PhD English

Program Overview

The PhD in English Language and Literature at Strathclyde University offers supervision by renowned researchers in fields such as 20th and 21st-century literature, Victorian literature, gender and sexuality, and critical medical humanities. Students engage in interdisciplinary collaborations and work on extended research projects under the guidance of published authors, contributing to cutting-edge scholarship in English and Creative Writing.

Program Outline

Other:

• The PhD in Creative Writing is an opportunity to work on an extended project (up to 80,000 words) under the supervision of a successful, published author.
• Postgraduates in English language and literature will be supervised by researchers with international reputations in a range of fields, from the Renaissance period to the present day.
• Our areas of expertise include:
• 20th & 21st century literature & culture
• American literature & culture
• postcolonial literature & theory
• Victorian, Edwardian & Neo-Victorian
• Renaissance
• Scottish studies
• gender & sexuality
• animal studies
• life writing
• periodical
  ewspaper culture
• heritage
• linguistic & cognitive literary studies
• experimental literature
• Alasdair Gray Studies
• critical medical humanities
• critical disability studies
• queer theory
• monster theory
• Recent and current PhD projects supervised by English Studies include the representation of animals in the illustrated police news; the impact of the discovery of neanderthals on literary culture in the late nineteenth century; the concept of the will in renaissance writing; Alexander Trocchi; Nathaniel Hawthorne; a cognitive approach to spatial patterning in novels; metaphors and L2 learners of English.
• Postgraduates at Strathclyde are part of the Scottish Graduate School in Arts and Humanities and have been involved in organising postgraduate conferences for the Graduate School.
• There have been postgraduate symposia on interdisciplinarity and animal studies, and a postgraduate creative writing workshop in animal studies.
• Colleagues in English are active in researching writing about the experience of travel, from tourism to migration and refuge.
• This work is part of a critical engagement with how we can revise ideas about heritage in transnational contexts that challenge ‘authentic’ connections to place or memory.
• Churnjeet Mahn is currently working on monograph analysing queer travel and tourism in contemporary postcolonial writing and is leading a strand of a major AHRC grant on lost memories and experiences of Partition in Punjab.
• We maintain a strong research base in Scottish Studies, with particular interests in popular culture and the recovery of lost Scottish writing, and also contemporary Scottish literature, for example Alasdair Gray Studies.
• Recent works that have come out of this research include Poets of the People’s Journal, Dr Eleanor Bell’s The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution?
And The International Writers’ Conference Revisited: Edinburgh, 1962, while Dr Rodge Glass’s research on Alasdair Gray over the last 15 years includes his biography of Gray, first published in 2008.
• Dr Maria Sledmere’s additional work as editor-in-chief of the Glasgow-born SPAM Press continually informs research around small press publishing, popular culture, the post-internet and innovative poetry and poetics in Scotland and beyond.
• We are also active in Critical Medical Humanities research, especially where it intersects with the study of gender, race and sexuality.
• Recent and current projects in this field include Dr Sophie Jones’s book project on the politics of reproduction in US literature and film of the 'long 1960s', and ongoing research into the medicalisation of attention and post-1945 American literature.
• Dr Donna McCormack has recently completed an AHRC leadership fellowship on organ transplantation in contemporary literature and film.
• The monograph emerging from this project explores queercrip embodiments and belongings as forms of anticolonialism.
• This research brings together queer, crip, postcolonial and critical race theories to address questions around the meaning of life and death, including who controls these categories and lived experiences, and what other, less dominant, knowledges may teach us about these uncertain definitions.
• We have hosted a number of funded doctoral projects, including the AHRC-funded Adult Autistic Readers of Literary Fictional Narrative: A Cognitive Aesthetics Approach; Poetry, Song and Community in the Industrial City: Victorian Dundee; Industrial Workers as Readers: Libraries, Reading Rooms and the Industrial Workplace in the Long Nineteenth Century; The People’s Friend?
Recovering Scottish Popular Magazine Culture; Towers and Schemes in Revolt: Community Literature and Cultural Activism in Glasgow 1960 – 1990; and 'City Recorder': Alasdair Gray’s Practice & The 'Disappearing City' of Glasgow.
• Colleagues in English and Creative Writing work closely together and also with colleagues in Journalism, Media and Communication, History, and Languages, all of whom work within the Department of Humanities.
• Students are co-supervised across different subject areas within the school, as well as across the University and with other Scottish universities.