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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Medieval and Early Modern Studies MA, MPhil, PhD
This is a research programme within the English subject area.
Key facts
- Subject area: English
- Location: Canterbury
- School: School of English
- Start:
- Fees: More info
Outline
The opportunities for research are many and varied: Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library have an international reputation, but are relatively under-exploited as scholarly resources; social and religious aspects of the medieval and the Tudor city of Canterbury provide fascinating topics for investigation; the dramatic and literary associations of the city are exceptionally rich. Current research topics (many of which have a local or regional basis) include literacy and readership, piety, the Reformation, visual and manuscript culture, community, and drama.
Programme structure
As a research student, you meet regularly with your supervisor, and have the opportunity to take part in informal reading groups and research seminars to which students, staff and visiting speakers contribute papers. You will also benefit from a series of research skills seminars that run in the spring term, which give students a chance to share the research expertise of staff and postdoctoral members of the department.
For further information see the School site.
Funding
Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).
Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a maintenance grant. All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
In addition, the School of English may offer one or two fully funded AHRC studentships to Mphil/PhD candidates. Applicants to TEEME – Text and Event in Early Modern Europe will be able to compete for several EU-funded Erasmus Mundus fellowships.
For the taught MA, the School also offers several studentships each year, including one fully funded AHRC Research Preparation Master's, two fee-waiver bursaries, the Ian Gregor Scholarship (which covers fees and provides a £500 stipend), the Sasha Roberts Scholarship (which is an award of £2,000), and a scholarship for a student on the Medieval and Early Modern Studies MA worth £6,000, awarded jointly with the School of History.
All these scholarships are highly competitive.
Funding is also available for overseas students (who should apply to the University's International Office).
Students applying for a place on any one of the University of Kent at Paris MA programmes may also apply for an award from the Paris Scholarship fund, currently valued at over £5,000. For further information see University of Kent at Paris. For further details of postgraduate funding, see Postgraduate funding.
Further information:
Resources and facilities
The Templeman Library is well stocked with excellent research resources, as are Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library. There are a number of special collections: the John Crow Collection of Elizabethan and other early printed texts; the Reading/Raynor Collection of theatre history (over 7,000 texts or manuscripts); ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online); the Melville manuscripts relating to popular culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the Pettingell Collection (over 7,500 items) of 19th-century drama; the Eliot Collection; children's literature; and popular literature. A gift from Mrs Valerie Eliot has increased the Library's already extensive holdings in modern poetry. The British Library in London is also within easy reach.
Besides the Templeman Library, School resources include photocopying, fax and telephone access, support for attending and organising conferences, and a dedicated postgraduate study space equipped with computer terminals and a laser printer.
Further information:
Research groups
Research in the School of English comes roughly under the following areas. However, there is often a degree of overlap between groups, and individual staff have interests that range more widely.
Eighteenth Century
The particular interests of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century converge around gender, class, nation, travel and empire, and the relationship between print and material culture. Staff in the Centre pursue cutting-edge approaches to the field and share a commitment to interdisciplinary methodologies.
Staff
Dr Jennie Batchelor, Dr Paddy Bullard, Professor Donna Landry.
Nineteenth Century
The 19th-century research group is organised around the successful MA in Dickens and Victorian Culture and the editorship of The Dickensian, the official publication outlet for new Dickens letters. Other staff research interests include literature and gender, journalism, representations of time and history, and sublimity.
Staff
Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Dr Cathy Waters, Dr Sarah Wood.
American Literature
Research in north American literature is conducted partly through the Faculty-based Centre for American Studies, which also facilitates cooperation with modern US historians. Staff research interests include 20th-century American literature, especially poetry, Native American writing, modernism, and cultural history.
Staff
Henry Claridge, Dr David Herd, Dr Will Norman, Dr David Stirrup.
Creative writing
The Centre for Creative Writing is the focus for most practice-based research in the School. Staff organise a thriving events series and run a research seminar for postgraduate students and staff to share ideas about fiction-writing. Established writers regularly come to read and discuss their work.
Staff
Patricia Debney, Dr Brian Dillon, David Flusfeder, Dr David Herd, Professor Jan Montefiore, Amy Sackville, Simon Smith, Scarlett Thomas.
Medieval and early modern
The Faculty-based Canterbury Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies has a distinctive brand of interdisciplinarity, strong links with local archives and archaeological trusts, and provides a vibrant forum for investigating the relationships between literary and non-literary modes of writing in its weekly research seminar.
Staff
Professor Peter Brown, Dr Rosanna Cox, Dr Sarah James, Dr Andy Kesson, Professor Bernhard Klein, Dr Marion O'Connor, Dr Catherine Richardson.
Modern Poetry
The Centre for Modern Poetry is a leading centre for research and publication in its field, and participates in both critical and creative research. Staff regularly host visiting speakers and writers, participate in national and international research networks, and organise graduate research seminars and public poetry readings.
Staff
Professor David Ayers, Dr David Herd, Dr Ariane Mildenberg, Professor Jan Montefiore, Simon Smith.
Postcolonial
Established in 1994, the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research has acquired an international reputation for excellence in research. It has an outstanding track record in publication, organises frequent international conferences, and regularly hosts leading postcolonial writers and critics.
Staff
Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, Professor Donna Landry, Dr Alex Padamsee, Professor Caroline Rooney.
Show all
|Staff research
Professor David Ayers: Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory
The literature and theory of modernism; 20thcentury American literature and culture; critical theory and philosophy, including the Frankfurt School and recent French theory.
Dr Jennie Batchelor: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature
Eighteenth-century literature; gender; women's writing; fashion; visual and material culture.
Professor Peter Brown: Professor of Medieval English Literature
Chaucer and other late-medieval English writers; contextual aspects of medieval culture, including historiography; the visual arts; dreams and space.
Dr Paddy Bullard: Lecturer in 18th-century Studies
Eighteenth-century literature; the Enlightenment; intellectual history; rhetoric; politics and literature; bibliography and book history; textual criticism and editing.
Henry Claridge: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature
American literature; realism in the novel; literary criticism and critical theory; American modernism (especially poetry and fiction).
Dr Rosanna Cox: Lecturer in English Literature
Milton, 16th- and 17th-century literature and culture; gender; political writing; intellectual history.
Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid: Lecturer in English and American Literature
Nineteenth-century literature and culture, especially representations of history, time, disease, water and gender; Dickens; Kingsley; Collins; Macaulay; Forster; queer theory; sublimity.
Patricia Debney: Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
Creative writing (prose poetry, short fiction); auto/biography; translation and adaptation; collaborative/interdisciplinary work; feminist theory; psychoanalytic theory.
Dr Brian Dillon: AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts
The meeting points between fiction, scholarship and the essay or 'creative non-fiction'; landscape, memory, ruin aesthetics, travel writing, autobiography, melancholia and the history of medicine; the relations of contemporary art and art writing to literary practice and research.
David Flusfeder: Lecturer in Creative Writing
Twentieth-century American and British fiction (also Borges, Cortázar and Buchner); modernism; and the literature and cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah: Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures
Colonial and postcolonial discourse as they relate to African, Caribbean and Indian writing.
Dr David Herd: Reader in English
The relation of poetry to democracy in the post-war period; post-war British and American poetry; the convergence of American pragmatism and historical materialism through the idea of the speech-act; the Russian influence on 20th-century British and American poetry; American poetics.
Dr Sarah James: Lecturer in Medieval Literature
Late-medieval literature and culture; vernacular theology; writing by, for and about women; hagiography; drama.
Dr Andy Kesson: Lecturer in Early Modern Studies
Sixteenth and 17th-century literature; performance history, practice and theory; early modern actors, authors, publishers, readers and audience members; book history and print culture; prose fiction; pedagogy; gender studies; queer theory.
Professor Bernhard Klein: Professor of English
Early modern literature and culture; Irish studies; travel writing and cartography; maritime history and culture.
Professor Donna Landry: Professor of English and American Literature
Literature and culture of the long 18th century; cultural materialist, feminist and postcolonial theory; orientalism and travel writing; animal studies; countryside studies; the picturesque; sea studies, desert studies and historical re-enactment.
Dr Ariane Mildenberg: Lecturer in English Literature
Modern American literature; Woolf; phenomenology.
Professor Jan Montefiore: Professor of English and American Literature
Twentieth-century literature; Auden; Kipling; H D; Sylvia Townsend Warner; contemporary poetry; feminist critical theory; the intersections of writing and politics.
Dr Will Norman: Lecturer in North American Literature
Twentieth-century American literature and culture; European and American modernism; Vladimir Nabokov; models of high and low culture in the mid-20th century; critical theory.
Dr Marion O'Connor: Reader in English and American Literature
Theatrical reconstructions and dramatic revivals; iconography; drama as historiography; censorship.
Dr Alex Padamsee: Lecturer in English and American Literature
Postcolonial literature and theory; the South Asian novel; race and empire in 19th- and 20th-century British literature.
Dr Catherine Richardson: Senior Lecturer in English Literature
Early modern literature and drama; oral and literate cultures; relation between textual and material culture, especially clothing and the household.
Professor Caroline Rooney: Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies
African and Midle Eastern literature, especially Zimbabwean and Egyptian;colonial discourse and postcolonial theory; liberation literature and theory; terror and hte postcolonial; global youth cultures; contemporary visual arts; sea and desert studies; queer theory; psychoanalysis.
Amy Sackville: Lecturer in Creative Writing
An interest in the novel as a form and its development since the early 20th Century from modern to post-modern, and in the interrelation of language and the world.
Simon Smith: Lecturer in Creative Writing
Creative writing; poetry in translation, Latin and French; poetry reviewing; experimental fiction; critical theory; theory of creative writing.
Dr David Stirrup: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature
First nations and native American literature; 20thcentury North American literature; the American and Canadian Midwest; border studies.
Scarlett Thomas: Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing
Creative writing; writing and science; mathematics and fiction; the contemporary novel.
Dr Cathy Waters: Reader in 19th-Century Studies
Victorian literature and culture, especially fiction and journalism; Dickens; Sala; George Eliot; literature and gender.
Dr Sarah Wood: Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature
Creative critical writing; 19th- and 20th-century poetry and fiction, especially Robert Browning and Elizabeth Bowen; writing and visual art; literary theory; deconstruction, especially Derrida; psychoanalysis; continental philosophy.
Further information:
Contact details
Admissions enquiriesT: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 823054
E: english-office@kent.ac.uk
Scarlett Thomas
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827290
E: s.thomas@kent.ac.uk
Dr Caroline Rooney
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 827948
E: c.r.rooney@kent.ac.uk
Dr Catherine Richardson
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 824656
E: c.t.richardson@kent.ac.uk
Further information: