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The School of English hosts a broad spectrum of researchers with expertise across linguistics, literature, creative writing and film, literary linguistics, theatre, and the intersections between these fields.

Find a PhD supervisor by subject area

Creative Writing

Dr Jonathan Ellis	Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Dr Agnes Lehoczky	Modernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist Ágnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays.

Film

Dr Jonathan Ellis	Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Professor David Forrest	British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.

Language and Linguistics

Professor Susan Fitzmaurice	Historical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes.
Professor Joanna Gavins	Stylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics
Dr Kook-Hee Gil	Syntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition.
Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-Fernandez	Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing.
Professor Nigel Harwood	Academic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design.
Dr Valerie Hobbs	English for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Corpus Linguistics, Language Teacher Education, Reformed Christian Discourse.
Professor Jane Hodson	Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.
Dr Chris Montgomery	Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes.
Professor Emma Moore	Identity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change.
Dr Jane Mulderrig	Critical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly.
Dr Robyn Orfitelli	Syntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology
Dr Ranjan Sen	Phonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology.
Dr Richard Steadman-Jones	History of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric.
Dr Gareth Walker	Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction.
Dr Sara Whiteley	Stylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis
Dr Graham Williams	Historical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography.

Literature

Professor Frances Babbage	Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts
Dr Veronica Barnsley	Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature
Dr Anna Barton	Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture; Nonsense Literature
Professor Joe Bray	Stylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature.
Dr Madeleine Callaghan	Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.
Dr Fabienne Collignon	Cold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film.
Dr Katherine Ebury	Modernism; literature and science; animal studies;  law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies.
Dr Jonathan Ellis	Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
Professor David Forrest	British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.
Professor Joanna Gavins	Stylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry
Professor Jane Hodson	Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.
Dr Michael Kindellan	20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy
Dr Hamish Mathison	Robert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Professor Robert McKay	Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies
Dr John Miller	Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing
Dr Marcus Nevitt	Cheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant.
Professor Adam Piette	War Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry.
Dr Jonathan Rayner	Australasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films.
Dr Amber Regis	Victorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies.
Dr Emma Rhatigan	Early Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne
Dr Tom Rutter	Early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science.
Professor Cathy Shrank	Early Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism.
Professor Andrew Smith	Nineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science.
Dr Richard Steadman-Jones	Empire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality.
Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge	Old English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama
Professor Brendan Stone	Literature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory.
Professor Rachel Van Duyvenbode	African American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies
Dr Duco Van Oostrum	American Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture.
Professor Sue Vice	Modern and Contemporary Literature; Holocaust Studies; Film.
Dr Meredith Warren	Bible and Literature/culture; Classics and Literature/culture; Gospel of John; Revelation; Early Judaism; Senses in Antiquity
Dr Sara Whiteley	Stylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception
Professor Angela Wright	Romanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing.

Theatre and Performance

Professor Frances Babbage	Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts
Dr Carmen Levick	Physical Theatre; Shakespeare in Performance; Contemporary European Theatre.
Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge	Medieval and sixteenth-century English, Dutch, and French drama

Next steps

Once you have found a suitable supervisor, please email them to gauge their interest and availability to supervise your project. You should provide information on your proposed research, to make sure that it is in an area they are able to supervise. 

After that, your next step is to work on your PhD Supporting Statement and Research Proposal.

At any stage, you can email englishpgr@sheffield.ac.uk for information about the application process.

Information about supervision

PhD students in the School of English have two supervisors and a personal tutor.

Primary supervisor

The primary supervisor provides academic guidance on all facets of the research. They supervise your work, offering constructive and timely feedback, and guide the project to help you to complete it within the tuition fee paying period. They will also help you to engage with the wider research community, to build peer support and to present or publish your work.

Secondary supervisor

The secondary supervisor provides guidance, feedback and support on your academic progress, with a particular focus on key milestones to support timely submission. They also take the lead in supporting your researcher/professional development.

Personal tutor

The personal tutor provides pastoral advice and referral to specialist support. They also support students in relation to matters such as Leave of Absence applications, Change of Candidature, and other major pastoral issues.

Supervision meetings

For full-time research students, we expect supervisory meetings to be held around once a month. Allowing for holidays, this means 10-12 supervisory sessions per year. For part-time students, we would expect 5-6 meetings per year.