Find a research supervisor in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Our research on eighteenth-century literature embodies a wide conception of the literate culture of the period.

We have a strong tradition of research on the leading writers of the period, notably Pope and Swift, including substantial editing projects. At the same time, we explore key developments within eighteenth-century literate culture more widely, including examining the reception of earlier writers such as Jonson and Shakespeare; teasing out interactions between literature and visual art in the period; re-evaluating the literary forgeries of Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley; and considering how dictionaries helped to form new relationships between literature and language more widely. 

Professor Hugh Adlington

Professor Hugh Adlington

Professor of English Literature

  • John Donne and his contemporaries
  • Seventeenth-century religious poetry and prose
  • John Milton and his contemporaries
  • Early modern print and manuscript culture

Dr Louise Curran

Dr Louise Curran

Lecturer in Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century English Literature

  • Samuel Richardson and epistolary fiction
  • Letter-writing and authorial archives
  • Literary fame and celebrity
  • The novel and prose style
  • Life-writing (autobiography, biography, memoir)

Jessica Fay

Jessica Fay

Assistant Professor in English Literature (Enterprise, Engagement, and Impact)

I study eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature (chiefly the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth). I am interested in patterns of formal and generic innovation, and in exploring how memory, imagination, and art shape the identities of places and people

Dr David Griffith

Dr David Griffith

Senior Lecturer in English Medieval Studies

  • Late medieval literature
  • Medieval visual culture
  • Tudor literature
  • Pre-modern drama
  • Epigraphy
  • First World War

Dr Andrew Hodgson

Dr Andrew Hodgson

Senior Lecturer in Romanticism

  • English Poetry
  • Romantic-period Writing and its Legacies
  • Individualism
  • Lyric Voice

Dr Sebastian Mitchell

Dr Sebastian Mitchell

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

  • Eighteenth-century literature and art
  • Romanticism
  • Intellectual history
  • Aesthetics
  • Utopianism
  • Scottish literature

Dr Kate Rumbold

Dr Kate Rumbold

Honorary Associate Professor,

  • Eighteenth-century Shakespeare
  • Eighteenth-century fiction
  • Quotation
  • Reception
  • The uses of poetry
  • Cultural value

Dr Philippa Semper

Dr Philippa Semper

Senior Lecturer in English

  • Old English literature
  • Modern fantasy literature
  • J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Medievalism
  • Anglo-Saxon manuscripts

Dr Matthew Ward

Dr Matthew Ward

Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature

  • Romantic-period writing – especially the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats and the cockney-school
  • Literary afterlives
  • Poetry and poetics across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
  • Humour and comedy
  • Sound studies
  • The environment

Dr Emily Wingfield

Dr Emily Wingfield

Senior Lecturer

  • Older Scots Literature
  • Romance and Arthurian Literature
  • Women and the Book in the Middle Ages
  • The Trojan Legend/ medieval reception of Classical literature
  • Manuscript Studies and Book History
  • Magic and the Supernatural Chaucer and Chaucer’s Legacy (including Lydgate and Henryson)

Professor Gillian Wright

Professor Gillian Wright

Professor of English and Irish Literature

  • Aphra Behn
  • Restoration literature
  • Early modern women's writing
  • Book history
  • Samuel Daniel