[The University of Leicester]
Department of English

MA in English Studies

Student by Attenborough TowerThe MA English Studies offers students the opportunity to focus on the area of English literary studies that interests them most, with modules covering literature and language from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Students will also acquire advanced research skills to enable independent scholarly enquiry.

This Master's course offers the opportunity to write a dissertation of either 20,000 or 30,000 words and is therefore suited to those thinking of subsequent research to doctoral level as well as to those wishing to pursue careers in other areas.

As well as the dissertation, the course consists of an assessed module in Bibliography and Research Methods and either three or four specialist modules, depending on the dissertation length chosen. Students will be asked to decide at the end of Semester 1 which dissertation they wish to take (at the start of the second year for part-time students).  Students may opt to take Creative Writing Options.  For further details see below under Module Descriptions.

The School of English hosts or co-hosts a number of seminar series including the Medieval Research Centre Seminar Series, the Leicester Early Modern Seminar, the Victorian Studies Seminar Series, and the Modern Literature Research Seminars. These offer students the opportunity to hear talks by visiting speakers and by Leicester academics.  the School also runs a popular History of the Book Reading Group.

The School consists at present of 28 full-time members of staff with publications and research interests in all the major periods and fields of interest in the subject. They will contribute Option Modules and will offer supervision in response to demand. Some of the Options are offered within the School's other MA courses in Victorian Studies and Modern Literature.

The David Wilson University Library (re-open after major refurbishment in 2008) is an extremely well-stocked resource for all levels of study in English. In addition to the bookshelf collection, the Library subscribes to an excellent range of electronic resources and has areas for private and group study, as well as a dedicated Postgraduate Room. Material housed in the Library's Special Collections includes the Robjohns Collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed bibles, the Fairclough Collection of material relating to 17th century history and the papers of the Leicester-born playwright Joe Orton.

Course Director : Dr Victoria Stewart

Course Structure

The course modules are as follows:

The course may be taken in one year (full time) or two years (part time).  In their first year, part-time students take the Research Methods module, Editing and Textual Cultures and may also take an Option Module. In the second year, they complete the Option requirement and take either Cities of Words plus a 20,000 word dissertation, or a 30,000 word dissertation.

Applicants for this course should normally have a good Upper Second Class honours degree in English Literature or a Literature in the English language, or a joint honours or combined honours degree in which Literature in English is a major component. In exceptional circumstances applications from graduates in other disciplines may be accepted.

Module Descriptions

Core Modules

Editing and Textual Cultures: This module considers how the interpretation of works might be affected by editorial and contextual factors, as well as introducing theories of textual editing, book history and material culture. Examples will be drawn from a wide range of periods and genres, and students will be asked to undertake a short editing project.

Cities of Words: In this module students will read and analyse literary and linguistic representations of the city over the past millennium. They will be introduced to historical, geographical, cultural and theoretical concepts with which changes in urban forms and meanings are explained and understood. Drawing on this knowledge, students will practise how to contextualize literary representations across a range of urban topographies from Britain, Europe, North America and Asia. Students will investigate visual and cinematic images of the city, and will be involved in selecting literary, linguistic and/or theoretical approaches which best facilitate analysis of problems concerning representations of the city and urban life

Option Modules

Introduction to Manuscript Studies: This course will provide an introduction to manuscript studies. We will look at specific manuscripts from the Lindesfarne Gospels to Sir John Paston's 'Grete Bok' and the Winchester Manuscript, setting the manuscripts in their historical and social contexts. We will also engage in the scholarly debate regarding centres of production, scribes, type of manuscripts and texts, codicological and palaeographical and linguistic features, sources and theological background.

English Books and Texts 1060-1220: This module will contextualize the culture which produced and used documents and codices in English between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It will engage in issues regarding type of texts, audience(s) and languages.  It will also consider the role of technology in manuscript studies.

Lexicology and Lexicography: This module is an introduction to the study of words and the study of dictionaries. It includes discussion of register, semantic change, semantic relationships and figurative language. In the past, students have written their assessed work on various aspects of vocabulary, in including the vocabulary of specific authors and periods.

Managing Knowledge: Dictionaries and Ideology: This module will trace the beginnings of the modern dictionary in the work of Johnson and his contemporaries, but will concentrate on the great dictionary projects of the nineteenth century, particularly the Oxford English Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, Brewer’s Phrase and Fable and Farmer and Henley’s Slang and its Analogues. This module will examine their structure, definitional style, selection and use of sources, including the treatment of individual authors, and their approach to obscene and otherwise troubling terms. 

Church and State in Medieval Literature: This module will trace the development of relations between Church and State as reflected in medieval literature.  It will involve a close, guided exploration of extracts and short texts in the main, that bear on the overall topic; which are interdisciplinary in their approach.  Students will emerge from the module not only with an enhanced awareness of the tensions and collaborations between Church and State in some already familiar authors, but will also have been introduced to some of the most intellectually stimulating texts of the medieval period.

Heroic Poetry in Old English and Old Norse: This module covers a range of Old English and Old Norse poems in their contexts through in-depth study and discussion. Issues covered will include gender, genre, Anglo-Scandinavian connections, otherness, and reception. Texts will be studied primarily in translation

Gender & Sexuality in Medieval European Literature: In this module we will explore the varying constructions of masculinity and femininity as well as sexuality in medieval literature form a broad range of cultures and times, asking of the material a series of questions, e.g. Did medieval cultures envision the existence of two opposite sexes (as is popularly assumed today)?  How far is it possible to speak of sexual identity in the period ‘before homosexuality’? Can we discover women’s voices in the literature (even if it is authored or written down by men)? Use will be made of contemporary gender and queer theories, but no previous knowledge will be assumed, and literature will primarily be studied in translation.

Classical and post-Classical Latin: This module is aimed at beginners who have never studied Latin before, although provision will be made for students who have taken Latin GCSE and/or A-Level. It will foster an awareness of how the Latin language works and why Latin was of fundamental cultural importance throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Reading s will be drawn from sources beyond standard ‘texts’, including coins, graffiti and inscriptions; seminar topics will include the pastoral, mythology, religion, geography, travel writing, legal texts, satire and humour, love poetry and sermons.

Literary Journeys 1500-1700: This module will consider how the idea of the ‘journey’ developed across two centuries of English literary history. Between the sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, the theme of the journey became increasingly important in literature as the world writers knew expanded, as early modern writers became inspired by the new possibilities for travel due to technological innovations and the growing permeability of national boundaries. Conceived metaphorically, the journey was variously represented as an image of spiritual and moral progression, whether as an epic path down to hell or a pilgrimage made to an elevated devotional place; as a means of prompting literary meditation on home and nostalgia; and as a way of imagining the exotic and unknown.

Literary Journeys 1700-1830: This module will consider how the idea of the ‘journey’ developed during the ‘long’ eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century, emphasizing the continuities between writing on travel in this period and earlier forms of literature, as well as introducing new developments based on new political events, tourism opportunities, and technological developments. ‘Journeys’ will be understood both literally – as visits to other places – and metaphorically – as personal development and intellectual formation.

The Pre-Raphaelites in Context: A study of the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its followers, examining such issues as typological symbolism, the relationship between literature and art, patronage, and the representation of women. The problem of 'reading' Pre-Raphaelite paintings within social, political and religious discourses is also examined.

Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing: The module considers the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and M.E. Braddon; selected texts are read in the light of current feminist criticism and the attention given to women's writing, and also for the ways in which these writers reflect and challenge the concerns of nineteenth-century literature in general.

Charles Dickens: The module will comprise a close study of works from different stages of Dickens’s career: Oliver Twist (1837-39), A Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849-50), Great Expectations (1860), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). Attention will also be given to at least one adaptation. Students will additionally be encouraged to draw upon any wider knowledge of Dickens they already possess. To read Dickens carefully and intelligently brings not only an appreciation of one of the world’s greatest novelists but an encounter with historical, cultural and philosophic issues that remain of the first importance. The recommended texts are those of the Penguin Classics paperback series. Critical and background materials will be specified during the module.

Evolution and Entropy: Representations of the Sciences in Victorian Literature: It is increasingly recognised that the sciences formed a fundamental and integral part of Victorian culture, and that their growing importance was registered in a variety of literary forms.  The aim of this module is to introduce students to this exciting area of interdisciplinary study by situating a variety of literary texts, including works by Dickens, Gaskell, Hardy, Wells, and Stoker, within the context of key nineteenth-century scientific debates.  These will include the nature of life, evolution, degeneration and entropy, and the occult.

The Country House in Literature: The English country house has provided a succession of architectural and social settings in which generations of authors have explored a diverse range of themes.  Country houses have been places of refuge and reflection for authors belonging to the family and others enjoying its patronage.  The country house provides the setting for many of the great classics of English literature; works that continue to appeal to the 'general reader' as well as to the student and scholar.  In addition to their literary merit these novels, poems and plays are valuable sources of information about every facet of the English country house: its owners, their retainers, architecture, decorative arts and furnishings, landscape gardening and the social and economic life of the community of which it was/is the centre.  Naturally enough the perception of the country house changes from author to author, place to place and time to time.  This module consists of ten sessions covering examples of English country house literature from 1611 (Lanier) to 1993 (Stoppard).

Victorian Lives: Life-writing in the Victorian Period: This module explores nineteenth-century life-writing through a wide variety of biographical and autobiographical texts, including literary Lives, working-class oral life histories, biography as a Victorian institution (The Dictionary of National Biography), female autobiography, female memoir and fictionalised autobiography.  We will look at the construction of the self, issues of censorship, auto-biographical anxieties and the influence of class and gender in Victorian life-writing.  Indicative authors, subject to availability of texts, are:  Lytton Strachey, Thomas De Quincey, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Mayhew, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton, Edmund Gosse, Samuel Butler (a full list of primary and secondary texts will be available before the start of the module).

Literature and Gender: This module draws on feminist and queer theory to explore the ways in which gender is constructed and represented in literature. We will study a series of texts that explore what it means to be a man or a woman, probe the relationship between gender, sex and sexuality and create what Judith Butler terms 'gender trouble' by highlighting the fluidity, the multiplicity and performativity of gender in a way that challenges heteropatriarchal norms.

Literature and Exile: American Writers in Paris: American writers have always had a tense relationship with European culture, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century when writers began to distance themselves from European culture as failing to address their own national circumstances. However, by the early twentieth century writers like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin began to blend elements of American and European writing in order to embrace the international spirit of modernism. Paris proved particularly exciting for these writers as a cultural metropolis representing artistic and sexual freedom in an age of American Prohibition, mass commercialism and political intolerance. This option explores a range of creative work by Americans living in Paris after World War I as a form of self-imposed exile. It focuses particularly on the 1920s and 30s, considering issues of cultural exile, pessimism, experimentation and sexuality, and concludes with a session on African-American writers in Paris in the 1940s and 50s.

Writing Fiction: This module offers an introduction to the writing of fiction.  Taught in five two-hour workshops in which students read and discuss each other's creative work, the module aims to develop students' ability to compose fictional prose, for short and longer fictional works, focusing particularly on control of figurative language, dialogue, register and genre.  The objective is that by the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate competence in basic fictional techniques, including characterisation and plotting.
Students need have no previous experience of creative writing to enrol on the module. 

Poetry Writing and Contemporary Poetry: This module offers an introduction to contemporary poetry for students who would also like a go at creative writing.  The module is driven equally by conplementary academic and creative aims.  Students will discover some of the distinctive challenges contemporary poets face by writing poems themselves; and at the same time develop their own poetry writing by examining the work of a number of established contemporary figures.  We will study and compose poems under five headings: an issue (reference), a genre (elegy), a mode (narrative), a subject (landscape) and a form (villanelle).  Each teaching session will be both workshop and seminar in which we discuss poems by students and by established poets. Students need have no previous experience of poetic composition (or for that matter of contemporary poetry) to enrol on the module.

Course Tutors

CLAIRE BROCK BA (Cardiff) MA (Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff) PhD (Warwick) | e-mail cb178@le.ac.uk
Dr Brock’s research interests include women’s writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in genres other than fiction, the cultural history of fame and publicity in Britain and France, the reception of Russian literature and culture in Europe 1760-1860, and the place of the early female scientist in the history of science.  Her publications include two forthcoming monographs: The Feminization of Fame, 1750-1830 (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Comet Sweeper: Caroline Herschel’s Astronomical Ambition (Icon).  She has also published articles in History Workshop Journal, Studies in Romanticism and Women’s Writing.  Dr. Brock was the recent recipient of the British Society for the History of Science’s prestigious Singer Prize for young scholars.  Her winning article, ‘The Public Worth of Mary Somerville’, is to be published in the British Journal for the History of Science.  She is currently working on a book, entitled Public Experiments, about female practitioners in the physical sciences from Caroline Herschel to Mary Somerville.

GORDON CAMPBELL BA (Waterloo) MA (Queen’s, Canada) DPhil DLitt (York) Dr hc (Bucharest) FRHistS, FRGS | e-mail leb@le.ac.uk
Professor Campbell has written widely on Milton and other Renaissance subjects. He has edited the Complete Poems of Milton, Selected Poems of Marvell, The Alchemist and Other Plays by Ben Jonson, and an anthology of English Renaissance Literature. He was editor of the interdisciplinary journal Renaissance Studies for ten years and is now General Editor of The Review of English Studies. He has published a day-by-day Chronology of Milton (1997) and in 2003 published The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance.  He is Past Chairman of the Society for Renaissance Studies and Past President of the English Association.

DAVID CLARK  BA, MSt, MA, Dphil (Oxford)  | e-mail dc147@le.ac.uk
Dr Clark specialises in Old English and Old Norse literature, with a current focus on medieval gender and sexuality and the modern reception of medieval literature. He has published various articles on these topics, and he is currently completing a book with the provisional title Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval Literature for Oxford University Press, which investigates literary representations of same-sex relations (both erotic and non-erotic) in the early medieval period. With Carl Phelpstead (Cardiff) he is co-editing (and has contributed a chapter to) Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture, to be published by the Viking Society for Northern Research. He is on the council of the Viking Society for Northern Research.

JULIE COLEMAN BA (Manchester) MA PhD (London) | e-mail jmc21@le.ac.uk
Dr Coleman’s main research interest is in the history of the English language, particularly the history of the lexis.  Publications include Love, Sex, and Marriage. A Historical Thesaurus, and articles on a wide range of lexicological and lexicographic subjects.  She has co-edited two collections of papers: Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography, and Historical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionary Research, and is the founder and current chair of the International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, which holds biennial conferences.  Dr Coleman is currently studying the cant and slang dictionary tradition, and has published A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries Volume I: 1567-1784 and Volume II: 1785-1858.  Volumes III and IV are in progress, and will bring this survey up to the present day.

JOAN CROSSLEY BA(Sussex) MA(Leicester) PhD(London)
Rev Dr Crossley has lectured part time in the Department of the History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester since 1991. She has written on military themes in nineteenth century British art and is the author of Images of the Army (Manchester, 1988) (as J.W.M. Hichberger) and co-wrote Innocence and Experience: Images of children in British Art 1600-the present (1992).  A former editor of the Oxford Art Journal, Dr Crossley now writes and lectures on Baroque art in Europe and seventeenth century English portraiture and has recently completed a book on London hospital chapels, Sacred Spaces, published by the Museum of London, 2005.

ANNE MARIE D’ARCY MA PhD (Dublin) | e-mail amd13@le.ac.uk
Dr D’Arcy specializes in later Medieval and early Renaissance literature.  Her research interests lie in the areas of medieval and Renaissance Wisdom literature, medieval and Renaissance iconology and political theology; the patristic sources of Old and Middle English literature; nineteenth and twentieth-century medievalism.  She is the author of Wisdom and the Grail: The Image of the Vessel in the Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s Tale of the Sankgreal (Four Courts Press, 2000).  She has also co-edited a collection of essays on Old English language and literature, and has written articles on Old French romance, Middle English poetry and prose, and the medieval background to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  She has just published a co-edited collection of essays, Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Four Courts Press, 2005), and is working on an iconological study of the Pearl-poet.

ORIETTA DA ROLD Dott.ling.lett (IULM Milan) MA (Sheffield) PhD(DMU) | e-mail odr1@le.ac.uk
Dr Da Rold's research interests are in Medieval Literature c. 1100-1500 and Chaucer. She works on the codicology, palaeography, and language of medieval manuscripts, and their manifestation in the electronic age. She is the editor of a forthcoming electronic facsimile edition of the Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales based on Cambridge, University Library MS Dd.4.24, and has written on Chaucer's scribal and manuscript cultures, and in particular on the textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales. She has also published on English twelfth-century literary manuscript production and is a director of the AHRC funded Project 'The Production and Use of English Manuscripts' based in the School of English. Her project on the Paper Manuscripts in Medieval England is currently being developed, whose initial stages were funded by 'The Bibliographical Society' with a Falconer Madan Award, which led to a visiting scholarship at Wolfson College, Oxford.

GOWAN DAWSON BA (East Anglia) MA (Nottingham) PhD (Sheffield) | e-mail gd31@le.ac.uk
Dr Dawson’s main research interests are in the nineteenth century, especially in the interrelations between Victorian literature and science, as well as in the print culture of the period.  He has published several articles on these areas, and is co-author of Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and co-editor of Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Ashgate, 2004).  He is also co-author of a major online database, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: An Electronic Index, which was published by the Humanities Research Institute Online Press (www.hrionline.ac.uk/) in 2005.  Additionally, he is the guest editor, with Sally Shuttleworth, of a special number of the journal Victorian Poetry on ‘Science and Victorian Poetry’ (2003), and has contributed several entries to the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists (Thoemmes, 2004).  Dr Dawson has recently completed an interdisciplinary book entitled Aestheticism, Obscenity and the Victorian Debates over Darwin.

NICK EVERETT BA (Oxford) | e-mail ngre1@le.ac.uk
Nick Everett’s current research interests include poetic form and metre in twentieth century American and British poetry and American literary autobiography.  He has published essays on the work of a number of writers including John Berryman, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery, William Faulkner, Jonathan Aaron and Walt Whitman, and reviews poetry for the Times Literary Supplement.

DAVID FARRIER BA MA PhD (Leeds) | e-mail df59 @le.ac.uk
Dr Farrier's research interests are related to issues of movement, representation, and place, and coalesce in a number of areas of study: Caribbean, Pacific, and settler writing; colonial and imperial discourse; travel writing; the relationship between literary and ethnographic writing; and the representation of refugees, most particularly in the language of the asylum system.  He has published articles on Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Louis Stevenson, and is the author of Unsettled Narratives: the Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville, and London, which is forthcoming in the Routledge series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory: Outstanding Dissertations.  He is currently interested in contemporary representations of refugees and asylum seekers in literature and film.

HOLLY FURNEAUX BA(Kings, London), MA PhD (Birkbeck, London)  | e-mail hf35@le.ac.uk
Dr Furneaux's main research interests are in the nineteenth century, especially in gender, sexuality, the body, medicine and the Victorian novel.  She has published several articles and presented research at various UK and overseas conferences on these areas, and has recently co-edited, with Anne Schwan, a collection 'Dickens and Sex', which developed from a successful international conference that she organised (University of London, 2004).  She is now finishing a book project, Queer Dickens, which explores the affirmative representations of same-sex desire and non-formative 'families of choice' in the novels of Dickens, and how this fiction draws on and develops wider cultural strategies of queer expression.  She is also embarking on a new interdisciplinary book-length exporation of the literary and social history of male nursing in the long nineteenth century.

SARAH GRAHAM  BA , MPhil (Stirling), PhD (Leeds) | email shsg1@leicester.ac.uk
Dr Graham's research interests principally lie in twentieth century American texts: Modernism, twentieth century poetry by women, and contemporary fiction.  Her work focuses on issues of gender, sexuality and trauma.  She has published articles on war trauma and mourning in the poetry of H.D. and is currently writing a book on this subject.  She also works on texts concerned with adolescence - fiction and memoir - and is editing a collection of essays on The Catcher in the Rye.  She is interested in the relationship between autobiographical writing and trauma and is contributing an essay on Dave Eggers to a forthcoming collection on contemporary confessional writing.

MARTIN HALLIWELL BA MA (Exeter) PhD (Nottingham) | e-mail mrh17@le.ac.uk
 Professor Halliwell’s main research interests are in the areas of American literature and film, critical theory, twentieth-century fiction, and transatlantic cultural history.  He has published on modernism, film adaptations, representations of mental illness, and American intellectual history, and is the author of five books:  Romantic Science and the Experience of Self (1999), Modernism and Morality (2001), Critical Humanisms (2003), Images of Idiocy (2004) and The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (2005).  He is currently working on a book on American culture in the 1950s.  He is editor of the Twentieth-Century American Culture series and co-editor of the Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature series, both with Edinburgh University Press.  Professor Halliwell is Head of the School of English.

FELICITY JAMES BA MSt DPhil (Oxford) | email fj21@le.ac.uk
Dr. James's research focuses on sociability, allusion and exchange through the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on Dissenting authors and communities.  Her research interests include Charles Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Romantic friendship, and she has also published essays on Jane Austen and on Unitarian authors.  She is the author of Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Palgrave, 2008) and is now working on a study of Unitarian biography and life-writing, Dissenting Lives: Telling the Stories of Unitarianism, 1774-1865.  She is currently co-editing a collection of essays, The Dissenting Mind: The Aikin Circle, c.1740s to c.1860s, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

SARAH KNIGHT BA (Oxford) MA (London) PhD (Yale) | email sk218@le.ac.uk
Dr Knight’s main interests are in Renaissance literature, particularly comedy and satire in English and Latin, and in the intellectual and literary culture of the early modern universities. She has translated and co-edited Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus, a Latin prose satire (Harvard, 2003), and has written essays on Jacobean satire, early modern print culture, and the depiction of ‘Englishness’ in the war films of Powell and Pressburger. She is editing and translating the accounts of Elizabeth I’s visits to the University of Oxford for Court and Culture in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth: A New Critical Edition of John Nichols’ The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth I, and is co-editor of Monarchy in Motion: The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I (both OUP, forthcoming). She co-edits (with Dr Jayne Archer) Renaissance Journal, published by the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures, University of Warwick (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/publications/journal/). Dr Knight is currently working on a study of academic drama and representations of scholars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and on shorter studies of English and Latin bilingualism in early modern England, and institutional rivalry between the Renaissance universities and the Inns of Court.

CLARE LITTLEFORD BA (York), MA (Nottingham Trent)
Clare Littleford is a part-time tutor teaching the Writing Fiction module.  She has published two novels, Beholden (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Death Duty (Simon & Shuster, 2004) as well as several pieces of work in a variety of anthologies.  She is crime fiction reviewer for the Yorkshire Post and a member of both the Crime Writer's Association and the Society of Authors.  As part of the innovative collaborative writing and performance project Hazard Warning she has toured nationally with live literature works The Last Harvest and Blood Mother.  She is currently writing a literary novel, a crime novella and, in collaboration, a full-length screenplay.

KATE LOVEMAN BA (Cambridge), MA (York), PhD (Cambridge) | email kate.loveman@le.ac.uk
Dr Loveman researches into seventeenth and early eighteenth-century literature and history. Her particular interests are in the areas of reading habits, political writing, and sociability. She has published articles on Restoration drama, rogue literature, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Pepys. She has recently completed a book on deception in literary culture and is now working on a book about reading and news-gathering in Pepys' circle.

MARY ANN LUND MA (Oxon) MPhil DPhil
Dr Lund works on early modern literature, with particular research interests in prose, religion, and the history of medicine. She has written a book on The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton, and articles on Burton, John Donne, Sir Thomas Borwne, and John Bunyan. She is currently editing volume 12 of The Complete Sermons of John Donne, and is writing a book on the experience of illness in early modern literature.

GAIL MARSHALL BA (Durham) MA (Leeds) PhD (Cambridge)
Professor Gail Marshall has research interests in the Victorian period, and particularly in Victorian fiction and theatre, women’s writing, the figure of the actress, Shakespeare and the Victorians, and Victorian historiography.  She is the author of Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Victorian Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 2002), and Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback 2006).  She has edited The Cambridge Companion to the fin de siecle (2007), and George Eliot, in Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), and co-edited Victorian Shakespeare: theatre, drama, performance, and Victorian Shakespeare: literature and culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) with Adrian Poole.  She is general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series ‘Lives of Shakespearean Actors’.  Edited volumes on Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press) and Great Shakespeareans: Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Jameson, Cushman (Continuum) are forthcoming.  Gail Marshall is currently working on a monograph on the literature and culture of 1859.

CATHERINE MORLEY BA MA (Cork) PhD (Oxford Brookes) | email cm260@le.ac.uk
Dr Morley’s research focuses on identity, ethnicity, gender and cultural nationalism in modern and contemporary American literature. She is especially interested in transatlantic and transnational culture, American modernism and narratives of trauma after September 11. She is the author of The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge, 2008) and is currently working on Modern American Literature (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2010). She is also the co-editor of two volumes: American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2009). She has also published numerous scholarly chapters and articles on subjects such as American writing in the wake of 9/11, transnational influences in the work of Willa Cather, the influence of Samuel Beckett on Paul Auster, and various articles on the novels of Philip Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo. She is also researching a new monograph on the modern American writer Willa Cather. Dr Morley is the Secretary of the British Association for American Studies and she sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Studies.

JULIAN NORTH BA DPhil (Oxford) | e-mail jrn8@le.ac.uk
Dr North’s main research interests are in nineteenth-century literature, particularly Romantic and early Victorian biography and autobiography, drug literature, aestheticism and decadence.  She has edited volume 11 and co-edited volume 20 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 21 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2000-2003) and is author of a study of De Quincey’s critical reputation: De Quincey Reviewed (Camden House, 1997).  Amongst her other publications are articles and chapters on Romantic biography and autobiography, Jane Austen adaptations, opium and criminality in Victorian literature, and French and British theories of literary decadence.  Her current project is The Domestication of Genius, a book on the nature and history of literary biography, with a focus on early Lives of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Felicia Hemans.

EMMA PARKER BA PhD (Birmingham) | e-mail ep27@le.ac.uk
Dr Parker’s research focuses on contemporary women writers and feminist literary theory.  She has published essays on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and contributed to The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999).  She is the author of Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader’s Guide (2002) and editor of Contemporary British Women Writers (2004).  She is currently writing a book on Michèle Roberts.

MARK RAWLINSON BA MPhil DPhil (Oxford) | e-mail mjr1@le.ac.uk
Dr Rawlinson has many interests in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry and prose. He is the author of British Writing of the Second World War (Clarendon Press, 2000) and is finishing a sequel on the Second World War in British fiction since 1945.  He is editing the Norton Critical Edition of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, writing a monograph on the fiction of Pat Barker, and researching a cultural history of camouflage.  He is married with a son and a daughter.

JOANNE SHATTOCK BA (New Brunswick) MA (Leeds) PhD (London) | e-mail ejs4@le.ac.uk
Professor Shattock has research interests in the nineteenth century, particularly the Victorian period, and is Director of the Victorian Studies Centre. She is general editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell being published in ten volumes in 2005-6, and editor of vol. 1 on Gaskell’s Journalism (2005). She has edited Women and Literature 1800-1900 for Cambridge University Press (2001) and the fourth volume (1800-1900) of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature 3rd edition (1999). She has published The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (Oxford University Press 1993, paperback 1994), Politics and Reviewers (1989), and edited Dickens and other Victorians (1988), and co-edited, with Michael Wolff, The Victorian Periodical Press (1982).  She is co-editor, with Vincent Newey, of a monograph series, The Nineteenth Century, published by Ashgate, and an associate editor of the New DNB. She is currently general editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell to be published in ten volumes in 2005-6, and she is editing The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1900. 

PHILIP A. SHAW BA (Oxford) PhD (Leeds) | email ps209@le.ac.uk
Dr Philip Shaw's research focuses on Old English and other early Germanic languages, with particular interests in linguistic evidence for pagan religious life and conversion to Christianity.  He has published on a range of areas of medieval language and literature, including Old Norse mytholgraphy, Old English charms, hairstyles on Old English literature, miracles of the Virgin Mary and Anglo-Saxon coin inscriptions.  He has recently completed a book on language and paganism for Duckworth, and, together with Joan C. Beal, updated Charles Barber's The English Language: A Historical Introduction for its second edition.  He is currently working on the language of time divisions in the early Middle Ages and the conception of a Germanic pantheon among early medieval Christians.

PHILIP J. SHAW BA PhD (Liverpool) | e-mail ps14@le.ac.uk
Dr Shaw has research interests in Romantic poetry and prose, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics.  He has published articles on a range of Romantic critical topics.  His most recent publications include, The Sublime (2005), Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1789-1822 (2000) and, as co-editor with Vincent Newey, Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography (1996).  He has also written articles on Wordsworth and Byron, on eighteenth century military painting, and on Goya’s Disasters of War. He is currently at work on a study of the representation of conflict and suffering in British Romanticism.

MARTIN STANNARD BA(Warwick) MA(Sussex) DPhil(Oxford) | e-mail maj@le.ac.uk
Professor Stannard has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, following The Critical Heritage with the first volume of a major biography, Evelyn Waugh. The Early Years: 1903–1939, which was selected by the New York Times as one of the twelve best books of the year in 1986. The concluding volume, Evelyn Waugh. No Abiding City: 1939–1966, was published in 1992 and selected by Frank Kermode, Jonathan Raban, William Trevor, and Muriel Spark as one of their ‘Books of the Year’. In 1999, William Boyd selected both volumes as one of his ‘Books of the Millennium’. Professor Stannard has also published essays and review-essays on Kingsley Amis, Michael Arlen, David Garnett, William Gerhardie, Graham Greene, Dickens, Ford Madox Ford, Christopher Isherwood, Philip Larkin and Muriel Spark.  In 1995 he published the Norton Critical Edition of Ford’s The Good Soldier, which has been chosen as a set text for two consecutive years by the French Ministry of Education for their doctoral qualifying examination.  He is currently completing the authorised biography of Muriel Spark, a section of which won an Arts Council Writers Award in 1998.  He has served on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors and is currently the Faculty’s Sub-Dean for Graduate Studies.

VICTORIA STEWART BA(Sheffield) MA PhD(Leeds)  e-mail vas6@le.ac.uk
Dr Stewart's research interests focus on twentieth century and contemporary British writing.  She has published on topics including autobiography, First World War writing, the literature of the 1940s, and the representation of the Holocaust.  Her book Women's Autobiography: War and Trauma (2003) is an examination of the work of writers including Vera Brittain, Anne Frank and Virginia Woolf from the perspective of trauma theory.  In her new book, Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (forthcoming), she considers how memory was treated in the novel during and immediately after the Second World War.  She has also published on contemporary British drama.  her current projects include articles on the representation of the First World War during the Second World War, and on the depiction of memory in the contemporary novel.

Recent Research Topics

The following are some of the titles of dissertations produced by students over the years:

Next Step: Request an Information Pack

Further Information and Applications

Please contact Dr Victoria Stewart (Course Director) or Dr Paula Warrington (Postgraduate Administrator).

[University Home][English Department Home][University Index A-Z][University Search][University Help]

Last updated: 7th December 2009
English Web Maintainer
This document has been approved by the head of department or section.