Postgraduate Research

Our Students

Below is a list of some of our current students and their projects.

 

Bethany Davison (Graduate Teaching Fellow)

Landscape, Placemaking, and Solastalgia: Comparing Literary Responses to Ecological Crisis

Bethany’s research engages with Literature and Environmental Crisis. Her thesis explores the function of the concept ‘solastalgia’ against literary texts that engage with catastrophes of nuclear testing, oil spills and disease. She is particularly interested in literature from the 1950s onwards. 

 

Stephen Gibson

Ways of Seeing in the Novels and Non-Fiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard

The interdisciplinary research area of 'visual studies' combines ideas from art history, aesthetics and literary criticism into a powerful toolkit designed to reveal the subtle interaction between the ways in which a writer sees the world and the form and content of their work. Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer and novelist internationally acclaimed for his bold attempt to bridge the gap between realism and the real in his astonishingly revealing auto-fictional novel sequence My Struggle (2013-19). He co-curated an exhibition of Edvard Munch's work at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2017, published a book on Munch linked to the exhibition in 2019 and has most recently collaborated with a number of artists on the design and illustration of the four books in his seasonal quartet sequence, Autumn (2017), Winter (2018), Spring (2018) and Summer (2018). This project seeks to explore the complex interaction between word and image, realism and the real, art and life that resonates throughout Knausgaard's work.

 

Megan Laybourn

Fan Activity and Queering the Arthurian Tradition

Situated at an intersection between the critical fields of medievalism and fan studies, Megan’s project examines how the Arthurian tradition is queered through fan fiction. Drawing upon theories of participatory medievalism and queer temporality, Megan’s research considers the ways in which both medieval and modern source texts may, through their own resistance to cisheteronormative practices, invite queer interactions. 

 

Stephen Pollicott

Exploring Hybridity in New Weird Literature (2000 – 2009)

Stephen’s research focuses on the fantasy subgenre ‘the New Weird’, which complicates genre boundaries by drawing heavily from Gothic and science fiction influences. Stephen’s PhD research identifies the ‘early New Weird’ period, approximately between 2000 and 2009, and studies works by VanderMeer, China Miéville, and K.J. Bishop. By identifying and analysing common themes of hybridity, defamiliarization, posthumanism and existentialism shared across these New Weird texts, he hopes to provide a stronger understanding of the subgenre and its continued relevance.

 

Lucy Ryell

Re-politicising the Domestic Tragedy: Gender, Violence, and Protest, c. 1580-1630

This project examines gender-related abuse and violence in domestic tragedy in the period c.1580-1630. Consulting domestic tragedy plays alongside literary and legal sources, the project considers how representations of, and responses to, abuse in early modern England produce political meaning in contemporaneous and present-day contexts. 

 

Rebecca Shipp

Walking Habits and Cultural Heritage in British Literature, 1870-1939

Rebecca's research project focusses on the walking habits of rural communities in British literature in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She is interested in how ideas of cultural heritage and national identity are formed through walking – and in particular how this informs agrarian radicalism and land reform during the period. 

 

Tommaso Villa

‘Breathtakingly Insipid’: The Hyper-Professional Sports Hero in Contemporary American Fiction 

Tommy's thesis investigates the depiction of athletes in contemporary American literary fiction about sports. Specifically, it demonstrates that, stemming from David Foster Wallace's influence, the genre has undergone a shift towards a focus on the embodied experience of the athlete. Through the lens of phenomenology, the thesis analyses that experience in the context of masculinity studies and neoliberalism studies, with a focus on authors such as Chad Harbach, Tracy O'Neill, Emily Nemens, and Gabe Habash.