Find a supervisor

The first step in the application process is to find a supervisor with expertise in your specific research area.

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The School of English hosts a broad spectrum of researchers with expertise across linguistics, literature, creative writing and film, literary linguistics, theatre, and the intersections between these fields.

Find a PhD supervisor by subject area

Creative Writing
Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema

Dr Agnes Lehoczky

Modernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist 脕gnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays.

Film
Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Professor David Forrest British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.
Language and Linguistics

Professor Susan Fitzmaurice

Historical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes.

Professor Joanna Gavins Stylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics

Dr Kook-Hee Gil

Syntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition.

Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-Fernandez Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing.

Professor Nigel Harwood

Academic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design.

Dr Valerie Hobbs

English for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Corpus Linguistics, Language Teacher Education, Reformed Christian Discourse.

Professor Jane Hodson Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.

Dr Chris Montgomery

Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes.

Professor Emma Moore

Identity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change.

Dr Jane Mulderrig

Critical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly.

Dr Robyn Orfitelli

Syntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology

Dr Ranjan Sen

Phonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology.

Dr Richard Steadman-Jones History of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric.

Dr Gareth Walker

Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction.

Dr Sara Whiteley Stylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis

Dr Graham Williams

Historical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography.

Literature

Professor Frances Babbage

Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-si猫cle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts

Dr Veronica Barnsley

Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature

Dr Anna Barton

Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture;
Nonsense Literature

Professor Joe Bray

Stylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature.

Dr Madeleine Callaghan

Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.

Dr Fabienne Collignon

Cold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film.

Dr Katherine Ebury

Modernism; literature and science; animal studies;  law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies.

Dr Jonathan Ellis

Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema

Professor David Forrest

British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.

Professor Joanna Gavins

Stylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry

Professor Jane Hodson

Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.

Dr Michael Kindellan

20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy

Dr Hamish Mathison

Robert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature.

Professor Robert McKay

Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies

Dr John Miller

Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing

Dr Marcus Nevitt

Cheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant.

Professor Adam Piette

War Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry.

Dr Jonathan Rayner

Australasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films.

Dr Amber Regis

Victorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies.

Dr Emma Rhatigan

Early Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne

Dr Tom Rutter

Early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science.

Professor Cathy Shrank

Early Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism.

Professor Andrew Smith

Nineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science.

Dr Richard Steadman-Jones

Empire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality.

Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge

Old English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama

Professor Brendan Stone

Literature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory.

Professor Rachel Van Duyvenbode

African American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies

Dr Duco Van Oostrum

American Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture.

Professor Sue Vice

Modern and Contemporary Literature; Holocaust Studies; Film.

Dr Meredith Warren

Bible and Literature/culture; Classics and Literature/culture; Gospel of John; Revelation; Early Judaism; Senses in Antiquity

Dr Sara Whiteley

Stylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception

Professor Angela Wright

Romanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing.

Theatre and Performance
Professor Frances Babbage Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-si猫cle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts

Dr Carmen Levick

Physical Theatre; Shakespeare in Performance; Contemporary European Theatre.

Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge Medieval and sixteenth-century English, Dutch, and French drama

Next steps

Once you have found a suitable supervisor, please email them to gauge their interest and availability to supervise your project. You should provide information on your proposed research, to make sure that it is in an area they are able to supervise. 

After that, your next step is to work on your PhD Supporting Statement and Research Proposal.

At any stage, you can email englishpgr@sheffield.ac.uk for information about the application process.

Information about supervision

PhD students in the School of English have two supervisors and a personal tutor.

Primary supervisor

The primary supervisor provides academic guidance on all facets of the research. They supervise your work, offering constructive and timely feedback, and guide the project to help you to complete it within the tuition fee paying period. They will also help you to engage with the wider research community, to build peer support and to present or publish your work.

Secondary supervisor

The secondary supervisor provides guidance, feedback and support on your academic progress, with a particular focus on key milestones to support timely submission. They also take the lead in supporting your researcher/professional development.

Personal tutor

The personal tutor provides pastoral advice and referral to specialist support. They also support students in relation to matters such as Leave of Absence applications, Change of Candidature, and other major pastoral issues.

Supervision meetings

For full-time research students, we expect supervisory meetings to be held around once a month. Allowing for holidays, this means 10-12 supervisory sessions per year. For part-time students, we would expect 5-6 meetings per year.

Find a PhD

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