English Language and Literature

REF 2014

Northumbria has been rated in the UK top 15 for the quality of its English Language and Literature research publications
Northumbria is now ranked in the UK top 30 for research power in English Language and Literature, after climbing 43 places since the 2008 research assessment exercise.

Research in this unit covers the broad areas of literature, creative writing, and linguistics. Within the field of literature, we have strong groups in the early modern period, the long 18th century, and in modern and contemporary literature. In addition, our groups are complemented by cross-period 'themes' in 'Gendered Subjects', 'Studies in Popular Culture', and 'Situating States of Mind.'

Creative Writing

Academics in this group work across the genres of drama for stage, radio, film and TV; the short story, flash fiction, novel, and verse novel; poetry, song-lyric, and poetry combined with graphics. Group members share a commitment to re-thinking the nature and significance of practice-led research..

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Early Modern

The research interests and expertise of the Early Modern Group are lively and diverse. They range from work on early 16th century Scottish and English court culture to late 17th-century religious polemic, visual culture and book history, and from Jacobean court masques to Shakespeare's role...

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Linguistics

The group is strongly committed to empirical and inter-disciplinary research. We are one of the strongest centres for research in cognitive linguistics not just in the UK but internationally, and host the journal Cognitive Linguistics, the flagship journal in the field.

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Long Eighteenth Century

The Long Eighteenth Century Group is extremely vibrant and successful, its members having recently won several funding awards from the AHRC and Leverhulme Trust. The group has a diverse range of interests. We are prominent in the field of medical humanities...

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Modern & Contemporary Literature

Our vibrant and diverse research group boasts a particularly strong profile in English and American Modernism, critical and gender theory, and popular culture and media. In addition, our interdisciplinary research in geography and writing, and place, space and mobility makes use of both critical...

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