English Literature and English Language

We undertake world-class research which for English Literature includes the areas of medieval literature, Shakespeare, the Renaissance, Romantic and Victorian literature, modernism, twentieth-century writing, contemporary fiction and drama, women’s poetry, autobiography, working-class writing, literary theory, and postcolonial literatures. In English language, we have areas of expertise in stylistics and cognitive poetics, multimodality and multimodal literature, and lexical semantics and lexicography. 

De Montfort University’s English Research Institute exists to undertake investigations into the processes by which literary and historical works have been – and are today – created, disseminated, and consumed. This field includes literary criticism in its various historical, theoretical, and formalist modes, the study of English as a language, and creative writing as research. We specialise in the processes of literary adaptation and in the creation of critical editions of literary and historical works to convey to today’s readers the subtleties of meaning within their histories of creation, dissemination, and consumption. Increasingly these investigations draw upon digital methods, and, having pioneered some of these methods ourselves, we intend to stay at the forefront of their application to textual questions. 

The Institute of English at De Montfort University invites applications to the Midlands 4 Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Members of the Institute specialising in English Literature and Language are listed below. 

Professor Gabriel Egan – gegan@dmu.ac.uk

Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Director of the Institute of English, Director of the Centre for Textual Studies

Shakespeare, early printing, manuscripts, theatre history, cultural theory, digital methods 

Professor Deborah Cartmell – djc@dmu.ac.uk

Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor of English, Director of the Centre for Adaptations

Shakespeare, adaptation theory, film adaptation in the era of sound, the author on film 

Professor Tim Fulford – tfulford@dmu.ac.uk

Professor of English

Romanticism, eighteenth-century literature, literature and colonialism, literature and science, Robert Southey, Robert Bloomfield 

Dr Alison Hall – alison.hall@dmu.ac.uk

Pragmatics, philosophy of language, semantics 

Dr Takako Kato – tkato@dmu.ac.uk

Manuscript production and culture, digital methods, Caxton’s printshop, Chaucer, Malory 

Professor Siobhan Keenan – skeenan@dmu.ac.uk

Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature

Early modern theatre history, travelling players, early modern women’s writing 

Dr Anu Koskela – akoskela@dmu.ac.uk

Lexical semantics, lexicography, cognition; conceptual metonymy 

 

Dr Bethany Layne – bethany.layne@dmu.ac.uk

Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, biofiction, adaptation, appropriation 

Dr Sinéad Mooney – sinead.mooney@dmu.ac.uk

Samuel Beckett, modernism, Irish literature, women’s writing 

Dr Deborah Mutch – DMutch@dmu.ac.uk

Victorian literature, serialised fiction, the periodical press, fin-de-siècle and contemporary Gothic. 

Professor Joe Phelan – JPhelan@dmu.ac.uk

Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature

Nineteenth-century poetry, metre and poetic form, colonial writing, Anglo-Italian and Anglo-French literary and cultural relations. 

Dr Jamie Sherry – jamie.sherry@dmu.ac.uk

Reader in English

Adaptation, screenwriting, creative industries, the professional and industrial roles of adaptors, screenwriters, authors, and publishers 

Dr Alice Wood – alice.wood@dmu.ac.uk

Twentieth-century literature, modernism, women’s magazines, Virginia Woolf. 

Find out how to apply.