The Department welcomes applications for full-time research and part-time research. As you will see from the list of recently completed doctorates below, our PhD students work on a very wide range of subject and period. Details about the application procedure are available from the Research School website.
Fuller details of members of the department and their research interests, and further advice on how to present a research proposal, are available to download as a leaflet (pdf file, 60KB). You may also request a printed copy from the departmental coordinator.
Detailed advice on how to produce a research proposal is also available online. Key issues to bear in mind from the start include the fact that a PhD should be 'an original contribution to knowledge' - so you need to check existing scholarship in your field. Second of all, as how to produce a research proposal indicates, it is always useful to have research questions guiding your enquiry.
For specific enquiries please contact the Postgraduate Admissions Tutor:
Email: arts-english-enquiries@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1908 652092.
Follow this link to read a report on the Postgraduate Research Day Conference held on 16 September, 2011 and to view a selection of poster presentations.
Follow this link for some answers to Frequently Asked Questions provided by former OU postgraduate students.
Dr Jane Bownas ‘Hardy and Empire: Colonisers and the Colonised in the Works of Thomas Hardy’
September 2010
Dr P Green ‘Mid 18th Century Literature: The Interpretation and Representation of Pain in the Fiction of Laurence Sterne’
August 2010
Dr Elizabeth Sennitt-Clough ‘Diasporic Identities: A Comparative Analysis of David Arnason’s and Michael Ondaatje’s Poetry and Fiction – 1962-2002’
June 2010
Dr Nourdin Bejjit ‘The Publishing of African Literature: Chinva Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and the Heinemann African Writers Series, 1962-1987’
March 2009
Dr Jennifer Piper ‘Patrick White, Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan: National Myths in Australian Literature and Painting’
May 2008
Dr Tony Shaw ‘The Work of Lionel Britton’
April 2007
Dr Fay Gwilliams ‘The Early Fiction of J G Farrell as Influenced by the Writing of Albert Camus’, December 2006
Dr Philip Greaney
‘Less is More: Minimalism in the American Short Story’, March 2006
Dr Joanne Eysell ‘A Medical Companion to Dickens’s Fiction’, July 2004
Dr Terence Stanford ‘Periodicals, Poetry and Power: A Study of Attitudes to Authority as Reflected in English Catholic Literary Culture, 1870-1914’, May 2004
Dr Rachel Constance-Hughes ‘Some aspects of the Provincial Newspaper and Bible Trade in Chepstow, Monmouthshire: The Clark Family, Chepstow Weekly Advertiser and Proprietors and Bible Agents, 1855-1904’, March 2004
Dr Richard Freebury ‘Attitudes to Literary Property, Book Prices and Anglo-American Copyright as Reflected in the Bookseller 1858-1891’, December 2003
Dr Oladipo Agboluaje ‘A Comparative Study of Selected West African and South African Writings in the Post-Colonial Context’, July 2003
Dr Roger Sabin ‘Comics and Graphic Novels: Their History and Cultural Context’, July 2003
Dr Donald Milligan ‘The Aesthetic of Emancipation: A Study of the Relationship between Raymond William’s Socialism and his Literary Criticism, Cultural analysis and Theoretical Writings’, July 2003
Dr Christopher Saunders ‘The Definition of Edward Thomas: The Poetry of Identity’, June 2003
Dr Stephen Cooper ‘Revolt and Orthodoxy in the Work of Philip Larkin’, February 2003
Dr Clive Jones ‘Life and Prose Works of Amelia Opie’, July 2002
Dr Mourad Mkinsi ‘Constructing Thatcherite Man: Political and Literary Discourse on an Ideal Subject’
February 2002
Dr Rhona Hammond ‘The Influence of the Classical Tradition on the Poetry of Derek Walcott’, November 2001
Dr Alexandra Hendriok ‘Myth and Identity in 20th Century Irish Fiction and Film’, April 2001
Dr Ruth Herman ‘The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley’, February 2001
Dr Judith Humphrey ‘Liberal Images: a Feminist analysis of the Girls School-Story’, July 2000
Dr Janet Rowanchild ‘My Mind on Paper: Anne Lister and Literacy Self-Construction in Early Nineteenth-Century Halifax’, July 2000
Dr Michael Forsyth ‘Julia Kavanagh in her Times: Novelist and Biographer 1824-1877’, February 2000