The following summary indicates our principal areas of research expertise. Please view our staff profiles for further possible research topics.
Our work in Medieval English ( for example, Old English, Chaucer, Langland, Lollard writing, Reformation writing and medievalist writers such as Tolkien) extends through medieval literature into concerns with editing, print production, bibliography, manuscript studies, and non-manuscript verbal cultures of the Middle Ages; and also with relations between medieval verbal and visual cultures. In the Early Modern area (for example, Brown, Daniel, Donne, Johnson, Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, Spenser), our focus on drama extends into the reception of the dramatists in later periods, running alongside work on cultures of manuscript, print and 17th century women’s writing. In Restoration, 18th century and Romantics (for example, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Goldsmith) we focus on reading literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, with special interests in the editing of texts, in language and lexicography, in reception of the medieval, and in gender.
Our 19th century, 20th century, and contemporary research (for example, J.G.Ballard, Conrad, Dickens, T.S.Eliot, Michael Field, Wyndham Lewis, Zadie Smith) has a particular focus on the period 1830–1940 (especially Victorianism, Aestheticism and Modernism, literature and science, periodisation, and historiography); and on Postmodernism, Cultural Theory, Postcolonialism and Film (especially psychoanalysis, nationhood, space and place, Black British and British Asian writing, gender and sexualities, and literary and cultural studies). The research themes of materiality of the text (for example, textual editing, history of the book, media history) and gender (for example, women writers, relevant theoretical approaches) can be pursued across all these periods.