Find a supervisor

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.