Information about our Teaching and Research

In the early modern period, Dr Jem Bloomfield and Professor Nicola Royan all have research interests encompassing prose, poetry, drama, and historiography.  Nicola Royan has particular interests in late medieval and Scottish literature and history. 

The research interests of Dr Matt Green, Professor Lynda Pratt, and Dr Adam Rounce cover the long eighteenth century and Romanticism.  Adam Rounce specialises in Restoration and 18th-century poetry and literature, particularly Dryden, Swift, Samuel Johnson and mid-century poetry. He is an editor on the Cambridge University Press edition of Swift. Lynda Pratt specialises in Robert Southey and directs a major, externally funded edition of his letters. She also has interests in ‘recovery’ research and in Romantic period manuscript and print cultures.  Matt Green is an authority on Blake and works extensively in the field of adaptation studies, researching a range of genres under that heading including film, graphic novel, and music.  Matt also has research interests in literary theory and the permeable boundaries between politics, philosophy and literature as disciplines. 

Dr Carina Hart’s research is in the global gothic, folklore and fairy tale literature, and particularly the relationships between these fields.  Dr Kate Kim McLean’s interests include manuscripts and the history of the book, the depiction and agency of women in late medieval literature, the construction of display and the presentation of self.  The research interests of Professor Máire ní Fhlathúin centre on nineteenth-century literature. Máire works on the literature of British India from the late eighteenth century to 1947, and also has research interests in the areas of Romanticism, travel-writing and crime fiction.  Dr Rebekah Scott has research interests that bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and her research focuses on English and American literature from the Victorian and Modernist periods; transatlantic literary and philosophical relations; music and literature.  

In the field of twentieth-century and contemporary literature, we have several staff actively researching a range of areas, topics, and writers. Several focus on literary modernisms, both in regional and international contexts.  Dr Sarah Davison’s research is in the field of James Joyce and genetic criticism, with a special interest in modernist forms of parody. Dr Joel Evans has research interests in modern and contemporary literature and cinema; cultural theory and criticism; and contemporary theories and philosophies of media. 
Dr Andrew Harrison (who directs the D.H. Lawrence Research Centre) works on D.H. Lawrence, twentieth-century literature and biography.  Dr Joe Jackson’s research focuses on postcolonial theory, and race, nationhood and citizenship in contemporary British fiction.  Dr Ben Masters’ research encompasses prose writing (especially the novel form) from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular focus on the long post-war to present period.   Dr Steven Morrison has research interests in James Joyce; Modernism; Irish Modernism, fiction of the Cold War and nuclear fiction; modern Irish poetry; modern and contemporary British fiction; postmodern fiction; prize culture.  
Dr Vicky Sparrow’s writing and research focus is on poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on women’s writing and the politics of creative practice. 

Dr Richard Fallon is a Research Fellow in the School.

Emeritus Professors are Professor Josephine Guy, Professor Brean Hammond, Professor Dominic Head, Professor Norman Page, Professor John Worthen

Our Centre for Literary Creativity, Community and Place (LCCP) oversees a series of fresh initiatives relating to regional cultures at both local (i.e. East Midlands) and national levels. 

The LCCP hosts research groups focusing on the work of DH Lawrence – whose writing is central to Nottinghamshire’s literary history. Our researchers in Drama and Creative Writing focus on the production and study of performance and creative practice, and the Nottingham Poetry Exchange sets up creative conversations within and beyond the School on the writing and reading of poetry and poetries. The Contemporary Literary Research Network is a forum in which to share literary research and expertise. It comprises of researchers in Drama, Linguistics and Literature.

Research in Literature 1500 to the Present has generated successful grant applications to the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy in recent years. The taught Masters related to this area of our work comprise one generalist MA in English Studies, the highly successful MA in English Literature and several pathways through the Applied English distance learning Masters programme.

Applied Linguistics is an interdisciplinary area of research, touching as it does on aspects of psychology, sociology, education, modern languages, literature, historical studies, and computational science.  Our Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL), which includes a number of interdisciplinary research groups, is housed in our school. CRAL’s infrastructure supports corpus-based research, discourse-based sociolinguistic data analysis, multi-modal data capture and analysis, eye-tracking, and behavioural response time experiments.  

Our research is concentrated in the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL). Research groups within CRAL include the Psychology of the Language Learner Research Group (directed by Christine Muir), the Bilingualism Research Group (directed by Kathy Conklin and Walter van Heuven in Psychology), Literary Linguistics group (directed by Peter Stockwell and Violeta Sotirova), Health Language Research Group (directed by Kevin Harvey, Svenja Adolphs and Louise Mullany), Linguistic Profiling for Professionals (LiPP) (directed by Louise Mullany) and the Corpus Linguistics Workshop.  

Our teaching currently includes Undergraduate modules such as: The Psychology of Bilingualism and Language Learning, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Language Development, Language and the Mind, Language in Society, Language and Feminism, Discourses of Health and Work, Advanced Stylistics and Literary Linguistics, Texts Across Time. 

We have popular Master’s programmes taught on site within the School (MA Applied Linguistics, MA Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching (ELT) and an innovative MSc Communication and Entrepreneurship, co-taught with the University’s Business School).

We also contribute to an interdisciplinary MA in English Studies.

Over the last few years, we have invested in the development of web-based e-learning materials, a pioneering move led by our staff in the English Language and Applied Linguistics section and now involving all areas of the School.  We currently have over 200 distance students based in over 40 countries across the globe studying for MAs in Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching, and Literary Linguistics, among others. 

We also provide supervision to a thriving postgraduate research student community of around 40 students.   

Our Centre for Literary Creativity, Community and Place (LCCP) oversees a series of fresh initiatives relating to regional cultures at both local (i.e. East Midlands) and national levels.  

The LCCP hosts research groups focusing on the work of DH Lawrence – whose writing is central to Nottinghamshire’s literary history. Our researchers in Drama and Creative Writing focus on the production and study of performance and creative practice, and the Nottingham Poetry Exchange sets up creative conversations within and beyond the School on the writing and reading of poetry and poetries. The Contemporary Literary Research Network is a forum in which to share literary research and expertise. It comprises of researchers in Drama, Linguistics and Literature.

The Letters Page

The Letters Page – a literary journal in letters, where submissions are all made in the form of handwritten letter sent by post – Chief Editor is Jon McGregor in collaboration with a team of our Creative Writing students. The journal gives our students the opportunity to gain practical experience in selecting and editing work for publication, and to develop skills in literary production and promotion.

Our BA English with Creative Writing degree is a major-minor degree, in which our undergraduate students will spend some time focusing on English as a discipline, and the rest of their time on creative writing. The amount of time spent on specialist creative writing modules increases year by year, to a minimum of 50% of the final year. A key aim of our degree is to expand our students’ awareness of the professional and practical contexts of their own writing.

The craft of writing and seeing creative work through to publication is developed through our dissertation-level work, opportunities to engage with published authors, and subject-related work placements that run alongside core studies.

We also offer an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing.  

Our staff currently teaching and/or researching in drama and related areas include: 

Dr Anna Blackwell, who specialises in contemporary Shakespearean actor and popular cultural or multimedia adaptations of Shakespeare.  Dr Jem Bloomfield, whose work concerns the performance history and historical reception of early modern texts; Dr Chris Collins works on performance in staging cultures and memories and Irish theatre and performance, particularly in relation to JM Synge;  Dr Sarah Grandage, who works on the language and drama interface and on creativity and drama in the school’s curriculum.
Dr Mike Rodman Jones, whose work connects medieval and early Tudor theatre with the early modern context; Professor James Moran who specialises in twentieth-century British and Irish drama; Dr Lucie Sutherland, whose research is based on the relationship between professional infrastructure and creativity within the theatre industry from the late nineteenth-century to the present day.
Dr Andy Barrett and Dr Will Green are Research Fellows in the School.

Andrew Breakwell, a former Associate Director at the Nottingham Playhouse, has Honorary Lecturer status in the School as do local writers Stephen Lowe and William Ivory. Our honorary lecturers work with students on projects and events in the School.

Emeritus Professors are Professor Janette Dillon and Professor Brean Hammond. 

Our Drama curriculum for Single Honours students currently requires them to follow a compulsory first-year module entitled Drama, Theatre, Performance (20 credits), that involves workshop practice alongside seminar discussion work.  Students may then choose up to three second-year modules: Twentieth-Century Plays, Shakespeare and his Contemporaries on the Stage, and Stanislavski to Contemporary Performance (each 20 credits). These modules aim to develop an understanding of drama as a performed medium in cultural space and time and to introduce our students to some elements of performance theory. In the third year, students can choose from a range of options in drama, which reflect the research interests of staff.   

Our drama teaching and research in the School emphasises drama as a performed medium. Most of our undergraduate modules are text-based, but there is a distinct practice-focused strand available to undergraduate students, and we encourage the exploration of texts as performed events across all modules.  We benefit from the use of two performing arts studios where much of our teaching and performance takes place.  We have a long and successful history of collaboration with local theatres (including the Nottingham Playhouse, the Theatre Royal and the university's own Lakeside Theatre) on undergraduate and postgraduate work, thus opening up access to a further range of professional skills and technical resources. We have two on-site MA modules that include content relating to modern theatre and early modern drama, and we are developing Drama provision for the School of English’s innovative Applied Englishes distance learning programme. 

We also accept candidates to study for both traditional and practice-based PhDs, and have supervised Collaborative Doctoral Awards with the British Library, Nottingham Playhouse Roundabout, and New Perspectives Theatre Company. 

 Members of staff in our section are: 

• Dr John Baker (Name-Studies, Landscape History)
• Professor Jayne Carroll (Name-Studies, History of English, early medieval poetry)
• Dr Martin Findell (History of the English Language)
• Dr Rebecca Gregory (English place-names; personal names; historical semantics; history of English)
• Professor Judith Jesch (Old Norse and Viking Studies)
• Dr Mike Rodman Jones (Early English Studies - Middle English) 
• Dr Dana Key (Medieval and early modern English drama)
• Dr Christina Lee (Viking and English Medieval English Studies)
• Dr Joanna Martin (Middle English and Older Scots literature)
• Dr Kate Olley (Viking Studies)
• Professor Nicola Royan (Medieval, early modern, and Scottish literature
• Dr Matthew Blake is a Research Fellow 
• Debra Powell is a Research Assistant

Emeritus members are:

• Emeritus Professor Richard Marsden (Old English language and literature, history of English) 
• Emeritus Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre (Middle English language and literature)

 Our current and recent funded research projects in the Medieval section include:

• Medieval Proteins from a Priory (Wellcome Prime)
• Enhancing UK Flood Resilience (AHRC)
• Learning the Landscape through Language (AHRC)
• Flood and Flow: Place-Names and the Changing Hydrology of English and Welsh Rivers (Leverhulme Trust)
• Bringing Vikings Back to the East Midlands (AHRC)
• Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England (Leverhulme Trust)
• The place-names of Shropshire (AHRC)
• The Impact of Diasporas on the Making of Britain (Leverhulme Trust)
• Landscapes of Governance: Assembly sites in England, 5th-11th centuries (Leverhulme Trust)
• The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, owners and readers (AHRC)
• Genes of Gallgoídil: Cross-disciplinary studies of migration of Irish, Hiberno-Norse and other Gaelic-speaking populations in the Viking Age (AHRC/IRCHSS)
• Languages, Myths and Finds: Translating Norse and Viking Cultures for the 21st Century (AHRC)
• Perceptions of Place: English place-name study and regional variety (AHRC)

Text editing is a particular strength of the School, and we contribute to the publications of the Early English Text Society, the Scottish Text Society, the English Place-Name Society and the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project. Prominent research themes in the work of Medieval staff are Place-Names, Viking Studies, Disease and Disability, and Genetics, Migration and Diaspora. 

All Single Honours and some Joint Honours undergraduate students currently take The Beginnings of English (Year 1) module which covers the full range of medieval languages and literatures, including Old English, Old Norse and Middle English. Optional modules in medieval studies are available in both Year 2 and Year 3 of the undergraduate programme.

Our masters programmes include the MA in Viking and Early Medieval English Studies and our MRes in Medieval Languages and Literatures.  We also offer modules for the MA in English Studies and MA degrees in Medieval Englishes and Name-Studies are also available through our Distance Learning programme. 

The Library has good holdings in the medieval fields, including the Eiríkur Benedikz Icelandic collection. There is also a small but important collection of medieval literary manuscripts.  The Institute for Name-Studies has its own working library, located in the School.