Postgraduate Research
The PhD students who join our department appreciate the stimulating and supportive graduate culture that we nurture. On joining King’s you will be assigned a principal and secondary supervisor who guide your research and development. In order that graduate study is not an isolated experience, we have made it our mission to create an inclusive and lively research culture. Thus all first year PhD students are invited to join our Doctoral Seminar – a fortnightly forum for developing ideas and critical approaches. Student-run activities include regular ‘Skills Lunches’; the ‘Abstract’, a postgraduate reading group; and our annual postgraduate conference. You may well find yourself publishing work in Stet, our postgraduate on-line journal. And there are numerous occasions to participate in the seminars, symposia, and conferences organised by members of the department in your own research area. As part of your professional training, you will participate in our Graduate Teaching Assistantship scheme, through which all PhD students have the opportunity to teach in the department.
Below is a selection of the wide range of themes and topics that our PhD students are currently researching. We have a flourishing community of over 100 doctoral students who come from all over the world. Some of them have taken our MAs, but not all. All of them are dynamic young academics-in-the-making, and together they make up a vibrant and vital part of our department.
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‘Things’ in Anglo Saxon literature and culture;
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metaphors of the machine in 16th and 17th century England;
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travel writing about Persia;
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the blush in early modern drama;
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18th-century roads and stagecoaches;
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the Arabian Nights in 19th-century Britain;
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American literary regionalism;
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urban modernity and abjection
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boredom, the Northern Irish “Troubles” and post-conflict culture;
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Woolf’s modernism
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JG Ballard’s urban dystopias
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South Asian literatures and postcolonialism
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the ‘unstageable’ in contemporary performance;
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occult detectives.
Being a PhD student in King’s means that you can easily take advantage of the rich research resources of London, where many of the best libraries, archives and collections in the world are close at hand. You will be part of the extraordinary intellectual culture of major world city, and able to explore its rich histories, and its palpable and dynamic futures.
Many of our PhD students have gone on to academic careers, and are now teaching in universities across the world.