We are a dynamic and outward-looking research community equally committed to traditional literary scholarship and innovative interdisciplinary collaboration.
Staff working in literary studies are actively engaged in numerous international projects and we regularly host conferences and events on a range of topics at the leading edge of the discipline. Research in English at the University of Westminster was ranked in the top 30 in the country in REF2014 and in the top 20 for research outputs alone, with 79% of our research identified as 4* and 3*.
Research expertise in English includes Shakespeare and early modern literature, Victorian poetry and gothic studies, fin de siècle and modernism, contemporary British and American fiction and poetry, critical and literary theory, cultural and intellectual history. We also welcome interdisciplinary proposals that consider literature in relation to aspects of visual culture, philosophy, history, politics, memory studies, gender studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities.
Our PhD students are supported and encouraged to develop research initiatives, professional development and modes of research dissemination during their doctoral degree programme. Recent examples of initiatives and publication by our current PhD students include publication in the peer-reviewed journal Textual Practice, a research placement at Yale Center for British Art, and the organisation of a new IMCC Poetry and Poetics Reading Group at the University of Westminster.
All our doctoral research students are members of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, through which they have opportunities to disseminate their research at seminars, as well as organising research initiatives and events under the umbrella of the IMCC. Our doctoral researchers are fully supported to apply to the HEA (Higher Education Academy) for Associate Fellowship in the final year of their doctoral programme.
Current and recent PhD projects
Recently completed PhD projects include:
- Studies of body and mind in Samuel Beckett
- Ethics and aesthetics in the prose of Danilo Kis
- Early Twentieth Century Indian novels in English
- The construction and destruction of self in May Sinclair, Mary Butts, and HD
- The early drama of Michael Field
- The history of the Soho Poly theatre and the poetry of Christina Rossetti
Our current doctoral students are working on, among other topics:
- Wyndham Lewis and phenomenology
- US anarchism
- Disraeli’s novels
- Utopia and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
- Storytelling and the Anthropocene
- Oulipo
- Penguin New Writing and readers' responses to China
- Nineteenth-century fiction’s response to photography
- The afterlives of Kathy Acker
- Trans semiotics, decadence, and aesthetics in poetry
- Celebrity and American Lyric Poetry
Staff
Early Modern Literature and Theatre Studies
Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century Literature
Modernism and Contemporary Literature
- John Beck
- Lucy Bond
- Matthew Charles
- Georgina Colby
- Hannah Copley
- David Cunningham
- Monica Germana
- Michael Nath
- Elinor Taylor
- Leigh Wilson
- Anne Witchard