The Department welcomes applications for full-time research and part-time research. As you will see from the list of 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 Degrees 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 PhD proposals with a Creative Writing focus see the specific information and guidance.
For specific enquiries please contact the Postgraduate Admissions Tutor:
Email: arts-english-enquiries@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1908 652092.
PGR Publication News
Tracy Hayes has just published an article entitled ‘"Only the rames of a man": Hardy's 'Unmen' and 'Others'’ in The Hardy Society Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, (Spring 2013), pp. 62-66. In addition, her MA dissertation has been published in full in the MA in Victorian Studies Research Papers, edited by Jane de Gay, as part of the Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, Vol. 13, (2012), pp. 151-199. It is one of six papers, deemed outstanding, completed by students between 2005 and 2010 and is entitled ‘“Fallen Wessex”: How Thomas Hardy Subverts Milton’s Paradise Lost in Three Novels’.
Postgraduate Conference, September 2012
The annual Postgraduate Research Conference for students of English Literature and Creative Writing was held on Saturday, September 8, 2012 at Kent’s Hill, Milton Keynes.
Five students presented aspects of their work-in-progress and engaged the audience in questions and comments relating to issues of research methodology; the role of theory in framing research questions; finding and maintaining a focus; and constructing a plausible argument and a persuasive voice.
Follow this link to read a brief report and to download some of the presentations.
Heather's prize-winning idea for a creative writing
Congratulations to Heather Richardson who won an EPSRC Commercial Challenge competition for her idea to develop an app for teaching creative writing. Heather is currently working towards a PhD on writing historical fiction and she aims to develop a short Creative Writing course delivered in an app format. Follow this link to read more about Heather's experience.
Book contracts for recent PhD graduates
The department would like to offer its congratulations to two recent PhD students on their book contracts as follows:
Jane Bownas, Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Ashgate, 2012)
Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers (Palgrave, 2013).
Tracy Hayes, who is working on concepts of masculinity in Thomas Hardy, co-organized a conference at Leeds Trinity University College in March 2012 on “The Nineteenth-Century Memory: Approaches and Appropriations”. Read the report on this conference.
Postgraduate research day 2011
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 Helen Boyles ‘Wordsworth, Wesley, Hazlitt and the Embarrassment of Enthusiasm’
November 2012
Dr Richard Lee ‘Women Writing Partition: 1947-2000’
June 2012
Dr Marion Dell ‘Virginia Woolf - Nineteenth Century Legacies’
May 2012
Dr Ole Laursen ‘Black and Asian Britain Life Writing: Race, Gender, Representation in Selected Novels from the 1990s
May 2012
Dr Brenda Stroud ‘Charlotte Smith: Political Novelist’
March 2012
Dr Peter Bramwell Pagan ‘Themes in Modern Children’s Fiction’ (PhD by publication)
March 2012
Dr Marion Sherwood ‘Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness’
March 2011
Dr Phillippa Ireland ‘Material Factors Affecting the Publication of Black British Fiction’
February 2011
Dr Caroline Davis ‘Literary Publishing and the Three Crowns Series: Oxford University Press in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s’
December 2010
Dr Barbara Tarling ‘Representations of the American War of Independence in the late 18th century novel’
November 2010
Dr Adrian Tait ‘From Wessex Poems To Time’s Laughingstocks: An Eco-Critical Approach to the Poetry of Thomas Hardy’
November 2010
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