
Professor of English Literature
Department of English Literature
My research interests are primarily in the area of early modern literature (1500-1800), particularly religious poetry and prose, the works of John Donne, John Milton and Thomas Browne, the history of the book, textual editing, applications of computational linguistics to literary criticism, and genetic criticism. Selected works-in-progress include a monograph on John Donne's library and reading, ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 5672
- Email
- h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk
I am interested in supervising MA, MRes and PhD candidates in the following areas and will be pleased to respond to enquiries:
John Donne and his contemporaries
Seventeenth-century religious poetry and prose
John Milton and his contemporaries
Early modern print and manuscript culture
Applications of computational linguistics to early modern literature
Research projects currently or recently supervised or co-supervised include:
PhD, ‘Soteriology in the Writing of Edmund Spenser’
PhD, ‘Prose ...

Honorary Reader in English Literature
Department of English Literature
Now retired from the University, I continue to contribute to the University’s research profile as Director of the British Book Trade Index and through my continuing research and publications.
- Email
- m.bell@bham.ac.uk

Lecturer in Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Department of English Literature
I research eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially letter-writing and archive formation, prose style and the development of the novel, authorial reputation and literary celebrity, and the interplay between formal and material aspects of writing.
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 8697
- Email
- l.curran@bham.ac.uk
I welcome enquiries about research supervision in the following areas: letter-writing and archive formation; literary fame and celebrity; the eighteenth-century novel and prose style; life-writing from the eighteenth-century to the Romantic period; textual editing; eighteenth-century satire.

Senior Lecturer in United States History
Department of History
Tom Cutterham is a historian of Revolutionary America and the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He teaches the history of North America from the first English colonisations to the end of the nineteenth century, including courses on women in the American Revolution and the meaning of freedom in American history. Following his first book, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the ...
- Telephone
- 0121 414 5747
- Email
- t.cutterham@bham.ac.uk
Dr Cutterham is able to co-supervise post-graduate work in many areas of Atlantic and American history, from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in projects which address the eighteenth-century transformations of the British Atlantic world, including the American Revolution, and in work which seeks to grapple with the history of commerce, capitalism, and/or political thought in this period.

Senior Lecturer in Regional and Local History
Director, Centre for West Midlands History
Department of History
I am a social and regional historian with teaching and research interests in the history of the West Midlands region after 1700 and the history of ethnic minorities and anti-slavery. I am also Editor-in-Chief of the History West Midlands project.
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 415 8253
- Email
- m.m.dick@bham.ac.uk
I am able to offer supervision in the following areas:
The history of the West Midlands since 1700
The social and cultural history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
I have successfully supervised several research degrees since 2010. These include:
Close Encounters: The Personal and Social Life of Anna Seward, 1742-1809 (with English), MLitt, 2011
Robert Bage's contribution to social equality (with English), MLitt, 2011
Elizabeth Cadbury, 1858-1951 (AHRC ...

Director of the Shakespeare Institute; Professor of Shakespeare Studies
Shakespeare Institute
Like his own Falstaff, Shakespeare is not only witty in himself but is the cause that wit is in others. My career as a teacher of and writer about Shakespeare’s plays and poems has been devoted not just to examining these extraordinary writings in their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contexts, but to exploring how they have stimulated and enabled the creativity of other people, ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 9508
- Email
- m.dobson@bham.ac.uk
I supervise research students interested in: the performance and reception history of the Shakespeare canon, both within the Anglophone world and beyond; the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company; the history of amateur performance; Shakespeare’s afterlives.

Reader in Modern Languages
Department of Modern Languages
My research interests focus on the relationship between social and political inequalities and German culture in the period between 1750 and 1850. I have a particular interest in outsider figures, and above all the work of J.M.R. Lenz and Heinrich von Kleist. I have recently published a monograph on German-language pastoral writing, and am currently working on projects on the ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 6178
- Email
- e.griffiths@bham.ac.uk
My main research interests are in German literature of the period 1750-1850, with a particular interest in how social and political tensions manifest themselves in German culture. I have also supervised doctoral work on German-language cinema and have a particular interest in contemporary German and Austrian film. I am currently supervising a number of PhD projects, on German-language writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If you have a project ...

Professorial Fellow and Professor of Cultural History
Department of History
My teaching focusses on the social and cultural aspects of eighteenth-century Britain. I'm particularly interested in how men and women experienced their lives in the context of wider understandings of power, gender and the body.
- Telephone
- +44(0)121 41 58190
- Email
- k.l.harvey@bham.ac.uk
I offer PhD supervision in several areas of eighteenth-century British history, particularly cultural and social history and the history of gender. I welcome collaborations with external partners. I am currently supervising PhDs including ones on women landowners in Shropshire, 1760-1860 (Sara Downs), black women in eighteenth-century England (Montaz Marche), curiosity in the eighteenth century (Jenni Dixon), women in seventeenth-century ballads (Eleanor Sutton) and experiences of separation in East India Company ...
Emeritus Professor of German Studies
Department of Modern Languages
My main research interests lie in the literature, culture and society of Germany around the end of the eighteenth century.
- Email
- d.d.hill@bham.ac.uk

Teaching Fellow in Early Modern History
Department of History
I am a social and cultural historian of gender, objects, and consumerism in the long eighteenth century (1666–1832). I have broad research interests in the history of gender (particularly masculinity and manhood), domestic life, religion, manufacturing and consumption (in both a national and international context), material and visual culture, and the built environment in the early modern ...
- Email
- b.jackson.1@bham.ac.uk

Professor of English Literature
Head of School of English, Drama and Creative Studies
Department of English Literature
My teaching and my research interests move across the early modern and into the Romantic periods, with a particular focus on the way in which later writers respond to, adapt and receive earlier writers. My current projects include research on Ben Jonson’s poetry, the writing of Dryden and Congreve, and a British Academy-funded project on the professional and creative life of the early poet ...
- Telephone
- 0121 414 5679
- Email
- t.e.lockwood@bham.ac.uk
I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students across the range of my teaching and research interests.
I have been the lead or co-supervisor for a number of students who have completed their doctorates:
Wendy Trevor, whose thesis explored the varieties of dramatised male friendship in the early modern period, and is now Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs at Maria College, NY ;
Natalie Aldred, who edited William Haughton's play, ...

Director, Social Studies in Medicine
Institute of Applied Health Research
Professor Jonathan Reinarz is the Director of The History of Medicine Unit. He is Professor of the History of Medicine.
Jonathan has published extensively on the history of hospitals and medical education, including a history of the Birmingham teaching hospitals (2009), the history of the senses, especially smell, and the history of accidents, including burns and scalds. Most recently has led an ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 415 8122
- Email
- j.reinarz@bham.ac.uk
Dr Reinarz is interested in supervising doctoral research students in the following areas:
The history of medical institutions, including hospitals, workhouses, dispensaries and medical schools since 1750
The history of health and illness in the English midlands
The history of patients’ experiences of health and illness over the last two centuries
Children’s health and illness, and institutional care since 1750
The history of the senses, and particularly the cultural history ...

Professor Emeritus
Department of English Literature
My main enthusiasm is for eighteenth-century poetry and satire, particularly the work of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and I have a special interest in textual editing, having produced, over the last few years, editions of Pope’s Dunciad and of hoaxes and parodies by Swift.
- Email
- v.rumbold@bham.ac.uk
Lecturer in South Asian History
Department of History
I am a historian of modern South Asia (present day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). My research interests range from the early colonial period with the coming of the East India Company’s rule to the late colonial period – the mobilization of Indian soldiers transforming the First World War into a global conflict. I am particularly interested in histories of gender based ...
- Email
- m.sehgal@bham.ac.uk

Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century History
Department of History
I am an historian of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and empire. I research how historical actors produced, consumed, and derived meaning from, the material world. I am currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Losing Possession in the Long Eighteenth Century. My recent books include, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700-1830 (2014), N ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 4145756
- Email
- k.smith@bham.ac.uk
Kate encourages contact from potential postgraduate students considering working on the following areas: eighteenth-century British material culture, women, domestic spaces, property, emotions, the senses, trade, consumption, manufacturing or skill.

Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Applied Health Research
Leonard Smith is a social historian with a special interest in the history of psychiatry and mental health institutions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. His research has focussed primarily on England and the former British West Indian colonies. It encompasses the development of both private madhouses and public lunatic asylums, those who established and managed them, and the ...
- Email
- l.d.smith@bham.ac.uk
Dr Smith is currently the co-supervisor for two people undertaking PhD study.
Emeritus Professor of Music
Department of Music
I am a musicologist specialising in Italian secular vocal music (opera and chamber cantata) of the late Baroque period, especially Agostino Steffani, and in the music of George Frideric Handel.
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 5782 (secretary)
- Email
- c.r.timms@bham.ac.uk
Successful Ph.D. dissertations on Thomas Morley as a Music Publisher, Schuetz’s Passion settings, the cantata spirituale e morale, Handel’s opera Poro, Domenico Dragonetti, Tchaikovsky’s songs and Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas.
Find out more - our Music postgraduate study page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Senior Lecturer
Department of English Literature
I research the literary culture of the long eighteenth century, and my specialisms include eighteenth-century publications of renaissance poetry and drama, digital humanities, and the poetry of Alexander Pope.
- Email
- h.j.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk
I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in the following areas: the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century; the history of the book; digital humanities; literary editing; poetry; renaissance literature; Edmund Spenser; Alexander Pope; reception studies.
Current supervision projects include the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century.

Professor of English and Irish Literature
Department of English Literature
I hold a chair in English and Irish Literature. My research and teaching both focus on literature from the early modern period, and in particular on poetry, women’s writing, and book history and editing. I am a General Editor on the AHRC-funded Cambridge edition of The Works of Aphra Behn, for which I am editing Behn’s poetry. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction.
I am ...
- Telephone
- +44 (0)121 414 5671
- Email
- g.wright@bham.ac.uk
I welcome applications relating to early modern English and Irish literature, and am especially interested in supervising Masters and PhD projects on women’s writing (particularly Aphra Behn), Restoration poetry, Irish literature, and environmental humanities.