English Literature Research
The research interests of English Literature Research staff are listed below. We welcome contact from fellow academics and others about matters pertaining to our areas of interest.
Prospective MPhil/PhD students should also read our MPhil/PhD programme page. |
The Departmental Director of Research is Prof Adrienne Gavin |
English Literature Research Seminar
The Department runs a series of English Literature Research Seminars| at which members of staff, guest speakers, research students and interested undergraduate students are encouraged to give papers. All university staff, students or other interested parties are welcome to come and listen to any papers delivered or to participate in other discussions or events organized. Suggestions for or offers of papers are always welcome. Please contact Dr Claire Bartram|.
Conferences
Conferences and colloquia are regularly convened by English staff. Current conferences include:
The Annual Renaissance Colloquium|
Staff Research Interests
Dr Claire Bartram
Dr Claire Bartram's doctoral work focused on the diverse reading and writing practices of the Kentish Gentry and the constructions of gentry identity implicit in these writings. Her current research focuses more broadly on literate elites and book culture in provincial society. Current projects include the editing of a collection of essays entitled Contexts for Reading and Writing in Renaissance Society: c.1450-1650 and the development of a monograph on Gentry Writers in Elizabethan Kent. She is the founder of the Annual Renaissance Colloquium hosted in collaboration with Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library which foregrounds the study of provincial culture in the period 1400-1700. She also organises the English Literature Research Seminar which foregrounds the research interests of staff and postgraduates in the department.
Forthcoming articles include 'Reconstructing Literary Life in the Provinces with special reference to the Elizabethan gentry of Kent' Archaeologia Cantiana 129, 2009 and a co-authored essay on literary coteries in Late Elizabethan Dover, forthcoming in S. Sweetinburgh, ed. Negotiating the Political in Northern European urban society, c.1400-1600 (Brepols 2010). Previous publications reflect her interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and her interest in gentry culture and include 'Some tomb for a remembraunce': Representations of Piety in Post-Reformation Gentry Funeral Monuments in R. Lutton & E. Salter eds. Pieties in Transition:1400-1640 (Ashgate 2007). 'Proud lookes and brave attyre': Social Fabric in Francis Thynne's Debate between Pride and Lowliness' in C. Richardson ed. Clothing Culture c.1300-1600 (Ashgate 2004).'Melancholic Imaginations': Witchcraft and the Politics of Melancholia in Elizabethan Kent' Journal of European Studies (33) 2004.
She is currently supervising a doctorate on the printed playtexts of Nathan Field and would be interested in supervising research on book history, manuscript studies, and aspects of provincial culture in the early modern period.
Also see Dr Bartram's staff profile|
Dr Alastair Bennett
Dr Alastair Bennett works on the relationship between sermons and literary texts in late medieval England. His current project, based on his doctoral dissertation, explores the language of complaint in late medieval sermons, and responses to this language in Piers Plowman and in the writings of the heretical Wycliffite movement. His forthcoming publications include an edition of a Middle English sermon from London, British Library, MS Royal 8.F.VII, (Medium Ævum, 2011), and he is also working on an article on the imagery of blurred and distorted vision in Piers Plowman passus 5. His future research plans include a large-scale project exploring the relationship between ethical discourse in Middle English sermons and late medieval literature.
See also Dr Bennett's staff profile|.
Dr Stefania Ciocia
Dr Stefania Ciocia is a specialist in 20th and 21st century writing in English. She has a background in comparative literature and postcolonial studies, as well as a marked interest in American writing and culture. Her research interests include war literature, postmodern writing and theory, detective fiction and, within the field of Children's Literature, the recent phenomenon of crossover literature.
She has recently published articles on the influence of Heart of Darkness on Tim O'Brien, on the role of London and of the conventions of popular Victorian literature in Sarah Waters (www.literarylondon.org |), as well as a comparative reading of Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet against J. M. Barrie's original text. At the moment she is writing a monograph on Tim O'Brien and American literature of the Vietnam war, and co-editing, with Jesús Ángel González, a collection of essays on Paul Auster.
She is interested in supervising research in any of the above-mentioned areas, particularly in the field of representation of masculinity and femininity, and gender politics.
Also see Dr Ciocia's staff profile |
Professor Adrienne Gavin
Dr Adrienne Gavin specializes in Victorian literature, Twentieth and Twenty-First Century fiction, Childhood in literature, Children's Literature, and Crime Fiction. She also has research interests in Women's Writing, the Short Story, Biography, Textual Editing, and Edwardian Literature. She is author of Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (2004), the proposal for which won The Biographers' Club Prize 2000, and is editor of scholarly editions of Caroline Clive's 1855 crime novel Paul Ferroll (2008), C. L. Pirkis's The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (2010), Henry de Vere Stacpoole's 1908 bestseller The Blue Lagoon (2010) and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (forthcoming 2012). She is editor of The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary (2012) and Robert Cormier: A New Casebook (forthcoming 2012) and co-editor (with Christopher Routledge) of Mystery in Children's Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural (2001), (with Suzanne Bray and Peter Merchant) of Re-embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation Since 1850 (2008), (with Andrew Humphries) of Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time (2009, awarded the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award 2011), and with Carolyn Oulton of Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change (2012). She has also published on Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Mahy, short stories by women writers, female crime writing, and postmodern graphic short fiction.
She is currently working on a biography of Caroline Clive, and a project on Victorian fictional female detectives. She is also currently editing with Andrew Humphries the essay collections Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840-1940 and The Child and Crime .
She co-convened with Andrew Humphries Childhood in its Time: The Child in British Literature International Conference in March 2009 and with Carolyn Oulton co-convened the Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle International Conference held in London in June 2010.
With Carolyn Oulton she is establishing an International Centre for Victorian Women Writers.
She is interested in supervising research in any of the abovementioned areas.
Also see Prof Gavin's staff profile |
Dr Peter Merchant
Dr Peter Merchant recently contributed, both as essayist and (with Suzanne Bray and Adrienne E. Gavin) as co-editor, to the volume Re-Embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850 (Cambridge Scholars, 2008). Elsewhere, his publications concentrate upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has worked, and written, on several noncanonical novelists and poets of this period (Robert Paltock, Lord de Tabley, F. Anstey, the juvenilia of Sarah Egerton and Anna Kingsford)—yet he regularly returns to the major Victorian authors, having published essays on Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and Christina Rossetti, as well as introductions to classic works by Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope. Dr Merchant welcomes inquiries from any prospective postgraduate students with topics to propose that fall within these fields.
Also see Dr Merchant's staff profile |
Dr Carolyn Oulton
Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton is a Reader in Victorian Literature and has research interests in mid to late nineteenth century literature. She is interested in supervising research topics in this area, including: Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and New Woman writers, especially Mary Cholmondeley. She was the co-organiser, with Adrienne Gavin, of the Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle Conference at the IES in June 2010 and is currently working on a biography of Jerome K. Jerome.
Publications include: Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England. Palgrave Macmillan 2003; Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Ashgate 2007; Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley. Pickering & Chatto 2009; Ed. with SueAnn Schatz, Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered. Pickering & Chatto 2009; General Editor, New Woman Fiction 1881 – 1899. Pickering & Chatto July 2010 - May 2011. Ed. with Adrienne Gavin Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011.Scholarly editions include Mary Cholmondeley's Diana Tempest (Valancourt) and Red Pottage, forthcoming as part of the New Woman Fiction 1881-1899 series.
Further details on some of these projects can be found at www.marycholmondeley.com||
With Adrienne Gavin she is establishing an International Centre for Victorian Women Writers.
Also see Dr Oulton's staff profile |
Dr Andrew Palmer
Dr Andrew Palmer's doctoral thesis was a study of the work of Bruce Chatwin. He has since supervised dissertations on war poetry, censorship in the modern novel, and on a range of modern writers including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter. He has supervised an MA by research on the relationships between Modernism and Fascism and, currently, he is supervising a PhD on British traditions in creative nonfiction. He would be interested to consider PhD proposals in these areas, and any proposals relating to the poetry of war from 1918 to the present.
His publications include papers on the poetry of war memorials, Aldous Huxley and Jean Rhys, Alan Sillitoe, Bruce Chatwin, George Orwell and Howard Jacobson. His fiction has appeared in Firsthand: New Writing and The Jewish Quarterly.
Also see Dr Palmer's staff profile |
Dr Astrid Stilma
Dr Astrid Stilma specialises in early modern literature in a European context. She tends to approach literary studies from the angle of cultural history. Important focal points in her research are the history of political ideas, particularly kingship and resistance theory, and the role of religion in early modern literature and culture.
She has published a monograph on the writings of King James, A King Translated: The Writings of James VI & I and their Interpretation in the Netherlands, 1593-1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), and various book chapters on King James, George Buchanan and more generally on religion and politics in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.
Dr Stilma would be interested in supervising research in any of the following (or associated) areas: Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; the literature of the courts of King James VI & I; drama in performance (stage and screen); early modern translation; religion and politics in early modern literature.
Also see Dr Stilma's staff profile|