English Research MPhil/PhD

Joint PhDs available: Exciting opportunities to gain a joint PhD with Hong Kong University (HKU), the National University of Singapore (NUS) or Humboldt University in Berlin.

King’s is one of the oldest English departments in the country and is home to a lively and supportive group of academics and students engaged in the exploration of literary cultures from the 7th to the 21st centuries. Academics in the department have cross-period interests in visual and material cultures; literature, medicine and science; gender and sexuality; colonial, postcolonial and transnational cultures; creative writing, life writing and performance; text, history, politics.

All members of staff are actively involved in research: most have gained an international reputation for the quality of their scholarship and are frequently called on to contribute their specialist knowledge to newspapers and other media. Staff in the department regularly attract large-scale research grants from the European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Leverhulme Trust.

PhD students are at the heart of our Department and its research culture. We have over 100 doctoral students from all over the world working on a wide range of projects. Many are AHRC-funded and some are working on collaborative doctoral projects with our cultural partner institutions. Together with our community of postdoctoral fellows, our early career researchers both organise and participate in our thriving seminar and conference culture.

Research at the Department has been recognised in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, with 90 per cent overall rating for either ‘world leading’ (4*) or ‘internationally excellent’ (3*) research and 100 per cent at 4* and 3* for research environment.

Current number of academic staff: 57
Current number of research students: 122

Recent publications:

• Clare Birchall, Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America
• Adelene Buckland, Victorian Material Culture: Raw Materials
• Jon Day, Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia
• Lara Feigel, Look! We Have Come Through! Living With D.H. Lawrence
• Carl Kears, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry
• Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men
• Luke Roberts, Glacial Decoys
• Edward Sugden, Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture: Junctures of Time, Space, Self and Politics
• Benjamin Wood, The Young Accomplice: A Novel

Current and recent research projects:

• India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s
• REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation, and Conspiracy Theories (ESRC funded)
• Stories from Rwanda: Agency, Editing and New Audiences (AHRC funded)
• The Automation Imaginary, from 1822 to the Present (Leverhulme Trust funded)
• Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Oceans (Leverhulme Trust funded)

Current doctoral projects:

• Elite Female Servants in Early Modern English Drama: Gender, Race and Status in Service
• Branding Bondage: Racialised Slavery in the Mediterranean on the Early Modern English Stage (1560 - 1640)
• The Myths I Became
• The New Carthaginians / The Codex of Basquiat: Writing through his Paintings as an African Diasporic Poet
• Pretending and Performing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England
• Enacting Scripts of Mourning: Mourning Rituals in the Performing Arts in the Interwar Period, 1918-1939
• Modernist Up-topias: Imaginations of Height and Flight In Literature, Film, and Culture
• 'Dark Practices and Cunning Devices': The Materiality of Secrecy and Written Cultures of Security in Elizabethan England
• Women, Archaeology and the Provincial Press
• Changing Emotions in Early Modern Drama: Individual Agency and Social Frameworks

Joint PhDs available: Exciting opportunities to gain a joint PhD with either the National University of Singapore or Hong Kong University or Humboldt.