Literature, Art and Film

Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter (1662-65, Oil on canvas)

Six members of the School of English and Centre for American Studies have research and teaching interests in the relations between literature and the visual arts. We would like to consider PhD proposals from prospective graduate students interested in exploring all aspects of the relations between writing, painting, engraving, sculpture and film.

Students enrolling for PhD study with the School of English in this exciting area of research will benefit from the School’s close ties with the Department of History of Art and Film. The Department of History of Art and Film has its own slide room, which houses the collection of 100,000 slides; 70,000 photographs and 100 original prints. There is also a collection of reference books, an on-line computer and a collection of CD-ROMs and videos. 

The Film/Literature Reading Group has now been launched: to find out more, please e-mail David Clark, Julian North or Sarah Knight

We can offer dedicated supervision in the following areas:

Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature and Iconology

Dr Anne Marie D'Arcy, a specialist in late Medieval and early Renaissance literature and iconology, would welcome applications from students interested in working on all aspects of the relations between early medieval and Renaissance literature, early twentieth-century literature and the visual arts. 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 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000) and has published widely on medieval and early modern wisdom literature, medieval Romance in English and French, religious writing, the social and moral aspects of disease in medieval society, the patristic origins of medieval anti-Judaism, neo-platonism and political theology.

She has also had a consistent engagement with nineteenth and twentieth-century medievalism. Over the past decade she has given a series of guest lectures on the Insular and early medieval sources of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, with particular reference to the manuscript collection of Trinity College Dublin, where she studied Medieval and Renaissance English and History of Art and is now an Honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She is currently working on two forthcoming monographs: The Artifice of Eternity: Mariology in the English Poetic Tradition and Joyce's Saints and Sages: The Involution of the Insular Imagination.

Medievalism and Film

Dr David Clark specialises in medieval literature with a current focus on medieval gender and sexuality and the modern reception of medieval literature. In addition to his medieval research, he has co-edited Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (Viking Society for Northern Research, 2007), and Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Boydell & Brewer, 2010). He is currently working on film versions of Beowulf and other medieval texts, and co-editing a special issue of Arthurian Literature: Blood, Sex, Malory: the Morte Darthur, its sources and reception. Dr Clark would welcome enquiries from postgraduate students interested in the reception of the Middle Ages in 20th/21st-century literature (especially children’s literature) and film.

American Medicine: Fiction, Film and Art

Professor Martin Halliwell’s research interests are in the areas of American literature and film, twentieth-century fiction and transatlantic culture. He has published widely on modernism, film adaptations, representations of illness, and American intellectual and cultural history.

Professor Halliwell’s current project examines the visual representations of medicine, psychiatry and illness after World War II. Focusing particularly on American fiction, film, documentary and art, this research uses a range of sources from medical and film archives including the Wellcome Trust, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine and the UCLA Film Archive to explore the diversity of visual representations of illness in the period 1945 to 1970. Professor Halliwell would particularly welcome applications for PhD research that engaged with aspects of this topic.

Mid Twentieth-Century Cinema and Literary Adaptations

Dr Sarah Knight works mainly on early modern literature, particularly satire and drama written in English and Latin, and on the literary culture of the English universities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prompted by a long-standing interest in films of the 1930s and '40s, she has recently begun to investigate Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with the British stage in the first half of the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in Hitchcock’s connections with the du Maurier family, with special emphasis on his adaptation of Rebecca (1940). Dr Knight welcomes applications from students interested in researching the connections between early and mid-twentieth century cinema and adaptations of literature.

Jane Austen, Romanticism and Film

Dr Julian North has research interests in nineteenth-century literature, particularly 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 has written numerous articles and chapters on Romantic and Victorian topics. She has recently completed a book on romantic poetry and the creation of literary biography entitled The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Dr North’s interest in the relations between literature and film is reflected in two publications: Jane Austen's Life on Page and Screen’, in Gillian Dow and Claire Hanson (eds), Jane Austen (Palgrave, forthcoming 2010) and ‘Radical Austen, Conservative Austen: Sense and Sensibility from Text to Screen’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999). She would particularly welcome applications for PhD research which focus on adaptations of Austen and the relations between eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, biography and film.

Romanticism: Art and the Sublime

                    Professor Philip Shaw maintains research interests in romanticism and visual culture, in the history and theory of the sublime, and in contemporary art. He is the author of an inter-disciplinary study, entitled Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), which examines the representation of the battle of Waterloo, and has written a book on the concept of the sublime for the New Critical Idiom series (London: Routledge, 2006). An art historical book, entitled Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art, 1783-1856, is due for publication by Ashgate in 2010.

Professor Shaw is currently working on an inter-disciplinary project with Tate Britain, entitled The Sublime Object. Drawing together a wide range of individuals under the umbrella of Tate's collection, the aim of this project is to debate and collaborate on a series of interrelated events and research activities focused on the role of the sublime in our perceptions of the natural world.

Professor Shaw would like to encourage PhD proposals that focus on the relations between war, literature and the visual arts and/or on the history and theory of the sublime.

The American City, Literature and the Visual Arts

Professor Douglas Tallack is interested in receiving applications for PhD research that focus on the representation of the American city. His current project explores the transition of the American city from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, considering the interrelationship between changes to the built environment with urban representations in literature, painting, film and architectural design. It has already led to a number of outputs, including New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York (2005) and two electronic books, the 3 Cities Project 3 Cities Project (2000) and Global Cities/Local Sights Global Cities/Local Sights  (2009).

Last updated: 08 April 2009
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