English Language and Literature
Our research projects have received funding and other support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Modern Humanities Research Association, Arts Council England, the Panacea Society and other funding bodies.
Overview
Research Contact: Professor Philip Leonard
English research activity at NTU is spread across several major areas and periods of literary studies, from the early modern period to the 21st Century. The diversity of the discipline is reflected in our research; much of our work is historic, with a focus on the cultural location and significance of texts and traditions; many of us focus on recent and emerging theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies, and staff explore the interface of critical and creative practice. Our work includes textual editing, research across many Anglophone literary geographies, the history of the book, archival and manuscript research, and a focus on radical and marginal cultural production.
The research strengths of NTU English are built on a shared ethos of political radicalism and scepticism about literary canons. The team's interests stretch from the early Renaissance to the present day and our creative writers produce poetry, fiction, screen-writing and other genres. Areas of critical focus include:
- American literature
- Lesbian and gay literature
- Post-colonial literature and theory
- Travel writing
- Women’s writing
Centres
NTU English hosts two dedicated specialist centres:
- The Centre for Travel Writing Studies remains a world leader in this field. This Centre facilitates, promotes, and disseminates scholarly research on travel writing and its contexts, without restriction of period, locus, or type of travel writing.
- The Centre for Postcolonial Studies works across Arts & Humanities and Art & Design disciplines to advance contemporary debates in postcolonial writing, culture and theory.
- The Critical Poetics Research Group seeks to interdisciplinary stimulate debate, collaboration and innovation among scholars and practitioners whose work is concerned with creative and critical theory and practice.
- The Periodicals and Print Cultures Research Group supports and develops work on the study of modern periodicals and print culture, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Staff also contribute to other NTU research centres, including the Centre for Inequality, Culture, and Difference.
Case Studies
The following Impact Case Studies are linked to this subject area:
Collaboration
The team has long-established connections with external organisations, including galleries, arts centres, libraries and literary festivals. Research is published as single-authored books, journal articles, book chapters, and conference contributions; and our staff also talk about their research in the broadcast and print media, through online media and networks, at festivals and in open-access publishing forums.
We also run our own publishing house, Trent Editions, which aims to bring neglected writers back into print; and NTU English hosts two peer-reviewed academic journals, Studies in Travel Writing and Writing Technologies.
We work collaboratively with many regional and national groups and organisations, including:
- BBC
- Broadway Media Centre
- Bromley House Library
- New Art Exchange
- Nottingham Black Archive
- Nottingham Contemporary
- Nottingham UNESCO World City of Literature
- Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum
- Science Museum, London
Staff are committed to engaging with these and other partners, and to ensuring that our research benefits those beyond English literary studies and outside of academic environments. Our research is culturally and socially transformative at the local, regional, and international levels.
Related Staff
Academic Staff
Postcolonial literature and culture; feminism; Palestinian cinema and visual culture; Middle Eastern culture; Arab women’s writing; refugeeism and forced migration; cultural activism | |
Creative writing; young adult fiction; Crime fiction | |
Gothic; Romantic writing; Travel literature; literary and critical theory | |
Travel writing; Romantic and Victorian writing; print and periodical culture; gender; national identity | |
Classical mythology; gender and sexuality; Shakespeare; Intertextuality; Ovid | |
Travel literature and culture; Joseph Banks; Empire; science and literature | |
Twentieth-century women’s writing; periodical studies; feminist print culture; gender and sexuality | |
Nuclear literature and culture; literature and science; postmodern literature; twentieth and twenty-first century literature | |
Creative writing; poetry; literary and critical theory | |
Poetry; eighteenth and nineteenth century literature; Romanticism; recovery research; labouring-class poets especially John Clare | |
D. H. Lawrence; late Victorian, Edwardian and modernist print and publishing culture; literary marketplace; modernist magazines, literary censorship; twentieth century women's writing and reading | |
Creative and critical writing; twentieth and twenty-first century literature; writing and technology; psychoanalysis; deconstruction; contemporary poetry | |
Twentieth and twenty-first century literature and theory; deconstruction; globalization; world literature; literature and technology; orbital culture | |
Prof. John Lucas (Emeritus Professor) | Poetry; biography; Dickens; John Clare |
Literary activism; the American South; the US civil rights movement; African-American literature; Black British literary history; American literature and culture; US film, documentary cinema, journalism and civil rights media cultures | |
Travel writing; gender and sexuality; literature of the First World War; Twentieth and twenty-first century literature; British writing and Italy | |
Nineteenth and twentieth century literature; US literature; women’s writing; American regionalism; transatlanticism | |
Postcolonial literature and theory; resistance and activism; migration; literary marketplaces | |
Postcolonial literature; world literature; feminism; contemporary women’s writing; Marxism; queer theory and writing; popular music and culture | |
Early Modern theatre and performance practice; Shakespeare and his contemporaries; performance history; theatre reviewing; Shakespeare on film | |
Prof. Stan Smith (Emeritus Professor) | Poetry; Modernism; W.H. Auden; W.B. Yeats; Irish literature |
Creative writing; experimental poetry; Beat Generation writing; ecopoetics; travel writing; Nottingham writers and literature | |
Modernism and modernist culture; twentieth century literature; print and periodical culture; bookshops; literary geographies; space and the city | |
Postcolonial writing; contemporary literature; Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature | |
Digital and electronic literature; transmedia writing; creative industries | |
Modern and contemporary literature; creative writing; twentieth century British poetry; travel writing; war literature; regionalism | |
Georgian Drama; William Blake; Romantic period sub-cultures | |
Gay and lesbian literary and cultural studies, mainly 20th Century; The AIDS epidemic; Modernism; American literature; Writing poetry. | |
Travel writing; radical writing; African American literature; interwar writing; creative writing; poetry; post-1850 Anglophone literature; modernism; postcolonial literature | |
Nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century British and American literature; postcolonial literature and culture; South African writing; migration and immigration; the US South; literary transnationalism |
Current Doctoral Researchers
‘Strangers to these shores; strangers to themselves': An Exploration of Anglophone Caribbean-British Travel Writing | |
Roxanne Ablett | Collector, Curator, Creator: Nigerian Folktales and their Colonial Appropriation, Feminist Intervention, and Contemporary Reappropriation |
‘I Gave You Power’: The Weaponization of Literary Intertextuality in HipHop Lyricism | |
Arwa Almefawaz | Intersecting Factors Shaping Contemporary Black British Female Bodies on Stage |
Luke Allerton-Hilton | The Relationship Between Happiness and Capitalism in the Work of Don DeLillo |
Panya Banjoko | The Politics of Poetry in Nottingham and the Role of African-Caribbean Writers and Networks in the 1970s and 1980s |
Dalit Writing in the 21st Century: Activism and Literary Experimentation in Modern India | |
Victoria Callus | Paper Cuts: Investigating Paper Affect in Contemporary Experimental Literature |
Patterns in Nature: The use of poetic form in contemporary ecopoetry | |
Valentina de Riso | Indigenous Literatures as Pathways Towards Decolonisation, Resurgence and Reconciliation: Facing the Traumatic Experience of the Residential School in First Nations Women’s Writing |
Karen Eckersley | Out of this World: Surrealist Practice and Post-Humanist Ethics in the Writing and Visual Arts of Elizabeth Bishop and Leonora Carrington |
Publishing Black British Short Stories: The Potential and Place of a Marginalised Form | |
Nottingham Playhouse: A Cultural History and Analysis of its Community Engagement | |
Humour and the Feminist Avant-Garde in Modernist Magazines | |
Close Up: A creative-critical intervention in women activists and activist documentary filmmaking | |
Poetics of the Spatial Turn: Place Attachment, Economic Instability and Contemporary Poetry | |
Rogues Gallery: Liminality and the Politics of Power in Early Modern Texts | |
Sian Liddle | The Hidden Faces of World War 1: Representing Disfigurement in Film |
Queer Resistance(s): Contemporary Caribbean Communality | |
Promised Lands – A Psycho-social account of statelessness | |
‘I myself have never met’: A queer analysis of psychosis and trauma in the plays of Sarah Kane | |
Purnachandra Naik | Reading the Rejected: Dirt, Spatiality and Subjectivity in Dalit Literature |
Allan Njanji | Redocumenting refugee perspectives: Developing visual alternatives to the UK media's representation of refugees and asylum-seekers through creative documentary practices |
Margaret Ravenscroft | Creative cultural productions by and of displaced women |
Sean Richardson | Queer Spaces of Modernism |
Tony Robinson-Smith | The Dragon Run: A Travel Narrative of Bhutan |
Catherine Smith | The Gothic and Shakespeare |
Ceren Sengezer | Shakespeare and the Beats |
'The Flashing and Fading of Consciousness in Perception': The Fictional Freud in Literature and Theory | |
‘Spaces & Places of Representation: Contemporary British BAME writing at UK Literature Festivals’ | |
Contemporary Poetry, Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding | |
Modernist Objects |
Selected recent Doctoral Projects
Amna Alkormaji | Quarreling in Romantic Writing: Burgoyne, Shelley, Cobbett |
Zayneb Allak | Spider Poetics: Writing the Uncanny |
Presentism, Politics and Contemporary International Performance: Shakespeare’s Collaborative Plays, Edward III and Arden of Faversham | |
Realism, Neoliberalism, and Class in Writing in Britain since the 2008 Economic and Financial Crises | |
That’s not how it should end: The effect of reader/player responses on the development of narrative | |
Mastering Time: Time and Temporality in Contemporary Poetry | |
Fitting Manifestations: Epiphany in Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie and Liz Berry | |
Heather Hawkins | Recovering the Rural: Form and Dialect in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy |
Jenny Owen | A Barren Legacy: The Arabian desert as Orientalist trope in English travel writing, post-Thesiger |
Melissa Roddis | Amalgamated Subjects: New Dialogues in Posthumanism, Ecocriticism and Contemporary Literature |
Mark Sullivan | Exporting the Standard Measure: The Function of Travel in selected writings of Richard Harding Davis |
Amy Watson | A Critical Study of the Literary Life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire |
Dawn Whatman | Recovering British Labouring-Class Women Poets of the Romantic Period, 1780-1837 |