English and Creative Writing - Keele University
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Research Institute for the Humanities

Research in English and Creative Writing

English and American Literature

English received a grading of 5 in the 2001 RAE, and in 2008 50% of English’s outputs were assessed as being internationally excellent or world leading in quality. English at Keele has major research strengths in the following areas, where we welcome postgraduates who are seeking expert supervision:

  1. The Early Modern period (Dr Munro, Dr Pooley, Professor Bruce, and Dr Seager) is the focus for long-standing interdisciplinary collaborations with Early Modern Research in History. There are strengths in textual editing and the history of the book, and Dr Munro collaborates with the Globe Theatre, London.

  2. Keele remains associated with the leading edge of eighteenth-century research through Emeritus Professor McLaverty’s and Dr Seager’s research on Defoe and print culture augments this area and is an important bridge between the early modern period and eighteenth-century interests.

    leadership of the AHRC-funded Swift Electronic Archive project, and his involvement in the Cambridge University Press the Swift edition;

  3. The Victorians and Long Nineteenth-Century has been for many years a major focus at Keele (Professor Amigoni and Dr Shears); in 2008, the Masters Programme in Victorian Studies celebrated its 40th anniversary with an international colloquium on Life Writing.  Voice in Romantic poetry is a major thematic focus (Dr Shears). The study of life writing (Professor Amigoni) and the relationship between science, medicine and literature (Professor Bell, Professor Amigoni) are important areas of activity. Dr Shears is developing pioneering, innovative work on the long cultural history of the hangover. 

  4. English and American Literature at Keele constitutes a major international centre for research into Trans-Atlantic culture (including Franco-phone Canada) from Modernism to the present. Professors McCracken, Bell, and Harris, work with Drs Bentley, Lustig, Morgan, and Peacock in an area where twentieth-century research questions around print, editing and cultural space are shared concerns.

  5. There is also a vibrant group researching later twentieth and twenty-first literature and culture (Dr. Bentley on contemporary British fiction, British literature and culture of the 1950s, postcolonialism, and youth cultures; Dr Morgan on Canadian metropolitan writing, literary geographies and travel writing; Dr Carrigan shares the latter interest, and also works on globalisation, eco-criticism and colonial disaster); Dr Johnson’s research on film, theory and sexuality. The focus on film and visuality also finds expression in Dr Munro’s work on Shakespeare and film, and Professor Bruce’s work on the history of photography.

Creative Writing

Research in Creative Writing is currently moving in new and exciting directions. James Sheard, a poet, and Joe Stretch, a novelist, are energetic leaders of the Creative Writing team and have established a successful MA in Creative Writing which started in September 2009. Creative Writing is an area of research in its own right. An important goal is to establish a Centre for Contemporary Writing, based on interests shared between creative writers and critics.


Funded Collaborations

From 2009 to 2011, English at Keele will be involved in an innovative AHRC -funded doctoral training programme, teaching PhD students the 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science, and Medicine'. In collaboration with eleven other partners : the Universities of Salford, Leicester, Manchester, King's College London, the London Consortium, the Science Museum, National Maritime Museum, Museum of Science and Industry, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the Wellcome Library, students will be taught by experts with different approaches to disciplinary boundaries, and will be equipped with the skills needed to utilise manuscript sources, rare books, material objects, philosophy, literature, film and visual arts in their study. Over the next two years each partner will host one event and contribute teaching to the whole programme. There will be twenty funded places per event for PhD students in this field to attend events, and during and 2011, this website, created and hosted by the University of Salford, will offer training resources in this important new subject. Keele will host an event on the early history of social science in early July 2011, based on its unique archival holdings; http://calmview.keele.ac.uk/CalmView/default.aspx

David Amigoni and Lucy Munro are co-investigators on a major interdisciplinary project entitled ‘Ages and stages: the place of theatre in representations and recollections of ageing’, and led by Professor Miriam Bernard of Keele’s Centre for Social Gerontology. They work in partnership with the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme – originally Peter Cheeseman’s famous Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent (on which the project’s archival research is to be based). The project is funded under the New Dynamics of Ageing cross-council research programme.

Scott McCracken is on the editorial board for new formations - an international interdisciplinary journal with an established international reputation. Since 2001, issues have included: Mobilities ; Cultures and Economies ; After Fanon ; Intellectual Work ; Jean Laplanche and the Theory of Seduction ; After Iraq: reframing postcolonial studies.

Ian Bell is on the editorial board of Journal of American Studies and Symbiosis. A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and on the advisory board of CUP's The Complete Works of Henry James

Lucy Munro is co-editor of the Shakespeare section of Literature Compass. 

The Northern Modernism Seminar is organised jointly by the English departments of Keele, De Montfort and Manchester Universities.

The David Bruce Centre, founded with an endowment of £400,000, supports interdisciplinary work in American Studies.

Keele has launched a new website devoted to the modernist author, Dorothy Richardson. Dorothy Richardson Homepage


Members of English and Creative Writing