Find a supervisor
Once you know what you would like to study, it’s important to find a supervisor who is an expert in the area, and who can guide you through the three-year programme. This is the first step in the application process.

The School of English hosts a broad spectrum of researchers with expertise across linguistics, literature (including creative writing and film), literary linguistics, theatre, and the intersections between these fields.
Find a PhD supervisor by subject area
- Creative Writing
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Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema Modernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist Ágnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays.
- Film
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Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema Professor David Forrest British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place. - Language and Linguistics
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Historical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes.
Professor Joanna Gavins Stylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics Syntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition.
Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-Fernandez Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing. Academic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design.
English for Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, Corpus Linguistics, Language Teacher Education, Reformed Christian Discourse.
Professor Jane Hodson Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film. Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes.
Identity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change.
Critical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly.
Syntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology
Phonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology.
Dr Richard Steadman-Jones History of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric. Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction.
Dr Sara Whiteley Stylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis Historical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography.
- Literature
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Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts
Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature
Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture;
Nonsense LiteratureStylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature.
Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.
Cold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film.
Modernism; literature and science; animal studies; law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies.
Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema
British Cinema; British Television Drama; Sport in Film and Literature; Film Audiences; Working-Class Literature; Region and Place.
Stylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry
Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.
20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy
Robert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies
Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing
Cheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant.
War Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry.
Australasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films.
Victorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies.
Early Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne
Early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science.
Early Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism.
Nineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science.
Empire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality.
Old English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama
Literature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory.
African American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies
American Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture.
Modern and Contemporary Literature; Holocaust Studies; Film.
Bible and Literature/culture; Classics and Literature/culture; Gospel of John; Revelation; Early Judaism; Senses in Antiquity
Stylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception
Romanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing.
- Theatre and Performance
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Professor Frances Babbage Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts Physical Theatre; Shakespeare in Performance; Contemporary European Theatre.
Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge Medieval and sixteenth-century English, Dutch, and French drama
The roles of different types of supervisors
Primary supervisors
Primary supervisors are responsible for all communications regarding the student's progress to their funding body, to faculty and to the course manager. The primary supervisor is responsible for scheduling meetings, commenting on drafts, and determining the overall pattern of work in negotiation with the student.
Second supervisors
Second supervisors are responsible for providing general support and advice as appropriate (for instance on issues in their areas of specialised competence such as methodology). In the first month of registration, the student should meet at least once with their second supervisor.
In some instances it may be appropriate for particular supervisory sessions to involve both primary and secondary supervisors. This is a matter of negotiation between the supervisors and the student.
Joint supervisors
We would normally expect supervision sessions to involve both supervisors. This is especially the case in the first semester. At the end of the first semester the supervisors and student should have negotiated how they want the supervision to be shared and the responsibilities of each supervisor.
Supervision meetings
For full-time research students, we would expect supervisory meetings to be held once per month. Allowing for holidays, this would equate to a minimum of 10 supervisory sessions per year. For part-time students, we would expect a minimum of six meetings per year.
In the first semester of registration, supervisory meetings will probably need to be more frequent and as a general rule meetings should be once every two weeks.
Next steps
Once you have found a suitable supervisor, please email them directly to ensure that they have availability. You may wish to provide some information on your proposed research as well, to make sure that it is in an area they are able to supervise.
At any step in the process, you can also email english@sheffield.ac.uk for information about the application process.
For more information, check out the PhD Supporting Statement page.