English Literature

The University of Brighton offers an active, supportive and stimulating environment for English Literature PhD study in a range of literary fields.

Current and recent doctoral research includes projects on creative practice, queer performance, contemporary representations of technology, international Bohemia, the lesbian gaze in seventeenth-century Britain, independent black publishers and British travel writing on Montenegro.

Key facts

As a English Literature English Literature PhD student at University of Brighton University of Brighton , you will benefit from:

• a supervisory team comprising two or three members of academic staff. A doctoral researcher may choose to work with members of staff in the Literature team (whose specialisms range from Early Modern literature to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature) or else work on an interdisciplinary project with supervisors drawn from both literature and one of the cognate disciplines in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences or wider university (including creative writing, autoethnography, linguistics, history, philosophy, psychology, design, art and screen studies).

• desk space and access to a computer in a space specifically designed for research students. There are a range of facilities on the Falmer site include various catering options.

• access to a range of electronic resources via the university’s online library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections in the Falmer Library and other campus libraries in Moulsecoomb and in central Brighton.

Current strengths for which our provision is particularly suited include:

• Early Modern literature (Elizabethan/Jacobean)

• twentieth-century literature

• twenty-first-century / contemporary literature

• women’s writing and feminist theory 

• postcolonial literature 

• British, American and European literatures

• creative writing and autoethnography