identifying the recurring figures and fantasies of the conflict: the dome or parabola as sheltering techno-form; the fictions of total security adapting to constantly changing targeting strategies; gadget love; closed, freezing worlds. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow serves as the book’s recurring focal point; his prose technique inspires and exemplifies the study’s attention to secret affinities.

Research interests

Most of my research has been on the twentieth-century poet, Elizabeth Bishop. My first book, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Ashgate) was published in 2006. Since then, I have published essays on Bishop’s love poems, on her epistolary relationship with the poet Anne Stevenson, and on the reception of her uncollected and unpublished poems. I have recently co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop with Professor Angus Cleghorn (Seneca College). The book, composed of 12 specially commissioned essays by leading Bishop scholars, was published in hardback and paperback in 2014.

In addition to scholarship on Bishop, I have also published articles on Amy Clampitt, Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath and Jeanette Winterson, among others. An abiding interest in film is represented by recent publications on Woody Allen's reputation in the 1990s and the depiction of the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro's film, Pan's Labyrinth.

I welcome applications from potential PhD students in all areas of my research interests, particularly American and British poetry of the modern and contemporary periods and the art of letter writing and its relationship to other literary genres. I am currently supervising four PhD students, on Elizabeth Bishop, William Burroughs, Cold War fiction and twentieth-century letter writing. 

Research interests

My main research area is British social realist cinema, with a particular interest in the functions of space, place and landscape in realist texts. I have also published work on British television drama, the British New Wave and contemporary British cinema.

My work is currently focussed on the film and television writer and novelist Barry Hines, perhaps best known of the novelA Kestrel for a Knave (1968) and the TV play Threads (1984). Together with Professor Sue Vice, I am developing a delivering a number of research and public engagement projects around Hines and working-class film, television and literature more broadly.

Research interests

My research interests lie at the interface of language and literature, and I am interested in the way in which style is contested at an ideological level. As a linguist I am particularly concerned with the Later Modern English and historical sociolinguistics. As a literary scholar my specialism lies in prose of the Romantic period.

I welcome PhD applicants who wish to undertake interdisciplinary work in language and literature, particularly with reference to dialect representation, historical stylistics, and issues of power, politics and gender.

My current critical research focusses on death rituals, weird landscapes, and folk horror. I am co-investigator of a project on burial shrouds at Coffin Works museum that considers the symbiotic relation between bodies and landscapes.

My first novel The Museum of Atheism (Salt, 2012) was an experimental crime novel about a malevolent forest.

My doctoral research explored bioluminescence and crime scene investigations, and resulted in a prose poetry collection, The Luminol Reels (Calamari Archive, 2014), and a critical book, Luminol Theory (Punctum, 2017). 

I am also interested in experimental nonfictional, poetic, and hybrid writing, and in small press publishing. My own work has appeared in PLINTH, Entropy, Black Sun Lit, Tarpaulin Sky, and Egress. I have written reviews and essays about contemporary poetry, fiction, art, and hybrid writing from writers including Aase Berg, Lara Glenum, Sara Tuss Efrik, Olivia Cronk, James Pate, Siân Rathore, and Nathalie Djurberg for publications including Montevidayo, Entropy, and 3AM.

I am a member of the Hex collective with Jodie Kim, and during June 2019, we were guest editors of Burning House Press where we published experimental writing and art by artists including HyperVerses, M. R. Massey, Bobbi Lurie, Janice Kang, Joyelle McSweeney, Leif Holmstrand, and Jenna Vélez. We are also working on a hybrid work of critical, creative, and found material titled Letters to Our Daughters Who May Never Be Born.

My current novel, Blood Forest, is about poisonous plants, adolescent girls, and death rituals. Blood Forest has received a Hosking House Fellowship, and a K. Blundell Trust Award.

I am general editor, alongside Vera Fibisan, of Route 57.

Research interests

My research focuses on modernist and contemporary poetry and post-modern prose, particularly on the correlation between the psyche and urban landscapes, between (inner and outer) geographies and the stratigraphy of language. My main interest and research focus on the structural, poetic, psychological space of the prose poem.

My main research field is of Scottish eighteenth-century literature.

My PhD was a study of how poetry was popularised and marketed in the eighteenth century, and it looked at how the poetry of Robert Burns (1759-1796) was promoted at the time. I maintain an interest in the theoretical work of Jürgen Habermas and "Frankfurt School" critical theory.

My most recent work has been on the connections between print culture and patriotic sentiment in the eighteenth-century Scottish newspaper press, part of a larger interest I have in developing the literary history of early Scottish newspapers.

My work in the field of eighteenth-century studies is heavily invested in the emerging discipline of `book history´, and this has led me back to the origins of Scottish print in the sixteenth century.

Research interests

My research focuses on writing about animals, ecology and empire from the nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on the late Victorian period. My first monograph Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. I recently completed the co-authored volume Walrus for the Reaktion Animal series and am now working towards my next monograph, Fur: A Literary History. Other work currently in progress includes co-edited collections on Henry Rider Haggard: and on globalization and heterotopia; on wolves, werewolves and the gothic;, and on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary ecologies.

I would be very happy to supervise projects relating to any aspect of my research, particularly animals and/or ecology in Victorian literature and culture, adventure fiction, and literature and colonialism/postcolonialism/globalization.

Research interests

I am working on other aspects of Cold War culture, and help run the Cultures of the Cold War network.

Cultures of the Cold War

I am also currently researching Beckett and am planning a series of articles on Beckett and the French Cold War, Beckett and the maternal, Beckett and reader response. I am also researching espionage fiction, contemporary poetry, the Cold War and the construction of Europe.

I welcome research students working in any area of modernism, those interested in war studies, particularly the Cold War in literature, and would be happy to supervise projects on Joyce, Beckett, Proust, French-English comparative work, research into 20th century and contemporary poetry, and am willing to work with creative writing students.

Research interests

My current research centres on connections between cinema and landscape and the representation of navies, naval combat and naval history on film. From my PhD onwards my interests also include Australasian cinema (particularly Australian Gothic horror films), genre films and auteur studies.

I welcome applications from researchers working on film, particularly in my research areas. I have supervised film studies PhD students in British, European, American and Japanese cinema and maritime films.

Research interests

I am currently developing my DPhil thesis into a monograph on preaching and religious culture at Lincoln´s Inn from 1570 to 1641. In conjunction with this work I am editing a volume of Donne´s Inn of Court sermons for the recently commissioned and AHRC-funded Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (general editor Peter McCullough). This edition aims to provide a freshly edited and, for the first time, fully annotated text of Donne´s sermons.

I have also edited, together with Peter McCullough and Hugh Adlington, the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermons. This collection of twenty-five essays offers a full survey of preaching in the British Isles from 1500-1740, together with a comprehensive guide to the key rhetorical, theological, and historical precepts essential to the study of early modern sermons.

I welcome PhD students interested in sixteenth- and seventeenth century literature.

Research interests

My publications are mainly on sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literature, and in 2004 I published Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 (Oxford University Press). This book offers a re-evaluation of a neglected, but important, period of English writing, in which English national identity was hotly contested. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, co-edited with Mike Pincombe, was published in 2009 by Oxford University Press (paperback 2011). This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the accession of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I, and its 45 chapters pay especial attention to the decades before 1580; it was awarded the Sixteenth Century Society's Ronald H. Bainton Prize in 2010. I have also published on Shakespeare, including editingCoriolanus for the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare (forthcoming), and have edited Philip Massinger´s City Madam, which transports the Angelo plot of Measure for Measure to a London merchant’s family (Globe Quartos, 2005; republished 2010 to accompany the production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Current research includes a monograph on Tudor dialogue; I am also in the process of producing an edition of Shakespeare´s poems, co-edited with Raphael Lyne, for the Annotated English Poets series. In short, I have a wide range of research interests across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, stretching from the most canonical early modern writers (Shakespeare!) to obscure figures and neglected texts (one of my current favourites is Thomas Lodge’s 1591 adaptation of the legend of ‘Robert the Devil’).

I welcome applications from potential research students in any area of sixteenth- and early- seventeenth-century literature.

Research interests

My earliest research concentrated on the role of language in colonial encounters and in 2007 I published a book on early British grammars of the South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu, under the title Colonialism and Grammatical Representation. I have also written on 17th-century descriptions of Native American languages and 19th-century grammars of the West African language, Wolof. In all this work, I have been particularly concerned with the relationship between technical descriptions of linguistic structure and the political contexts in which those descriptions were produced.

I continue to take an interest in the study of colonial culture and in April 2011 I spoke at a conference on ‘The East India Company and the Study of Language’ at City University, Hong Kong. I also have an article on John Masters´ fictional representations of British India forthcoming in a collection edited by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz to be published by Manchester University Press in summer 2011.

Much of my present work focuses on a different kind of cross-cultural experience: the condition of exile. In collaboration with Jessica Dubow, a colleague from the department of Geography, I have written two articles on linguistic ideas in the work of the novelist, W.G. Sebald. And, since 2009 I have been collaborating with Jessica and my colleague from the School of English, Frances Babbage, on an AHRC-funded project with the title `Archive of Exile´. Each of us is working with a different artist – in my case the New York-based composer, Eve Beglarian – on the relationship between the concepts of archive and exile. Eve and I both have a strong interest in the documentation of language, speech, and the human voice, and this forms the focus of our work together. As part of her research for the project, Eve kayaked the length of the Mississippi river between August and December 2009, and I did the first part of the journey with her. The trip was reported in the arts pages of the New York Times.

Research interests

My research (and teaching) often involves me in working with users of mental health services. I am currently working with a range of initiatives in which service-users are supported in using creative arts and digital media to explore and communicate their experience and influence healthcare policy and practice. I am always keen to hear from individuals, groups, or organisations who want to develop similar or related work. I am a long-time mental health service-user myself, and have a strong commitment to the rights and empowerment of individuals using mental health services and/or living with mental distress. I am committed to promoting service-user led research wherever this is feasible.

Research interests

I am influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and my research background is in the work of Malcolm Lowry. This interest has continued in my recent work and teaching, including the publication Malcolm Lowry Eighty Years On (1989).

My publications in the field of literary theory include Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996) and Introducing Bakhtin(1997).

I have been interested in representations of the Holocaust for many years, and have published a book on novels about the Holocaust, Holocaust Fiction (2000), one on children´s perspectives, Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), and, with Jenni Adams, have edited a volume entitled Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013).

I welcome applications from PhD students wishing to work in most areas of twentieth- and twenty-first literature, theory and film, including Holocaust studies.

Meredith Warren's primary research interests lie in the cultural and theological interactions among the religions of the ancient Mediterranean, especially early Judaism and Christianity. Her current research focuses on the sense of taste and heavenly food in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman narratives. Warren's first book examined the tropes of anthropophagy, sacrifice, and divinity in the Gospel of John and the Ancient Greek novels.

Please Note:

Research applicants proposing Dr Meredith Warren as a supervisor should select the Arts and Humanities IPO on the application form

I am interested in the many uses of the arts and popular culture, and the relationship between mental health, urban living, and politics. I think that people with mental health problems often find ways to live well and that one of the most positive developments in this field is the strength of the service user and voices movement. Collaborative approaches to mental health seem to me to offer a way forward. I have recently become a trustee of Art Refuge UK which uses art therapy in different international locations to support people (particularly young people and children facing the difficulties of migration).

Research interests

I have published in The Journal of American Studies, co-edited a special edition of U.S. Studies Online, written essays forYear´s Work in English Studies and book reviews for peer-reviewed journals. Currently, I am working on two main projects: a monograph entitled Literary Whiteness: Reading Whiteness Critically in African American Literature and Theory; and a project on Teaching Whiteness in Higher Educational Contexts bringing together my teaching experience with developments in the field of critical race studies.

I welcome PhD applicants who wish to undertake research in American Literature (particularly African American Literature), issues of race, gender and/or sexuality in twentieth-century writing, as well as applicants who have an interest in the study of whiteness.