Romanticism and 19th century literature

English and Creative Writing is home to world-leading and field-defining research in the literature and culture of the Romantic period and long nineteenth century. We specialize in material culture, periodical culture, travel-writing and literary tourism, the representation of vagrancy, slavery and slave-narratives, British and American fiction (especially historical fiction, women’s writing, and children’s literature), book history, and the interconnections between literature and music, empire and colonialism, war, and disability.

Our academics and research students work across and within a number of lively research groupings within and beyond English and Creative Writing, including HOBAR (History of Books, Authorship, and Reading), PGLRG (Post-colonial and Global Literatures Research Group), GOTH (Gender and Otherness in the Humanities), Literature and Music, and Digital Humanities.

We work with museums, libraries and archives across the UK and Europe to develop research impact and knowledge exchange, and we facilitate similar opportunities for our research students.

Entry requirements

Minimum 2:1 undergraduate degree (or equivalent). If you are not a UK citizen, you may need to prove your knowledge of English. 

Current/recent research projects

• Freethinkers, a novel and inventing history: how do research, imagination and memory fuse creatively in the writing of an historical novel?
• Virginia Woolf: nineteenth-century legacies
• Monomania: the life and death of a psychiatric idea in nineteenth-century fiction, 1836-1860
• Yellowback fiction and the history of reading on the railways in the late 19th century
• Fanny, Mary, Claire: uneasy sisterhood and the novella-in-flash

Potential supervisors

• Dr Francesca Benatti
• Dr Delia da Sousa Correa
• Dr Sara Haslam
• Dr Anthony Howell
• Dr Edmund King
• Dr Alex Tickell
• Dr Encarna Trinidad-Barrantes
• Dr Shafquat Towheed
• Professor Nicola J Watson

Links

• DREAMing Romantic Europe, 2018–2020  
• RÊVE: Romantic Europe The Virtual Exhibition  
• European Romanticisms in Association  
• UK Reading Experience Database, 1450–1945 
• READ-IT project  
• English at the OU 

Fees and funding

Some of our research students are funded via the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership; others are self-funded.

For detailed information about fees and funding, visit Fees and studentships.

To see current funded studentship vacancies across all research areas, see Current studentships.