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.

A group of PhD students work at their computers
Off

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
Dr Jonathan Ellis Twentieth-Century American Poetry (particularly Elizabeth Bishop); Letter Writing, Creative Writing (particularly poetry or non-fiction); Contemporary Cinema

Dr Agnes Lehoczky

Modernist and Postmodernist Poetry and Poetics, - particularly the Modernist Ágnes Nemes Nagy's Poetry and Essays.

Film
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

Professor Susan Fitzmaurice

Historical Sociolinguistics; Historical Pragmatics; World Englishes.

Professor Joanna Gavins Stylistics; Cognitive linguistics; Text World Theory; Ecolinguistics

Dr Kook-Hee Gil

Syntax; Semantics; Generative Second Language Acquisition.

Dr Beatriz Gonzalez-Fernandez Second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition, development, teaching and testing.

Professor Nigel Harwood

Academic writing; English for specific and academic purposes; materials and textbook design.

Dr Valerie Hobbs

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.

Dr Chris Montgomery

Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Varieties of English, Perceptual Dialectology, Folk Linguistics, Language Attitudes.

Professor Emma Moore

Identity; Gender; Dialectology; Ethnography; Style; Language Variation and Change.

Dr Jane Mulderrig

Critical Discourse Analysis; Corpus-based CDA; Identity; Political Discourse; Ageing and the Elderly.

Dr Robyn Orfitelli

Syntax; First language acquisition; Prosody/Intonation; Experimental methodology

Dr Ranjan Sen

Phonology; Phonetics; Historical Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Comparative Philology.

Dr Richard Steadman-Jones History of Linguistic Thought; Literary Linguistics; Semiotics; Rhetoric.

Dr Gareth Walker

Phonetics; Conversation Analysis; Phonetics of talk-in-interaction.

Dr Sara Whiteley Stylistics, cognitive poetics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis

Dr Graham Williams

Historical (Im)politeness and Pragmatics; Early English Letters; Digital Corpora; Palaeography.

Literature

Professor Frances Babbage

Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts

Dr Veronica Barnsley

Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (particularly South Asia and West Africa), Global Modernisms, Childhood in Contemporary Fiction and Film, Children's Literature

Dr Anna Barton

Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Print Culture;
Nonsense Literature

Professor Joe Bray

Stylistics; The Eighteenth-Century Novel; Experimental Literature.

Dr Madeleine Callaghan

Romantic and Post-Romantic Poetry; 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.

Dr Fabienne Collignon

Cold War culture; technology; technologised spaces; American literature since 1900; genre fiction & film.

Dr Katherine Ebury

Modernism; literature and science; animal studies;  law and literature; crime writing; Irish Studies.

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.

Professor Joanna Gavins

Stylistics; Cognitive stylistics; Ecostylistics; Text World Theory; Contemporary poetry

Professor Jane Hodson

Literary Linguistics; Romantic Literature; Dialect in Literature and Film.

Dr Michael Kindellan

20th century Anglo-American poetry and poetics; editorial theory; textual studies; Ezra Pound; pedagogy

Dr Hamish Mathison

Robert Burns; Print Culture; Scottish Poetry; Eighteenth-Century Literature.

Professor Robert McKay

Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature and Film; Critical Theory; Animal Studies

Dr John Miller

Victorian Literature and Culture; Ecocriticism; Animal Studies; Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Globalization; the literary representation and cultural theory of tattooing

Dr Marcus Nevitt

Cheap Print; Literature of the 1650s; Royalism; Seventeenth-Century Journalism; The Works of Sir William Davenant.

Professor Adam Piette

War Studies; Modernist Literature; Translation; Contemporary Poetry.

Dr Jonathan Rayner

Australasian Cinema; Cinema and Landscape; Naval Films; Genre Films.

Dr Amber Regis

Victorian Literature; Auto/Biography; Gender and Sexuality; Adaptation Studies.

Dr Emma Rhatigan

Early Modern Literature; Religious Writing; Performance; John Donne

Dr Tom Rutter

Early modern drama; Shakespeare; Marlowe; playing companies; early modern science.

Professor Cathy Shrank

Early Modern Literature; Dialogue; Sonnets; Humanism.

Professor Andrew Smith

Nineteenth Century Literature, Gothic, literature and Science.

Dr Richard Steadman-Jones

Empire Writing and critical responses to it; Literary Language; Linguistic Issues in Literary Writing (e.g. depiction of multilingual contexts); Digital Textuality.

Dr Charlotte Steenbrugge

Old English and Middle English literature, Middle Dutch literature, medieval theatre, late medieval devotion, early Tudor drama

Professor Brendan Stone

Literature and Trauma; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Theory.

Professor Rachel Van Duyvenbode

African American literature; higher education; critical pedagogies

Dr Duco Van Oostrum

American Literature; Sports Culture; African-American Literature and Film; Auto/Biography; and 1970s Culture.

Professor Sue Vice

Modern and Contemporary Literature; Holocaust Studies; Film.

Dr Meredith Warren

Bible and Literature/culture; Classics and Literature/culture; Gospel of John; Revelation; Early Judaism; Senses in Antiquity

Dr Sara Whiteley

Stylistics, cognitive poetics, emotion, reader/audience reception

Professor Angela Wright

Romanticism; Gothic; Eighteenth-Century Literature; Translation; Women's Writing.

Theatre and Performance
Professor Frances Babbage Contemporary drama and performance; Gender and theatre at the fin-de-siècle; Adaptation studies; Intersections between literature and other arts

Dr Carmen Levick

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.

Find a PhD

Search for PhD opportunities at Sheffield and be part of our world-leading research.