English literature PhD

My current PhD students are working in both creative and critical areas on sventeenth-century drama, including ideas about hauntology and performing gender and sexuality. Through close integration with our Resarch and Enterprise Group on Theatre and Communities, we are attracting a good local community of like-minded researchers. 

Current projects are:

• Jane White ‘Queering Women in Restoration London:  Aphra Behn’
• Ellan Parry ‘Performance, Gender, Queers Studies’
• Sarah Grange ‘Improvising Moll - staging dialogues between queer pasts and presents’
• Cara Gathern ‘Discourses of Rape through Lucrece in Seventeenth Century Texts’
• Katrina Rideout 'Reawakening the Witch: can utilising liminality in creative writing shift persepctives towards the environment?'
• Alan Meggs 'Reclaiming cabaret: A haunted autoethnogrpahy of real, researched and imagined stories from cabarets past and present'
• Rasha Mousa 'The Image of a Cyborg in Female Playwrighting: Iraq'
• Gill Balfour, 'The Ageing Woman and the Menopause: Literary Representations'
• Gill Ide 'Rachel Ferguson, Creativity and Middlebrow Prejudices'

Bergin has supervised MA theses in the field of African American literature and culture, Caribbean literature, Welsh cultural memory and Holocaust Representation. 

She is has supervised Phd theses to completion in "Memorialisation in the Postmodern-Neoliberal Conjuncture", "Women's literature in Belize: Memory, Identity and the Legacy of slavery" and "Male Perfomance Wear and authenticity in Country Music 1947-1992". She is currently supervising PhDs in nazi persecution of homosexual men,  post-war stream of conciousness fiction, British represenations of the Armenian Genocide, race and identity in conemporary Britain, and folk horror and counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland. She is interested in supporting research in the following areas: African American writing; enslavement and representation; black radical history; Caribbean culture and Identity; Marxist literary history; post-colonialism; Holocaust memorialisation; novel studies; transnational solidarities.

Victorian literature and journalism, sexuality, American literature, slavery

My research has focused on the relationships of cultural texts to nations and transnational movements and most recently has concerned the cultural representations of work and workers. My publications explore the way that social, political and economic questions are played out through various kinds of cultural representations and practices including modern and contemporary writing in English, and in visual cultures of the late twentieth and twenty-first century.

I have published widely on the idea of the nation and on the culture of globalization. This research considers how changes in public discourses are reproduced and challenged by creative and cultural texts. This has concentrated on ideas about national and racial difference; on the shape of the global economy since the late 1970s; and on contemporary attitudes towards terror. I have published extensively on  literature and globalization and this work has helped to shape the debates defining this field. In 2010 I co-edited the Literature and Globalization Reader (Routledge) which, for the first time, brought together major theoretical writings on globalization with critical responses to these theories in literary studies. 

My book Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel (Palgrave,  2017) explores how regimes of flexible labour in the contemporary economy have been represented in English-language fiction about office work in a range of national contexts. I am currently developing this area of research in a project on the concept of intimate economies; looking at various forms of intimate labour, this work attempts to explore how cultural texts have narrated and defined the changing boundary between the economic and the non-economic during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nigel supervises PhD students in three main fields: modernist/postmodernist, postcolonial and contemporary fiction; Russian literature and film; and the history of Anglo-Hungarian cultural contacts. He is very happy to be contacted by prospective students, especially those who can see themselves contributing to the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.

Specific areas of literary analysis might include:

Modernist, Postmodern, Postcolonial, and Contemporary Fiction

• The influence of cultural, anthropological, and shamanic forces on human psychology: the psychogeographic impact of Aztec and Zapotec civilizations on Malcolm Lowry
• The Mexican Day of the Dead: anthropological, cosmic, and shamanic perspectives
• Alienation, survival, and regeneration in Toni Morrison
• Verbal and non-verbal identity in J. M. Coetzee
• The representation of cultural identities and memory

The Golden Age of Russian Literature and Culture

• The influence of socio-political alienation on human psychology in the works of A. P. Chekhov, M. Yu. Lermontov, and A. S. Pushkin

History of Anglo-Hungarian Cultural Contacts

• British visitors to Hungary and Hungarian travellers to the British Isles in the early modern period onwards
• British attitudes and perceptions of Hungary (and vice-versa) and their reflection in the genre of travel writing

PhD Students Supervised: 

Nabila Ahsan, The Representation of Young Adult Women in Angela Carter’s Work

Ana Zivkovic-Snowley, Constructions of Montenegro in the works of British authors from the nineteenth century to the present

Piamaria von Konow, A Study of the Shamanically-Inspired Imaginary: A Cross-Cultural Study of Shamanic/Shamanistic Imagery

Dr Hammond would welcome PhD applications in post-1945 British literature, postcolonial literature and European literature, as well as in the literary treatment of such topics as decolonisation, European identity, left-wing ideology, borders and the Cold War.

Dr Jenzen has supervised several doctoral students to completion across topics such as queer visual activism and social media and LGBT mental health support. Currently she supervises projects on Feminist social media activism; LGBTQ kinship practices; queer filmmaking and learning disability; gender creative parenting; climate justice discourse in the media; and heritage, participation and technology. She welcomes applications for projects interested in digital media and visual activism, activism and issues of gender and sexuality, or from applicants who situate their project within feminist and/or queer theoretical methodologies, and in a wider sense, relate to sub cultures and popular culture.

She is particularly interested in supervising research projects in the areas of feminist theory, Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Gothic and supernatural fiction, women's writing and the short story.

One of my key passions is working with PhD students on creative practice, autoethnography and creative writing pedagogy. I have supported doctoral students working on transdisciplinary projects and work that seeks to challenge conventional academic discourse. At the moment, I am honoured to be working with students who are looking at queering the colonial, creativity and Bronte, Santiago de Cuba as moving archive, diverse narratives from Brexit, feminist romance, autoethnographic arts-based work, stories from care, autoethno-drag, identity and hybridity in fiction, and queer bodies in performance.

My supervisory interests include the study of popular media genres (science fiction, horror); the relations between media, memory and trauma; and media and politics (specifically imperialism, (post)colonialism and globalisation. Interdisciplinary projects on media, literature and culture are most welcome.

A more detailed indicative list of supervisory interests includes the following areas:

• the study of popular media genres (science fiction, horror/Gothic, utopia/dystopia, (post-)apocalyptic fiction).
• the relations between screen media, trauma theory and memory studies - with a more recent interest in nostalgia studies.
• the historical and discursive relations between screen media and imperialism, globalisation and (post)colonialism.

Students with an interest in an interdisciplinary approach that extends across English studies and Film and Television studies are most welcome. I have also researched, taught and published on the late Victorian period ('fin de siecle') and postmodern theory, literature and culture.

I would be happy to talk to students about PhD projects in contemporary literature, cultural and queer studies.

Specific areas might include:

• Black British Literature and Culture
• BrexLit
• European Literature
• Postcolonialism
• Postcommunism
• Literary and media representations of migration and specifically 'Eastern European' migration
• LGBTQ+ Literature

My current supervision includes the following PhD projects:

(COMPLETED) Kadija George, Raising the voice and visibility of independent Black publishers (TECHNE-funded) http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/techne/for-students/techne-students/techne-students/techne-students-2016/george

Najma Yusufi, Leave To Remain” (novel); Dissertation component –“The theoretical fictional study of Faria’s character in Leave To Remain and the impact of double consciousness in second generation British Asian writing.’’, https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/najma-yusufi

Amanda Holiday, 'Poetry, Race and Art' (TECHNE-funded), https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/amanda-holiday

Veneta Neale, 'This is our History: Diasporic Feminist Black British History'.

Aakanksha is happy to supervise postgraduate work on late Victorian and modern literature. She has specific interests in literary modernism and would particularly welcome projects exploring literature and the arts (music and visual culture).

Specific areas within literary studies (1850-1950) might include

• Victorian/modern transitions
• philosophy, aesthetics and politics in modern literature
• poetry and poetics
• literature, music and visual culture
• aestheticism, decadence and desire

English literature; American literature; the novel; poetry; philosophy of ethics; critical theory

 I am accepting graduate students interested in any aspect of modern and contemporary literature. Feel free to e-mail me for more information about the PhD program.