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.

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.

Staff 

Early Modern Literature and Theatre Studies

Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century Literature

Modernism and Contemporary Literature

Critical Theory