With 45 members of academic staff, the Birmingham English Department has long been one of Britain's leading centres of research in English Literature and Language, and we are proud to maintain that tradition of excellence.
Because we have so many well-established resources to draw on, we continue to recruit superb young scholars who are at the forefront of that rethinking of English studies which makes research in the field so intellectually rewarding. And as a consequence we are fortunate to have a constantly renewing cadre of very able doctoral students here, who move on to successful academic careers of their own.
We have more than 100 students working on doctoral degrees, and this includes a significant number of students from around the world. Our Centre for Advanced Research in English (CARE) in collaboration with the Centre for Corpus Research and the Shakespeare Institute hosts visiting linguistics and literary scholars who come to study and write here for shorter periods (typically six months), and we encourage them to participate fully in all departmental research activities.
Beginning postgraduate students often remark on the exceptional diversity of work being pursued by members of the Department, which is partly a reflection of our openness to new applications of our various kinds of expertise, and partly a benefit of being a large community in which language and literature are often studied and taught in tandem.
Areas of research excellence
Projects