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English MPhil/PhD

Brunel's research strengths continue to grow as the English Department expands with the university's major investment in this area. All staff are research-active, and some of their research interests are listed below. There are several research centres in English, including the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) an established research group that has undertaken projects such as the Fiction and Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) Intitative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Various events are organised by the BCCW, as part of its role as a centre of excellence in the study of contemporary and popular literature, fiction, poetry and culture.

The English Department's active research culture is enhanced by the provision of taught postgraduate degrees, a series of lectures by contemporary writers, and research seminars covering a range of periods and fields given by leading academics whose research is internationally significant. Research can also be taken in Creative Writing, supervised by writers such as Benjamin Zephaniah, Matt Thorne and Celia Brayfield.

Supervision is offered in the following areas by tutors with specialist research interests in the following areas:

• Modernism/Intermodernism
• Contemporary British fiction
• Post-1945 avant garde British fiction
• South Asian Anglophone writing, women's writing and literatures of the black and Asian diasporas in Britain
• Translation studies and the world literature context
• The elegiac mode in postmodern poetry
• The New York School and the Avant-Garde
• Postcolonial literature and theory
• Science Fiction & Fantasy writing of the 19th and 20th centuries
• Modernist and postwar women's writing
• Popular fictions, popular culture and consumption
• The politics of cultural translation, literary production and consumption in the postcolonial field
• Early modern death; the interaction between poetry, material culture and ritual in the seventeenth century
• Early modern spectacle: Elizabethan progresses, popular culture and reception
• Old age in early modern literature and culture
• War, heroic masculinity, and the body in the early modern period
• Catholic sensationalism in Victorian literature: religious prejudice, secular anxieties, and narratives of cultural subversion
• Literature and Gerontology

Please note that the above are indicative and certainly do not cover all of the areas of expertise where staff may be capable of offering in terms of potential MPhil/PhD supervision.

For applications for MPhil/PhD by research, please click here If you genuinely have any further questions after having first read the answers to the frequently asked questions, contact our English Research Coordinator: Prof Philip Tew.

Please contact Philip if you have any questions about pursuing any research degree in English at Brunel. Do note, as indicated in detail in the answers to frequently asked questions, that his initial advice is for you to first work out roughly an idea for and topic, and next consult carefully the research and publication record of English staff at Brunel to see if we are likely to be able to offer a potential supervisor.

Some funding is available, please check to see if you are eligible.

Illustrative projects:

• "Reversing Realism: Truth, Authority and Social Reform in the Works of George MacDonald" Researcher: Jenny Neophytou
• "Mythopoeia, historiography, and metafiction in the novels of John Fowles" Researcher: Michelle Buchberger
• "The Inn Crowd: Lawyers and Jacobean city comedy" Researcher: David Westlake
• "Literary Text as Graphic Art" Researcher: Robert Stamper
• "Dreaming of Heaven": a novel. Researcher: Hallie Gordon
• "Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Pictorialism" Researcher: Myrna Nader